June 30 ends Microsoft’s 2017 fiscal year. Undoubtedly, Redmond will report strong growth in Office365 and Azure cloud sales and corresponding strong profits overall. Following the peak deal-making season that ends June 30th, ‘Microsofties’ begin the summer conference and vacation season with internal meetings, planning sessions, then the large public conferences – most notably the annual worldwide Partner conference, “Inspire” which this year is in Washington DC, July 9th – 13th.
At these conferences, Microsoft rolls out the new year’s key products and services, talks with resellers, partners and developers about “what’s hot” this coming year, and begins the consistent global rollout of the “next thing” that Microsoft will be pitching in enterprise boardrooms in the coming 12 months.
In past years, licensing deals such as the Enterprise Agreement (EA) or subscription bundles such as Secure Productive Enterprise (SPE) have been rolled out. So if you are looking at a Microsoft deal anytime in the coming 12 months, you should pay attention to the announcements made during the sleepy July conference season.
What’s it going to be this year? Well, cloud, obviously – how to sell more cloud, how to get more customer workloads into the cloud, how to manage an ever-growing catalog of cloud-based services. There will be lots of publicity in the trade press about new cloud features and services, perhaps even some new deal bundles.
There will also be price increases announced, quietly, and usually these take effect beginning in November. Lately, Microsoft has gotten very good at obfuscating their price increase under a haze of licensing metric changes. Any customer who has worked through the conversion from Windows Server “per processor” into the new “per core” licensing will understand.
But the question that IT leaders should be asking is not “what is Microsoft pitching” but “where does our enterprise need to go?”
In meeting with clients in the past few months, I’ve been hearing consistent concerns:
Your Microsoft sales team won’t be able to effectively answer these questions for you. Not with the trustworthy, “bet the business” straight answers that IT leaders need.
That’s why we are here. So take a nice well-earned vacation this summer, and relax, because when Microsoft comes around to pitch the next great thing, we are only a phone call away.
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