By Paul Mason, Chief Commercial Officer, Solgari
The Microsoft Marketplace Summit 2024 in London is just around the corner. At its heart is a simple question to partners: Do you want to leverage this considerable ecosystem to grow your business?
As the leading customer experience ISV on the Microsoft Marketplace, we have seen first-hand how partnerships are crucial to success in this most dynamic of markets. We are excited to connect with other businesses at the cutting edge of innovation.
This is the perfect time for such an event, coming shortly after Satya Nadella’s FY24 Q4 earnings update. It made for impressive reading, but it is the success of Microsoft Teams and the central role it is playing that in particular caught our eye. This may have been lost among the headline numbers, but is extremely relevant to partners seeking to grow cloud revenue.
There can be no doubt that Microsoft is the leading vendor in unified communications and collaboration. With a market share of around 43%, its role at the heart of business cannot be understated. As Satya himself said: “Microsoft Teams has become essential to how hundreds of millions of people meet, call, chat, collaborate and do business.”
Furthermore, the way organizations are seeking to extend Teams and its capabilities is seriously impressive. Teams Premium, for instance, has surpassed three million seats, up by almost 400% year-on-year, trusted by huge organizations such as Ford and Eli Lilly.
It is clear that Microsoft believes in a frictionless experience, not just for its customers, but the wider partner ecosystem. At Solgari, we recognized early on how the Microsoft Marketplace would turbocharge our already considerable growth. We are leveraging multiparty private offers (MPOs) and other sales initiatives to land customers including a major NFL franchise in the US, as well LW Theatres here in the UK.
Understanding that organizations are looking to extend Teams and its capabilities, our Microsoft-native customer engagement application delivers a fully integrated all-channel capability that automatically captures all customer interactions in a single data source of our customers own choosing. This unleashes the next generation of Artificial Intelligence, enabling organizations to deliver exceptional customer services. We are proud to be the only CX vendor attending the Marketplace Summit that is already transacting on Marketplace worldwide through private CSP offers and now MPOs, never losing sight of the value this approach brings to partners.
Being Microsoft-native, we reduce sales cycles and achieve faster deployments. As a Microsoft-certified application integrated natively within Teams, we are fully compliant with Microsoft’s ‘secure by design’ principles, reducing risk that can slow down deals. Finally, we help partners to take ownership of their customers’ AI journey, with practical and immediately impactful AI use cases. Businesses are under pressure to adopt AI and the customer experience sector is one where early gains can be made.
So, if you’re going to be at Microsoft Marketplace Summit 2024 and want to speak to the only ISV that transforms Teams into the world’s best customer engagement platform, get in touch. We would love to meet you there. To book a meeting, please contact us here.
