Microsoft Azure Stack is now available

It is the new hybrid cloud platform from Microsoft, which also announces the ISV Cloud Embed program at its Inspire event.

Microsoft celebrates these days its Inspire macro-event, which takes place in Washington, in the capital of the United States, and where the Windows company brings together 17,000 professionals of the channel (including nearly 100 from Spain). There, the firm has reiterated its desire to accelerate the migration to the cloud, following the same line of action that led him recently to announce cuts in its commercial team. The goal set by the management team headed by Satya Nadella is to reach 20,000 million dollars in the cloud by 2018, that is, approximately one fifth of the billing.

Precisely, to strengthen its cloud strategy, Microsoft has also announced, with the support of several of its hardware partners, such as Dell, EMC, HPE and Lenovo, that Microsoft Azure Stack is already available. Azure Stack is an extension of Azure and offers a hybrid cloud platform, which makes it a good solution for customers who want flexibility, "without having to build applications in a different way."

From Azure data centers to the most innovative in the cloud, whether it's miles underground in a mine shaft, far out in the sea on a ship, or on the floor of a factory dependent on continuous operations in real time, Azure Stack facilitates applications cloud that meet all business and regulatory and security requirements.

Some partners have begun to see the benefits of Azure Stack, according to Microsoft. This is the case of Rackspace, Tieto and Resello. Microsoft has made available to its partners various resources where they can know how to carry out a successful cloud strategy. Thus, it has placed at your disposal in a specific site Practice Development Playbooks, where you can find the best practices of cloud deployments of Microsoft partners around the world. In addition, Microsoft offers its business partners online courses where they can perfect their skills and abilities on Azure.

In addition, during Inspire Microsoft has announced two new ways in which it is helping its partners to better connect with their customers and to offer innovative solutions to the market. Last year, Microsoft launched a new Azure co-sales program to provide extensive sales and marketing support for partners developing solutions with Azure. In the first six months since its inception, this program helped close more than one billion dollars in contracts to Azure partners, increased its business opportunity to 6,000 million dollars and generated more than 4,500 partner contracts.

250 million to accelerate the joint sale of Azure

In addition, Microsoft announced it is making additional investments to accelerate the joint sale of Azure over the next 12 months. In addition, it has created a new role, that of channel director, which will be 100% focused on supporting partners to better reach the market, helping them to ensure that their solutions impact new customers and integrate the sales model. jointly with Microsoft. Overall, these investments will be $ 250 million, which will increase materially Microsoft staff dedicated to the company's business partners and join the Azure co-sale incentives.

Microsoft is also making it easier for partners to create and modernize business applications through the new ISV Cloud Embed program, through which partners can contract the main functions of Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps and Microsoft Flow in blocks, with discounts that can reach up to 50%. In the same way that partners today create their applications on Microsoft Azure, now they can also use the Microsoft enterprise application platform for the automation of sales, service and start-up of operational backend functionality easily to their own applications.

This helps reduce the development overhead and reduce and contain costs by putting Microsoft engineers to work for them. Thus, partners receive support and it is an opportunity for them to reach the 100 million monthly active users with which Office 365 counts and a growing community of Dynamics 365 customers through Microsoft AppSource.