Dive Brief:
- Microsoft wants its partners to use more AI to sell more AI, Nicole Dezen, Microsoft corporate VP and chief partner officer, said Tuesday during a keynote at the tech giant’s annual Ignite conference. “The foundation for partner success starts with becoming customer zero,” said Dezen. “These are partners that don't just sell AI. You embrace it, internalize it and operationalize it throughout the organization.”
- Partners can now earn a Frontier Partner badge by demonstrating expertise across Microsoft’s cloud and AI portfolio and qualify for three additional designations detailed in a Tuesday blog post Dezen authored. Frontier Distributor status is available to firms successfully driving AI adoption among small and midsized businesses. Microsoft will also reward partners for excellence in cloud support and sovereign cloud.
- The badging initiative is part of a broad push to accelerate AI adoption across Microsoft’s channel ecosystem and drive more reselling to its revamped cloud marketplace. The company integrated its AppSource and Azure Marketplace platforms in September, creating a one-stop shop for cloud, software and AI solutions. Dezen announced the roll out of a marketplace vehicle for independent software vendors called App Accelerate Tuesday.
Dive Insight:
Channel partners are gravitating to hyperscaler marketplaces as cloud becomes a preferred procurement platform for business applications.
Private partner arrangements and distributor deals offered by Microsoft and its two chief competitors — AWS and Google Cloud — are propelling massive marketplace growth, according to Omdia, which forecast a more than fivefold surge in marketplace spending in the next five years. By 2030, cloud marketplace transactions will surpass $160 billion, up from just $30 billion last year.
Partners are also developing tailored AI offerings and platforms to capture a share of marketplace revenue, the analyst firm said in an October report.
Microsoft is paving the way for vendors eager for a slice of the growing pie and banking on their success.
“Our partners have a ton of expertise in different customer segments,” Dezen told Channel Dive Monday. “Microsoft focuses our investment and R&D on creating platforms, and that's really where we shine, but partners play just as crucial a role in the equation, because the best way for a customer to embrace AI is through a partner who can think about their organization holistically.”
Microsoft increased its investments in partner training in the last year, introducing an agentic AI and Copilot course available through a partner skill-building hub that went live in July.
“We want to reward our partners that make investments in deep expertise … to guide our customers on this journey moving forward,” Allison Hughes, Microsoft CVP of global SMB, said last month, during the Canalys Forum Americas conference.
On Tuesday, the company introduced a $21-per-seat SMB Copilot-Microsoft 365 for organizations of up to 300 users, as well as pre-purchased credits that give partners the flexibility to offer customers 32 Microsoft AI agent services using a single funding pool rather than separate accounts.
“This is really going to enable all of you to deliver scalable, predictable, integrated agentic AI solutions,” Dezen said at Ignite.
Disclosure: Informa, which owns a controlling stake in Informa TechTarget, the publisher behind Channel Dive, is also invested in Omdia. Informa has no influence over Channel Dive’s coverage.
