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In this insightful session from the Ultimate Partner Live event in Bellevue, Washington, Vince Menzione sits down with Stephen Boyle, Corporate Vice President for Enterprise Partners at Microsoft, to pull back the curtain on the tectonic shifts redefining the tech ecosystem. Boyle details Microsoft’s massive organizational pivot into enterprise and SME/channel divisions , explaining how artificial intelligence acts as the foundational thread unifying systems integrators, software vendors, and digital natives. Moving past market noise surrounding competing foundational models , he highlights Microsoft’s strategy to become the ultimate “platform of platforms” by prioritizing user choice, security, and trust. Emphasizing a shift away from infrastructure technicalities and toward practical business outcomes , Boyle delivers an urgent mandate for partners to scale technical talent, eliminate traditional operational silos, and brace for the incoming consumption-driven, agent-based future of enterprise computing.
Key Takeaways- Microsoft has restructured its global sales divisions into distinct Enterprise and SME/Channel organizations to better target its massive total addressable markets.
- Artificial intelligence is fundamentally altering the partner ecosystem by dismantling traditional software and systems integrator silos to build interconnected, multi-party solutions.
- Rather than forcing alignment to a singular model, Microsoft aims to be the definitive platform of platforms by offering extensive choice across over 1,100 language models.
- The enterprise landscape is rapidly moving past experimental AI pilot phases and entering production setups completely focused on transforming core business outcomes.
- Tomorrow’s service organizations are aggressively evolving into software-minded operations that deploy repeatable, highly specialized internal autonomous agents.
- Managing tokens and monitoring usage metrics represents the emerging operational baseline for balancing efficiency against the scaling expenses of large language models.
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Key TagsAI frontier, platform of platforms, enterprise partners, global systems integrators, digital natives, language models, token consumption, agent sprawl, citizen developers, shadow IT, business outcomes, technical enablement, marketplace growth, hyper-scalers, processing fluency, sovereign AI, industry ecosystems, data governance.
Transcript[00:00:00] Stephen Boyle: This is the biggest, most transformative, iterative change in technology we’ve ever seen, where, if you wanna call it a paradigm shift or whatever word comes after paradigm shift.
[00:00:12] Vince Menzione: We just came back from Ultimate Partner live in Bellevue, Washington, where we hosted incredible leaders for two amazing days. Come join us for this next session where we explore the tectonic shifts we’ve all been seeing. Uh, I am thrilled to invite our next guest up on stage. I’ve known this gentleman for several years back in my days at Microsoft, and, um, we’ve been friends, actually Microsoft, and then we both went and did different things, came he’s come back to Microsoft in a big way.
[00:00:46] Vince Menzione: Uh, Steven Boyle, for those of you don’t know, is recently a named the C. We will talk about it in a second, but I, I need to announce you properly. Is the corporate vice president, which by the way in Microsoft is a big deal for enterprise partners. He and Nicole De and I would say are the two Microsoft leaders in the organization.
[00:01:06] Vince Menzione: Nicole is the channel chief. Steven has a, a big remit and we’ll talk about that up on stage. But I’m just so delightful for his support and for making the time in a very busy week at Microsoft ’cause this is CEO summit this week to make some time to come with us and be on stage with me. Please welcome my good friend Steven Boyle.
[00:01:29] Vince Menzione: Good to see you, sir. To see. So I’m gonna put you on this side.
[00:01:33] Stephen Boyle: Okay.
[00:01:35] Vince Menzione: The hot seat. So I’m gonna, I, I didn’t do a justice and I, I wanted you to explain your role. I, I think I know, but I think for the, for the people in the room, uh, talk to us what Enterprise Partners means at Microsoft and what that role remit and remit looks like.
[00:01:50] Stephen Boyle: Um, CVPs may or may not be important, but one thing they don’t do is get invites to the CEO summit. So I’m super pleased to be here with you guys. No, no, it’s totally cool. It’s totally cool if that phone rings. No, I’m kidding. Doesn’t. So what does it mean? So I’d like quickly, um. January last year, uh, we split the sales organization into enterprise and small to medium enterprise and channel.
[00:02:15] Stephen Boyle: You guys probably familiar with that? Nicole is the, uh, chief partner officer lives in the SMA and C world and drives the channel, um, drives our marketplace business and, and a lot of other things. Um, for that 60 billion, um, you know, total addressable market that we have. Down there in SME and C. Um, at the same time, we established enterprise partner as part of Nick Parker’s overall organization.
[00:02:40] Stephen Boyle: Um, but for most of 2025 we ran it as global systems integrators and advisories, ISVs and digital natives. So three separate footprints all focused entirely on, on, on enterprise. Um, in December, January, we talked about establishing an enterprise partner leader that would. You know, aggregate all of this stuff.
[00:03:00] Stephen Boyle: Um, I was fortunate to come through, um, some frankly, pretty hairy, uh, experiences, I bet with some of our senior leaders. Um, I, I’ve loved to
[00:03:08] Vince Menzione: been in the room for that
[00:03:09] Stephen Boyle: questions like, why Steven Boyle and things like that, right? And really have to dig deep to, uh, to justify. Anyway, uh, I’m blessed and honored, uh, to run that entire portfolio of partners, uh, for the entirety of the enterprise partner world, which now from a chief revenue officer perspective, belongs to Deb.
[00:03:25] Stephen Boyle: Deb Co. So Deb is the enterprise leader for all of our sales that we do into that space. Awesome. Um, I have three regional leaders, Nina Harding here in the United States, Ehab Ra in in Europe, and Heather Gordon in Asia that mirror and replicate and flow down the things that we decide to do from a strategy perspective for the, uh, for the core.
[00:03:45] Vince Menzione: And we love Nina. She’s been, she was at our last event,
[00:03:47] Stephen Boyle: super, super lady. And, uh, you know, the US is still 50% of our overall business.
[00:03:53] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:03:53] Stephen Boyle: Too big to fabric. Every time I talk to Nina, I’m like, Nina, you’re too big to fail. We can’t cover you anywhere else. So you know, you’ve gotta be successful here in the Americas.
[00:04:01] Vince Menzione: So I think just for breaking it up, I, ’cause I do want to like, it’ll lead to the next question, right? So you have the global systems integrators, all these systems integrators. Essentially you have all of the software companies we used to call ISVs, we now call SDCs or software development corporations.
[00:04:17] Vince Menzione: And then you also have the AI stack, I’ll call it. Right? So under Jason Grafe. Yeah. Many, many might know. Jason’s been a guest on the podcast and was Satya’s chief of staff at one time, eight years. Eight years. Wow. I didn’t realize there was that many.
[00:04:31] Stephen Boyle: Carry carried a lot of bags for Satya over the years.
[00:04:34] Vince Menzione: Unbelievable. Well, let’s, I mean, so AI is an important component, right? And you saw Jay’s, Jay talking, just talking about AI and all these things. I would love to start here, right? Because, uh, you’re, you’re, I wanna get your perspective as Microsoft, your perspective as Microsoft on the biggest shifts you’re seeing in defining this we’ll call AI Frontier.
[00:04:54] Vince Menzione: We’re seeing right now, how should partners translate that into how they position and go to market externally? How, how do we need to think about this time?
[00:05:02] Stephen Boyle: Yeah, that is, uh, that is a huge question and I’m not sure we’ve got enough time to go into the, into all of the detail. Um, so let me sort of up level it a little bit for you.
[00:05:10] Stephen Boyle: And I think, look, the move that we meet at made a couple of months ago and pulling together those three aspects. Nicole had already done it in SME and C. Right. One partner organization across the world with a very common set of goals. We were working closely together, Sandy Gupta, on ISV, Jason on ai, and myself on on si.
[00:05:29] Stephen Boyle: But we were still working closely together across silos. So the opportunity for me, 60 days into this role is AI just allows you to wire the partner ecosystem together differently. Right? And even if you look at how we’re going to market an AI today, um. You know, with, with, with chat GPT, with Claude, with Anthropic, um, I think there’s something like 1100 different, you know, language models on Microsoft today.
[00:05:55] Stephen Boyle: So the way I think about AI is we are absolutely gonna be the ultimate platform of platforms. Yeah, choice is incredibly important. Um. It’s, it’s, you know, turn the clock back 12 months, everybody was chat gpt five point x, you know, and then six months ago it was Gemini and now it seems to be clawed. And honestly I don’t know what it’s gonna be next quarter.
[00:06:15] Stephen Boyle: So the only thing I can do is offer you choice.
[00:06:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:06:18] Stephen Boyle: And from a partner perspective, I think that minimizes or reduces the risk that you have betting on the Microsoft platform because you can go in a multitude of different directions. I know we’re not in Europe, but if you were in Europe and you were worried about G-G-D-P-R and Jay mentioned sovereignty, you’d probably be like lining up really closely to Misra.
[00:06:37] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. And a bunch of other Europe, European partners. So wherever you are in the globe, I wanna be that platform choice. Um, and we will lead with our own first party solutions. I hope they’re not coming for me. Um. I parked safely in the hotel. It can’t be me. Um, but you weren’t vibe coding in the room. Um, but you know, wherever you are in the world, in whichever industry you are in, um, it is our intent to, to offer that platform of platforms and to give the broadest set of partners the opportunity to engage with us.
[00:07:07] Vince Menzione: I think that’s really important because I, I have found, especially in the last month or two, people are, it’s almost like a knee jerk. Don’t you feel like people don’t know what to do? There’s been so much noise in the press and the media and, and the markets around open AI and anthropic especially. Where do I go?
[00:07:26] Vince Menzione: Seems to be like when I, when I sit, I watch everybody in the room here. I think they’re, they’ve all been thinking that as well. So you can,
[00:07:31] Stephen Boyle: there’s a, a little bit of a deer in the headlights moment. Yes. And even I like, I get that. Yeah. Um, you know, I saw, uh, Jay slides. Jay, love the presentation. Love the slides, man.
[00:07:40] Stephen Boyle: I’m gonna steal several of them. Um, we’ll talk about that later. We, we
[00:07:43] Vince Menzione: have the deck,
[00:07:45] Stephen Boyle: but, but in all seriousness, you know, this, this is like. It’s a new paradigm. I will date myself a little bit. Some of you might heard me say this. I sold many computers in the 1980s. Mini computers. Some of you in the room are going, what’s a mini computer?
[00:07:59] Stephen Boyle: Um, I sold client server for Sun Microsystems in the nineties. I sold an awful lot of Oracle databases in the Auts, I think they’re called, and I’ve done two stints with Microsoft. This is the biggest, most transformative. Iterative change in technology we’ve ever seen. What, if you wanna call it a paradigm shift or whatever word comes after paradigm shift.
[00:08:18] Stephen Boyle: Um, and we are building intelligent systems at scale faster than we’ve ever seen. Scalable, mission critical solutions being implemented today inside of Microsoft and with our most important customers. So, and we can’t do it without partners, right? There is absolutely nothing we can do in this industry. I will, I will put the, you know, the elephant in the room out there.
[00:08:40] Stephen Boyle: Our ISD organization has between five and 7,000 people. Our forward deployed engineering organization is about a thousand people.
[00:08:47] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:08:48] Stephen Boyle: So when you look at the scale of the total addressable market that Jay just talked about. We are gonna service directly like this much
[00:08:55] Vince Menzione: used to be 5%. Was it even, is it even that high?
[00:08:58] Stephen Boyle: I doubt it’s, I doubt it’s even that. And the billions of dollars that we spend every year helping our customers transform to what we’re now calling frontier firms is gonna be, have to be driven with every single person in this room in some way, shape, or form. Judson is not asking Marla to significantly increase ISD.
[00:09:15] Stephen Boyle: Not asking John to significantly increase FDE, although we probably will hire in that area just because of the, the newness and the, you know, bright shiny object that everybody’s like, oh, FDE, I’ve gotta have those. We’ve got a thousand already today that have been around in John’s organization for 10 plus years doing the things that we are doing today.
[00:09:32] Stephen Boyle: But we are gonna build out that muscle. But the real way we’re gonna build out that muscle is with all of you in this room. That’s like categorical. That is my like, probably number one goal for the next one to three years is make sure that, that story that Jay just told about Microsoft not being involved in AstraZeneca.
[00:09:48] Stephen Boyle: I probably won’t tell Judson that Jay, but I love the story. Um, like if you could all do that for me, like win, um, that is so, you know, from our worldwide learning, through our skilling enablement through our cloud solution architects that I personally own. We are pivoting aggressively towards making sure that the partners understand our platforms better than any other job, number one for me right now, if you don’t understand what I’m selling, like I’m kind of dead in the water obviously.
[00:10:15] Stephen Boyle: Well,
[00:10:15] Vince Menzione: I was gonna ask you why now? Why Microsoft? Why now? Right? Because there is a lot of noise. You know, Google just announced, you all announced your results on the same day, which was astounding. That was freaky, wasn’t it? It was. It was the first time. And the, the total commitment, customer commitment is over a trillion dollars now, I think 1.2 trillion is what I counted up.
[00:10:33] Stephen Boyle: Yeah.
[00:10:34] Vince Menzione: But it’s saying a lot about like, what do I do now, like as these partners in the room. Um, how, I think you kind of already, and you’ve talked about this, about differentiating where Microsoft is, I think J Slide does a lot of justice there. It says how, uh, Microsoft Partners came into the room, surrounded the customer.
[00:10:52] Vince Menzione: It feels like Microsoft has always leaned in big time on partners. Uh, more so I would say than any other organization out there. What would
[00:10:59] Stephen Boyle: you say Joe Roses, my chief of staff, business manager and so many other things was telling me last night that, you know, we used to say 500,000 partners.
[00:11:05] Vince Menzione: Yeah,
[00:11:06] Stephen Boyle: it’s a, it’s a significantly higher number than that as well.
[00:11:09] Stephen Boyle: So there’s an element of, you know, back to the deer in the headlights, which partners are, are more important. One of my other phrases that I say on a regular basis, the winners and losers are yet to be decided in this next wave. Like, I want all of us to on the right side of that argument. Right? But, but it’s gonna be a challenge and, and companies are going through shifts.
[00:11:28] Stephen Boyle: You know, Accenture, maybe, possibly doesn’t need 750,000 employees in the not too distant future. Maybe TCS at 600,000 doesn’t need 600,000 human employees. So we’re going through this dramatic shift of, you know, what’s the right balance going forward. What I would say about Microsoft is notwithstanding the fact that we’ve figured this out for 51 years, which is a little bit mind blowing, um, that you know, all the way back in the seventies we’ve gone through so many iterative changes.
[00:11:56] Stephen Boyle: People have questioned just like they’ve questions. A lot of other technology companies, are you gonna be around for the long haul? I think we’ve proven time and time again, and I love Jay’s story. I’ve used that myself about how many companies disappear on a, on a decade to decade, you know, business. 10 years ago I had the opportunity to listen to Craig Clayton Christensen, who’s sadly no longer with us.
[00:12:15] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. But you know, the books that he wrote and the story that he told to Microsoft 2014, we were nowhere in cloud.
[00:12:21] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:12:22] Stephen Boyle: AWS was so far ahead of us, it was crazy. And he came in and he’s like. You know what? You guys need to be successful. You need to figure out how to cross this chasm again, and we’ve done it time and time again.
[00:12:32] Stephen Boyle: You can go back. You know, Microsoft used to be known as a fast follower in ai. I don’t think we’re a fast follower. I think we’re right up there. We’re right at the front, but that race is still being run and the winners are losers are yet to be decided.
[00:12:44] Vince Menzione: I was in that room with Clayton Christensen with you, by the way.
[00:12:46] Vince Menzione: I remember, I remember that. That was at a Prism conference.
[00:12:49] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:50] Vince Menzione: You men, you touched on this with the GSIs a little bit. How do you see the roles evolving? You know, we, we, we bucketed all, we’ve always been. Fantastic about bucketing ISVs or SDCs and sis and digital natives. Yeah. How does it, how does that all come together?
[00:13:06] Vince Menzione: Does it come together any differently in this new AI platform era, or is it the same?
[00:13:11] Stephen Boyle: I look, I, I’ve said this for a long time, like if you go into AstraZeneca, the six plus, you know, frontline partners, there’s probably a whole board of second, third tier that, that we don’t know about doing, you know, things across the AstraZeneca group.
[00:13:25] Stephen Boyle: It takes several villages and sometimes a small town, especially in my world, in the enterprise world, strategic five hundreds. Yeah. Um, you know, we, we ran some reports a few years ago and it is shocking how many global systems integrators have a footprint in Shell or Exxon or, you know, bank of America or whatever else.
[00:13:44] Stephen Boyle: So I’ve always believed that partner to partner is critical. Yeah. I think it became even more critical in the, in the AI world, and I’ll take my new friends at Anthropic. So I went to the first Anthropic partner Summit. Some of you might have been down there in, in San Diego, um, just a couple of months ago.
[00:13:59] Stephen Boyle: Same partners, same people from the same partners. In the room, you know, talking about what they’re gonna do together with Anthropic. Um, and I’m looking out across this audience going, okay, well I know him and I know her and I know those guys, and like, I need to figure out how I’m gonna weave this together.
[00:14:14] Stephen Boyle: So it’s not just an Accenture and Anthropic or an NTT data and anthropic, but it’s an NTT data plus anthropic plus Microsoft. Story going forward. And then who’s best at delivering those services capabilities? So it’s it at every juncture that I see in the, in the partner community, and this is the, the reason why I argued vehemently with Nick, that it has to be one organization I’m gonna create maybe given a little bit away.
[00:14:40] Stephen Boyle: So if you’re recording, stop now. Um, I’m gonna create an enablement organization that is partner agnostic. I don’t necessarily care. I do care about the digital natives, but I don’t care about how I train them. Right. What I’m more important of is how do I train the digital natives in what the sis are doing, and how do I train the sis and what the ISVs Plus digital Natives are doing.
[00:15:01] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:15:01] Stephen Boyle: That is my, that’s my game plan. If I fail there, then I think we fail to raise the bar and be differentiated in an AI world, and I’m not set up like that today.
[00:15:12] Vince Menzione: I wanna, I wanna ask you, uh, uh, because I was looking at Jay’s slide and the, the managed piece is. And we have a lot of managed service providers in this room today.
[00:15:20] Vince Menzione: A lot of them, by the way, come from the old school of managed services. The managed piece seems to be like, if I’m doing something today with ai, we’re gonna talk about security next, uh, up on stage here. It seems like there’s a new set of skills or a different approach to the customer, don’t you? Don’t you agree?
[00:15:37] Stephen Boyle: I I
[00:15:37] Vince Menzione: think you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all
[00:15:39] Stephen Boyle: times. I think what it boils down to is you can’t do AI unless you do certain other things.
[00:15:44] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:15:44] Stephen Boyle: Right. You could be a modern work specialist and you could make a lot of money being a modern work specialist, or you could be a, a dynamic specialist.
[00:15:52] Stephen Boyle: We just held our, uh, inner A in a circle conference last last week, which I was disappointed to miss for the first time in a few years. Those, those days are, are, are fast becoming over.
[00:16:03] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:16:04] Stephen Boyle: Um, why? Because everything that I’ve just said is tied together by ai. Yes. And in order to do good ai, you need good data.
[00:16:12] Stephen Boyle: And in order to trust everything that you’re getting, as Judson talks about trust and intelligence, you need to wrap that in a really secure
[00:16:19] Vince Menzione: Yes.
[00:16:19] Stephen Boyle: You know, en en environment. Now we will do our best to provide levels of security into how we deliver ai. But that’s not the end of the game, right? You have to take it all, all the way to the edge.
[00:16:30] Stephen Boyle: So that’s why a siloed partner or a singular commercial solution area partner in Microsoft’s terms, has got to transform its business. ’cause if you’re gonna do ai, you’ve gotta do those other things as well.
[00:16:41] Vince Menzione: Agreed. I must see the model changing, and in fact, I see like bigger organizations becoming managed service providers in many respects.
[00:16:48] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, there’s still, there’s still a role for all the old terminology you mentioned is SV to sdc. Yeah. I’m like, I’m been around long enough. Look, it’s ANB still anv, it’s still an isv. Thank you. Independent software vendor. Um, and it’s, you know, where, where AI is allowing software to be, you know, frankly developed in a number of different places.
[00:17:07] Stephen Boyle: We are all citizen developers. Um, you know, I was on a call with our internal leadership yesterday, um, and you guys might have heard this story ’cause I think it came out at Ignite. When we turn the agent 365, around and on ourselves. We found 130,000 agents running across Microsoft that had been developed and deployed internally with, I mean, you could call it shadow it.
[00:17:28] Stephen Boyle: I guess that would be one phrase that you would use for it, but the reality is if you, if you haven’t got something to do your job today, you have the tools. To build it really, really fast. Um, and that, you know, that’s, that’s a great opportunity for people to be able to do their work, you know, in a better and in a different way.
[00:17:45] Stephen Boyle: But it’s also a huge opportunity to make sure that data governance and security and all the other things that we need to deliver are there out of, out of the gate and out of the platform that we deliver. So security’s absolutely critical. Not saying that managed services won’t grow, um, at, at some level as well, but only if they transform into this multifaceted way.
[00:18:04] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Thinking
[00:18:05] Vince Menzione: about, well, that’s what I was, I was gonna lead to here with innovating. It’s happening across, I mean, we’re talking about chips, we’re talking about foundational models, LLMs, we’re talking about applications, we’re talking about agents. How should we think about where to play and how to differentiate as partners in this room?
[00:18:22] Stephen Boyle: I think.
[00:18:25] Stephen Boyle: So look, I mean, one, one of the ways that Judson talks about it is I think silicon’s gonna change over time. Yes. NVIDIA’s definitely the 800 pound gorilla, maybe the 8,000 pound gorilla. Yeah. Uh, but you know, if you read the press, there’s, there’s things happening in, in different places as first party silicon, which we clearly are, are developing, um, in a quantum direction for sure.
[00:18:45] Stephen Boyle: Um, there’s lots of different language models that haven’t even been launched on, on, on the marketplace yet, so. You know, Judson’s trying to uplevel our conversations. You’ll hear us talking about conversations more and more as we go into FY 27, um, that obviate all of those layers. Just like even when I was selling Sun Microsystems, it was about the business outcome and the business solution that we were solving for not necessarily the fastest piece of hardware or the best client service solution on, on the market.
[00:19:17] Stephen Boyle: So I think what’s gonna happen over the next 12 to 24 months is we’ll have so many different models to choose from. We’ll have more silicon to choose from, but those won’t be the real buying decisions. The real buying decisions of what? How am I trying to transform my finance organization, my HR organization, and my supply chain?
[00:19:36] Stephen Boyle: Because the underlying technology, Judson says commodity I, I guess I can go with that. It will be commoditized and we’ll really start to focus back on what the important things are. We’re moving a lot from pilot to production. You guys have probably seen that. The numbers that Jay just showed about how many.
[00:19:52] Stephen Boyle: Projects are failing, is getting less and less because we’re getting smarter and smarter about what it takes to actually drive the business outcome. And I need all of us to be talking that same language. Yeah. Having conversations with head of HR about how we’re gonna transform human capital management in the, in the age of agents, if you like, like the underlying platform.
[00:20:14] Stephen Boyle: It’s not, don’t worry about it. You wanna be on a secure platform. Don’t get me wrong. But at the same time, I don’t think we, we spent too much time worrying about that.
[00:20:21] Vince Menzione: Yeah. We’re not, what you’re saying is we’re not spending enough time on outcomes. On the business outcomes. Right. And that’s where we need to focus.
[00:20:27] Vince Menzione: We’re, we’re focusing on, I, I feel like we’re, it’s a signal to, to noise ratio that we’re living through right now. There’s too much noise.
[00:20:33] Stephen Boyle: Yeah.
[00:20:34] Vince Menzione: And we’re not focusing on the signal. I think that’s what you’re saying.
[00:20:36] Stephen Boyle: I, it’s got to be, I mean, to be honest with you, it’s always been, you know, even when I sold what I would perceive, you know, sun in the nineties was a rockman ship to the stars and, you know, kind of sad what happened to that company.
[00:20:47] Stephen Boyle: Um, but we, we were, we were fixated on, we had the best client server. But, but nobody was buying, you know, a piece of Sun hardware as a room heater, which is all it did, you know, like for the longest. But if you had SAP, if you had Cybase, if you had Bond, remember Bond, I mean all of those applications that drove the business outcomes, we’ve gotta get back to that kind of mentality.
[00:21:09] Stephen Boyle: Yes. And worrying a little bit less about the underlying architecture. Yeah. It needs to be, it needs to be part of the conversation. ’cause it needs to deliver trust and security and intelligence and everything else. Then you need to rapidly move to what are you trying to achieve and how can we ensure the, the, the success of, of your business outcome.
[00:21:27] Stephen Boyle: And look, I mean, Palantir pri you know, sort of came out and said, well, the way we do that is through forward deployed engineering. Um, and they stole the show. And, and, you know, they’re, they’re doing very well as a result of doing that. Uh, but if you go and talk to, um, Tom Siebel’s organization at C3 ai.
[00:21:43] Stephen Boyle: They’ve had FDS for quite a while. You know, I told you about John Chuchu 10 years ago. John Chu, Chuck’s job was to go and get all the applications that we needed on the Microsoft phone. Remember that?
[00:21:54] Vince Menzione: Yes. Um,
[00:21:55] Stephen Boyle: you know, so we’ve pivoted John o over the years to doing what he’s doing now, which is to go sometimes in partnership with, with partners into the customer and say, what is it you’re trying to achieve?
[00:22:05] Stephen Boyle: Let me show you how I can build that for you in three weeks or three months. That might have taken you three years. We literally just did a hackathon with one partner last, last, last week with, uh, with our ISE organization, the, the, the forward deployed, uh, group that John runs. Um, and one of the big customers said, I’ve just done in three days what would’ve taken me three months.
[00:22:26] Stephen Boyle: Now he hasn’t productized it and rolled it out and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is that is how fast things are changing. And this was not a small company. This was a very, very large oil company, and they were like blown away by how much we can achieve. We’ve gotta do that at scale.
[00:22:41] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:22:42] Stephen Boyle: You know, we, we have a commitment to scale our FDE community through partnerships to touch all of the S 500 in a very personalized way.
[00:22:51] Stephen Boyle: And then, you know, at a slightly, you know, lower ratios down through the, through the majors and into, into Nicole’s SME and C world as well.
[00:22:59] Vince Menzione: Jay talks about the decade of the ecosystem. He coined that term back, back on a podcast way back in nine, in, uh, in 2020. Microsoft has been at the, for, we used to call partner to partner back, back in the day.
[00:23:10] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. Do you remember those days? How do you think about this ecosystem evolving and what steps are you taking to help bring these organizations together? Because I, I, again, we look at the seven seats or 6.3 seats at the table. The customer has the power now that they didn’t have before. ’cause they have the commitment with like with Microsoft and they can buy off of the marketplace and pull together multiple organizations to go, go do that.
[00:23:34] Vince Menzione: How do you think about helping to orchestrate that as the leader of the enterprise partner business?
[00:23:39] Stephen Boyle: So I’ll start with a really big example, and I’ll try and sort of scale it down a little bit. But my friends at Accenture, with the Accenture, Microsoft Business Group, we spend an awful lot of time, you know, in, in each other’s pockets, in each other’s deals.
[00:23:51] Stephen Boyle: We know everything that’s going on in the Accenture, Microsoft Business Group. And a couple of weeks, or maybe a month or so ago, I was told that the Microsoft Business Group is now larger than the SAP Business group. It probably flip flops.
[00:24:03] Vince Menzione: Yeah,
[00:24:04] Stephen Boyle: it won’t be too long before the Anthropic Business Group is bigger than both of those.
[00:24:08] Stephen Boyle: So what I need my Microsoft team to do is to not spend all of their lives in the. A MBG, the Azure, the Accenture, Microsoft Business group, but to go make friends in the Anthropic Accenture Business group and frankly still to make friends in the SAP business group and maybe in the Oracle Business Group and the list goes on.
[00:24:27] Stephen Boyle: So at a macro 11, in the very largest accounts where we haven multiple practices, where we haven’t spent time before, I’m gonna. Push my people into uncomfortable zones and I’m gonna push them to go into those other areas and I’m gonna load them up with technical talent and cloud solution architects and ai, you know, forward deployed engineers.
[00:24:45] Stephen Boyle: And I’m gonna force different people to talk together that haven’t talked together. So I can do that in TCS. I can do that, Capgemini, I can do that. Um, you know, in Europe with Capgemini and Misra is a classic example. Um, with the, with the Indian sis, Indian based sis, they’re all big enough where I know all the practices exist.
[00:25:04] Stephen Boyle: I just need to do a better job of, of talking to them. Now, when you downsize that into, you know, into a, a company that doesn’t have all of that scale, this the same truth still holds. I need to talk to people who aren’t necessarily motivated every single day to do something with Microsoft. I need to talk to people who are motivated to do something with an AI partner or even a traditional SaaS partner.
[00:25:27] Stephen Boyle: I noticed yesterday, actually no, this morning I got a notification that we just passed, um, a billion dollars in revenue on the marketplace with ServiceNow.
[00:25:35] Vince Menzione: Nice.
[00:25:36] Stephen Boyle: Um, and I think AWS announced the same thing, by the way this month as well. Um, so thank you to the ServiceNow people. Yeah. Um, you know, that is that there’s a tremendous demonstration of how far we’ve come in marketplace.
[00:25:48] Stephen Boyle: ’cause that’s another one where we trailed AWS quite significantly. But with the right partnerships. And driving the right motions, we can, you know, we can definitely catch up and we will continue to pass, uh, some of, some of the other hyperscalers in, in, in that way. So really the bottom line to your question is partner to partner is still real.
[00:26:08] Vince Menzione: Yeah,
[00:26:08] Stephen Boyle: how we do it and what we use to tie things together. And I know that compensation drives behavior and we’re not gonna get into a compensation about like how we get compensated and everything else, but the reality is I’ve gotta break down those barriers and those silos and I’ve gotta deliver real meaningful enablement and practice development so that, so that the people who sit in the Anthropic business group and the people who sit in the Microsoft Business Group are spending as much time together as they are with me.
[00:26:34] Stephen Boyle: That makes sense. Simply put, that’s what I, I need to achieve at scale rapidly.
[00:26:40] Vince Menzione: So to, we’re getting close to time here, but as you look forward, what would define the most successful partnerships in this ecosystem? Is it, is it what you described, the opening up the aperture or for the, for the leaders in the room here today, what should they go do better and differently?
[00:26:58] Stephen Boyle: Um, so obviously we’re closing out this fiscal, we’ve got Microsoft start and Microsoft start for partners coming up in July. Um, I mentioned the fact that we’re, we’re driving. Cu customer engagement through the lens of conversations and how do we achieve business outcomes? I would encourage you to, to gravitate, if you like, above the commercial solution areas where you might have understood, this is how I interact with Microsoft today.
[00:27:23] Stephen Boyle: Um, and abstract it up to that AI layer. You know, think about trust, think about intelligence, think about business outcomes, and how do I potentially weave together a story? If I’m in the dynamic space, how do I get better in data? If I’m in the data space, how do I get better in. In that modern work environment, but really use AI as the overlay to, to help tie that together.
[00:27:44] Stephen Boyle: That’s one thing. The second thing is if we’re not training you in the right direction, it’s stevenBoyle@microsoft.com. Let me know. Awesome. Um, we’ve got programmatic stuff, um, you know, and we’ve got high touch stuff as well. So I think this is, this is another time where Microsoft is gonna over pivot on all of the training and enablement that we need to do to make sure that you’re, you know, you’re grounded in our platform.
[00:28:07] Stephen Boyle: Um, I think there’s a huge opportunity with this agenda future to become more of a software partner. You know, even the deepest services organizations are going to need agents, and the more successful ones will be the ones that can turn on those agents in a repeatable way. So. Our agents, the new SaaS. I’m not exactly saying that, but I think that the agen future is one where even the more services oriented companies will, will have teams of agents that they’re deploying.
[00:28:35] Stephen Boyle: In fact, I had a very, very large systems integrator, um, in, in the EBC just about a month ago, three weeks ago. Um, and I was sat next to their head of consulting and he showed me what he called his God dashboard. Uh, and right in the middle of his God dashboard there are like 450 accounts. All of whom I recognized, ’cause they were all in the enterprise, right in the middle of his dashboard was, how many tokens am I spending?
[00:29:00] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:29:01] Stephen Boyle: Like, not like what’s my daily runway? You know, not am I making a profit on that account or anything else like that is like, how many tokens have I consumed? Yeah. Because there is an awful lot of, that is the new juice, if you like. That’s, that’s driving the success. You can have the smartest people on the planet, but you’ve got to still arm them with all the best tools that are available out there.
[00:29:22] Stephen Boyle: So it’s fascinating to listen to him, how he had gone through that thing of, you know, agent sprawl, how many are really working, how many are not working? How can we prove that? You can prove it through, you know, managing your tokens. There’s a new version of. Finops for tokens, for want of a better phrase, that’s gonna be critical for us all to understand.
[00:29:40] Stephen Boyle: ’cause they’re not cheap, they’re not free, that’s for sure. And, and they might not be cheap if you’re not, if you’re not managing them and using them effectively. Yeah. So that’s the other thing that I would really get on top of. And, you know, we’re gonna make some announcements in the not too distant future about the consumption driven future.
[00:29:56] Stephen Boyle: Um, that, that we will, that we will deliver with our first party and third party platforms going forward. So that’s another. Another critical thing
[00:30:03] Vince Menzione: sounds like some exciting announcements. Pretty soon.
[00:30:06] Stephen Boyle: Yeah, could look close. Quarter four, help me close. Quarter four. Yes. That’s priority number one, two, and three right now.
[00:30:12] Stephen Boyle: Uh, but get ready for some, you know, for some new announcements in July. Um, look, the future is incredibly bright with Microsoft. It’s incredibly bright in the industry as a whole, right? I mean, let, let’s be honest, the, the growth targets that we will have for ne next year are astronomical, and we will not make them without the partner community that we have, without training and enabling the partner community that we need for tomorrow.
[00:30:34] Stephen Boyle: So like, stay close, you know, stay engaged. Talk to your partner development managers, talk to the talk to field reps, talk to the accounts that that, that you are in, and stay as close as you possibly can to our emerging strategy. And, um, you know, look, I, I think if I had fivefold or tenfold the people I have today, I still wouldn’t be able to touch everybody that I would like to touch in the partner community.
[00:30:58] Stephen Boyle: So I’ll apologize in advance. Um, but we’re gonna have some, you know, some really cool ways of learning. Um, and we’re gonna make sure that they’re available to the widest possible audience.
[00:31:07] Vince Menzione: Well, we bring the practitioners and the experts in the room to help with that as well. Right? Yeah. Because you can’t always have a partner development manager tied to everybody in the room.
[00:31:14] Stephen Boyle: I, I would do hackathons on AI every week with every partner and every part of the world, but I can’t.
[00:31:19] Vince Menzione: Yeah, exactly. Well, so good to have you today. Thank you. So good to see you again. I don’t know what your schedule is like. I, we didn’t, we don’t have enough time for questions.
[00:31:28] Stephen Boyle: That’s cool.
[00:31:28] Vince Menzione: From the audience.
[00:31:29] Stephen Boyle: I’m gonna stay around for a little
[00:31:30] Vince Menzione: while this
[00:31:30] Stephen Boyle: morning and I’m coming back
[00:31:31] Vince Menzione: for cocktails. Alright, terrific. So. Stephen Boyle will be here for cocktail hour. Thank you. Four 30 and uh, I wanna thank you, sir. So good to have you. Thank you. Good to see you. Absolutely.
[00:31:42] Stephen Boyle: So much. Absolutely. Hey, thanks everybody.
[00:31:43] Stephen Boyle: Thanks for what you do today, and hopefully thank you for what you do tomorrow as well.
[00:31:46] Vince Menzione: Thank you. An incredible leader.
[00:31:49] Stephen Boyle: Don’t forget, ultimate
[00:31:51] Vince Menzione: partner Alive is coming soon, June 18th at our executive breakfast in New York. I hope to see you there.Description
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