Microsoft have major advantages within the Productivity market; an unprecedented install base, Office, large account presence and a strong technical platform to name but a few so why do the likes of Verizon and Airbus look to move away from Microsoft and why does the perception of many enterprise customers maintain that they purchase Microsoft licences but fail to exploit them?
The primary reason I believe is that there remains a gap in the market to deliver Office 365 effectively for customers. Microsoft have built a world class cloud platform for Productivity and have a highly effective sales machine but the market doesn’t yet provide the required skills and experience to exploit.
How do organisations currently fill their Productivity programmes and projects?
- Internal IT departments – Office 365 and its predecessor BPOS are still relatively new services within the IT industry – it takes time for the market to build the required experience and skills to deploy. Given that IT departments focus on hiring for the long term within the current maturity curve they will find it difficult to find permanent staff who can guide them through a transformation to cloud and then be able to manage on an on-going basis.
- Build a team on contractors. A company may get fortunate and find a team of contractors in the required timeline to deliver their transformation but these resources (especially working as a team) are rare and they don’t scale to meet the needs of an industry.
- System Integrators/Partners. Engaging an SI to run a programme is a well utilised route, however there are issues with this path too. SI’s have the same difficulties as organisations and the market – there remains more demand for experienced deployment experts/teams than there are experts/teams. This issue is by no means insurmountable, especially with the promise of multiple projects keeping teams engaged. More fundamentally however SI’s struggle to cope with the key elements of an Office 365 project.
Many of the challenges of Office 365 fall outside of a the core technical delivery. This was not the case in the old world where the technical deployment with servers, data centres and configuration would take several months and many days of effort. Through years of experience SI’s understand how to deploy and price for these services.
But the the key challenges within an Office 365 deployment are not deploying equipment and software they are management of change and customer dependencies such as Network, clients, policies etc. These challenges are typically highly variable in nature and difficult to price and deliver for an external organisation. They miss the core capabilities which SIs attempt to deliver.
Microsoft helping with this challenge
Over the past 5 years Microsoft have implemented key initiatives to help with this challenge; focusing the sales teams on adoption/utilisation as opposed to license sales, gearing up Microsoft Consulting Services to meet the SI challenge, Business Funding, Fast track and Customer Success Unit to name but a few.
These key initiatives are in themselves valid and useful but are missing a vital element of delivering the change successfully within an organisation.
A new type of Partner needs to emerge
Partners need to emerge who lead on End User Adoption but have specific knowledge of programme management and technical delivery.
Key elements of what a Partner needs to bring:
- Focus on Education and Adoption – how to get the services out to users quickly and effectively. Be able to educate, inform and monitor usage of the applications. Quickly be able to articulate why it is worth managers and employees to invest the time in the new services.
- Customers also need support with explicit knowledge of the challenges of delivering Office 365 within organisations which they can directly input into the programme. The new Partner will bring deep knowledge and experience of previous deployments which will bring credibility to projects and programmes. Using this knowledge the partner would highlight the critical dependencies for a successful deployment unique to the organisation.
- Crucially they are act as a specific customer resource who will be with them throughout the deployment – not just an external body floating in at certain times nor a third party who report on customer dependencies and project margins as opposed to actually helping to deploy and reap the rewards.