The only constant is change, and that change arrived today when Microsoft announced long-time employee Satya Nadella as its third CEO. Bringing enterprise and cloud wins to the corner office unleashed a wave of SMB partner feedback synthesized below. At the request of one community member, I won’t speculate on the positive or negative nature of the comments and just present as is. I will tell you, though, that this is an important story because it will impact your paycheck, one way or another, as an SMB partner.
Pauline Turski, long-time SMB player, shared “From a (currently unemployed) vendor perspective - he's a cloud champion, selection led by Thompson, partner advocate at Symantec. If Nadella can combine the emerging cloud and partner model making it easy to do business then he will be a success.”
Ted Elhajj, an early SBSer, shared “This is only my opinion, and having been around SBS since the 4.0 days I think I have good input. Moving everything to the cloud like hosted exchange and office kind of leaves the small IT guy out in the cold. It seems as though Microsoft is stealing our business. It has lead our company to search out 3rd party mail solutions. Believe it or not a lot of companies are suspicious of having email in the cloud and I don't blame them!”
Jeff Ponts, a telecom technology executive, offered “My concern is not around product as he is a smart guy with thousands of smart people around him. How he values the overall channel will determine his future amongst the SMB VAR/MSP.”
Julian Wilkinson, an active peep, said “Well he used Twitter in 2010 so his finger is on the pulse...”
Joshua Liberman, a man who always has an SMB channel opinion, told me “It strikes me as sardonically funny that you even continue to entertain the remote possibility that SMB matters in even the remotest way to Microsoft. SMB is OVER. Much of the reason MS is pushing Cloud so hard is to remove us, the SMB service providers, from the equation. That could not be more obvious. I think your rosy glasses (or maybe it’s the lighting in that picture) are the only thing keeping you from seeing that. And perhaps your belief that anything MS tells you is true.”
Finally Jeff Loucks, a Microsoft CRM MVP, noted that he met Satya when he directed Microsoft Dynamics and he is a good guy and very sharp.
I’d offer that Microsoft is signaling a few intentions including the selection of an insider suggests a “stay-the-course” strategy at some level and the enterprise and cloud background will need to be expanded to somehow embrace the SMB partner. I don’t have the answers but I have the questions.
