Microsoft's Long-Term Vision for Partner Engagement

On the occasion of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2006, were more than 7.000 partners are attending presentations, products and services sessions and presentations of opportunities for networking, Allison Watson, corporate vice president, Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group has expressed the company's view for the general partner market ecosystem while underlying Microsoft's vision for partnership.

Through her, Microsoft has reinstated its commitment towards partners while spearheading profitability, market expansion, cost reduction and increased performance. "Worldwide, Microsoft currently has more than 380,000 partners across 14 competencies, which are designations that recognize a partner's areas of expertise and make it easy for customers to identify and connect with the partner most suited to their needs. The engine that fuels the partnerships, and the center of Microsoft's vision for partnering, is the Microsoft Partner Program, which we've made considerable investments in over the last few years," stated Watson.

Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in the partner platform, tools and guides to meet the standards of performance metrics imposed by the industry. Supporting teamwork, fostering compliance, facilitating insights, providing a high degree of information visibility, helping people work despite time and location factor and enabling process excellence are the extensions of Microsoft's strategy.

"Over the past three years, Microsoft has invested more than US$20 billion in research and development, the result of which is an unprecedented wave of innovative technology currently in the pipeline. Microsoft offerings that are currently on the market or will be very shortly include Microsoft Live Communications Server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Microsoft Windows Server System. With over 40 million small businesses and 1.5 million enterprises in the world and IT spending on the rise, there are tremendous opportunities for partners," promised Watson.