Kieron Allen interviews Dan Rippey, senior director, AI Cloud Partner Program, Global Partner Solutions at Microsoft, as part of the Acceleration Economy Partners Ecosystem Innovation series, in which he speaks with top executives responsible for the ecosystem businesses of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies.
In this discussion, Rippey details how co-creation is fueling co-selling, the ways that cloud and AI services are coming together, how Microsoft’s trust focus applies to partners, and the ecosystem investments that Microsoft is making.
Highlights
Co-Creation vs. Co-Selling (00:46)
Co-selling is on fire; it’s one of the fastest growth areas for the business for a couple of reasons. Co-creation has sped up co-selling. Microsoft decided three or four years ago to democratize co-sell, making it available to any partner in the world. That created an economy inside the business where partners understand they can close bigger deals faster when they have Microsoft accounts involved. One of the top asks in co-sell scenarios is partners in the early stage of concept development for a deal that hasn’t progressed to be sales qualified and they’re looking for Microsoft to come to the table with resources and Microsoft has the ability to create solutions with them. Co-selling has been a growing business for the last four to five years and co-creation has really accelerated that.
Cloud and AI Partners, Services Being Fused Together (04:10)
Cloud and AI partners are welding shut the gap that used to separate cloud and AI services. The point we’re at is reminiscent of the cloud in the 2008-2009 timeframe when we referred to digital transformation and cloud migrations. We distinguished between on-prem and cloud, and more. We don’t do that anymore. “I think two, three years from now, AI gets into every conversation just as a natural extension the way cloud computing does today. What’s different is cloud computing was such a pivotal shift from on-premise computing in terms of customers and partners shedding large investments they had made in their IT infrastructure…AI is almost the opposite because it creates pathways for more capacity.”
Partner Training and Skilling (06:50)
We’ve taken parts of our infrastructure and are trying to figure out how we can see accelerated gains through things like Copilot. We have all this collateral, or we have all this data, we have to train these models and Copilot to be useful for human interaction. An entire economy has been created around that. When companies are building new tech, AI has to be infused from the beginning so you’re not spending time and money trying to add it later. There’s a lot of value in getting technical and business audiences thinking about this from day zero, asking how a new soloution will take advantage of AI. That’s the kind of retraining model.
The Trust Factor and Partners (09:29)
Microsoft runs on trust; that’s the baseline in every customer and partner interaction. The company holds its partners to that same standard. Plus, transparency builds trust. When Microsoft or its partners have a misstep, being open about that in the ecosystem with our customers is critical. Microsoft looks at the attacks and the barrage of things that customers and partners face every day. Microsoft can go through an event quickly, recover from it, and then execute a series of after-action reviews to figure out how it happened, why it happened, and what attack vectors are being used to get into systems.
Investing in Partners (12:20)
“Microsoft has always been a partner-led company and will always be a partner-led company,” Rippey says. The company has a chief partner officer who advocates for the voice of partners. Through that voice, Microsoft is able to represent what its partners need. Partners access benefits from Microsoft’s products that extend to their developers and teams.
Rippey shares, “We were authorized to make a multi-million dollar investment in the partner channel these last couple months, so we’re going to add six different flavors of Copilot.” 472,000 partner organizations around the world will gain access to these benefits.
Microsoft is in its third year of building its AI Cloud Partner Program. By the third year, Rippey explained, Microsoft wanted to have programmatic homes that fit every partner of every type and size. “We wanted a really custom-built house for each one of those partners and we wanted floors in each house designed to meet the needs of those partners.”
2025 Outlook (17:44)
Microsoft had much success with partners in FY 2024, as well as with AI and its Copilot. The company expects to continue the momentum around that product suite moving into the next year. While Microsoft is developing new capabilities through its platform, Rippey says, “It’s our partners that drive value, and it’s our partners that get to bring that value to life for customers.”
