It’s a Wrap! What We Learned at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference

NewsGator had an awesome time at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in L.A. last week.  There are almost too many highlights for us to list:

1. Jon Roskill (Microsoft Corporate VP for Worldwide Partners) talked about NewsGator US Partner of the Year award during his Day 3 Keynote speech featuring me and our great customer Kraft Foods. Jon proceeded to wrap up his keynote by saying “Let’s all be NewsGator’s!” to the 16,000 partners in attendance! Check it out below:
   
   
   
   
2. I sent a picture of me on Kobe’s huge Staples Center screen to my kids, who texted back “Yeah, but are you gonna go to the Espy’s?”
3. We deepened our integration and go-to-partnerships with other key players in the $580 billion Microsoft Enterprise Social ecosystem. This is a huge competitive advantage - integration with partners like AvePoint, Cardinal Solutions, Infusion, and Nintex create soup-to-nuts stack augmentation offerings that will drive social as an enterprise class solution. Aggressive go-to-market partnerships with companies like Ascentium, Aspect, Avanade, Pariveda, PointBridge, RDA Corp, Slalom Consulting, and Unique World bring our lowest TCO solutions to market faster than ever.
4. We participated in innumerable meetings with the Microsoft field teams, industry vertical teams, product groups, BDM/marketing teams, Microsoft Consulting Services, and the management team (including Steve Ballmer) for 100% strategic alignment between NewsGator and Microsoft for their 2012 fiscal year and beyond - including O365 and the Cloud.
5. As part of the Partner of the Year (POY) ceremony to kick off Day 3, Laura Farrelly, VP of our Microsoft Alliance, carried in the US flag representing NewsGator and our US POY award. As Laura reports, “I always have wanted to be Olympian but with my lackluster VO2 max this is as close as it gets. The coolest part was meeting some of the winners from other countries. For example, the person who represented the Country Partner of the Year Winner for Algeria traveled 14 hours on four different planes in order to participate in WPC and accept his award for his company and country – there was so much dedication and excitement!”
6. So many parties, so little time to actually sleep. One of the great venues was for the Azure party – on top of the Standard Hotel in mid-town L.A.  We all felt like we were rocking out in Shanghai in the 1930s… or some William Gibson novel in the not-too-distant future. 

What did the conference tell us about Microsoft overall?

1. The event was extremely well-organized. Huge props to Jon Roskill, who took over as Corporate VP for Worldwide Partners a year ago. Tweetsville is filled with encomiums to his team’s work organizing and running the event.
2. Microsoft is fun! The social events were at great venues, and terrific music was to be found throughout. The last night’s fireworks were amazing! Two things I particularly remember are:
        a.    During the Smash Mouth concert, the lead guitarists’ pick landed on my smart phone while I was tweeting.
        b.    A gentleman next to me at the concert had his laptop open on his head throughout the show as he Skype’d the concert back to his kids in Israel. 
3. Buy their stock. Ironically, Microsoft didn’t have a lot of splashy new technology to announce this year (last year they rocked the house with Kinect). Nonetheless, the incessant impression throughout the event was of relentless competitive progress by the company. The past is a prolegomena; it sometimes takes them a few iterations but they do not stop coming at you, and they ultimately get it right enough to leverage their market position to win with the new, too.  Kinect and Xbox are accepted successes now but weren’t too long ago; Google as a threat in the enterprise has waned considerably; Bing and Windows Phone won’t stop gaining; Microsoft has become the most-trusted provider to IT (remember when they were enterprise pretenders years ago?); the cloud is the single biggest investment Microsoft has ever made; and Microsoft continues to invest more in R&D than anyone else in the industry. The capital markets don’t like to like the story, but this year signaled more significant competitive progress on all fronts for Microsoft than I’ve seen in years.

NewsGator is immensely proud to be Microsoft's Partner of the Year for the U.S. We're focused on extending the social ecosphere so that we're Partner of the Year for the Entire Galaxy in 2012!