Ultimate Partner®

Don’t miss this massive ecosystem shift! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Host Vince Menzione sits down with industry leaders Nicole Dziedzic, Erwin Visser, and Mira Ayad to uncover the critical transformations happening across the technology ecosystem and marketplace. The panel explores the impact of Reseller Enabled Offers (REO), the changing role of distribution into aggregation, and the immense opportunities surrounding agentic AI. They also dive into why MSPs need to ruthlessly simplify their technology stacks to make room for business value selling, and how data tools like ASPX are changing the game for proactive channel strategies. https://youtu.be/4Ox507-0l_8 Key Takeaways The marketplace has completely transformed software procurement and is now rapidly expanding into the SMB sector. Reseller Enabled Offers (REO) allow partners to own private offers on behalf of ISVs while maintaining their trusted advisor status. Ingram has introduced the MCP server to help partners automate and pull necessary distribution data seamlessly. The next few years represent a “golden age” for MSPs if they can successfully adopt, build, and operationalize AI agents. Microsoft’s ASPX platform gives partners critical usage and marketing signals to proactively target customer opportunities. MSPs must simplify their bloated technology stacks to create space for selling true business value with agentic AI. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags agentic AI, Reseller Enabled Offers, MCP server, marketplace syndication, ASPX data, Agent 365, precision velocity, managed service providers, hyperscaler enablement, technology stack simplification, Ultimate Partner Experience, cloud solutions strategy, customer zero, ISV go-to-market. Transcript Nicole – Erwin – Mira Podcast [00:00:00] Mira Ayad: I think it’s a very simple formula. Start where your customer is at, like meet the customer. Where they act is not just a generic cliche state statement. [00:00:10] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel. And what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes, the voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:43] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:53] Vince Menzione: We’ve got some word friends of ultimate partner coming up now, and then I’m gonna have them come up and introduce themselves. Uh, most of these people I’ve had the opportunity to meet Nicole, come on up. Come on. Good to meet you. I’m gonna have everyone introduce themselves. This guy, I never know. I’ve never met this guy before. [00:01:12] Vince Menzione: Mira, great to see you again. We gotta be on stage about a month ago. Yes. And we get to do this again while a different panel conversation. So, terrific. [00:01:22] Vince Menzione: Nicole, we’re gonna start with you on from the far end and come this way. So I’ll have you introduce yourself to, to our audience. [00:01:27] Nicole Dziedzic: Yeah. So, uh, so I lead our, uh, US business for Ingram, uh, really focused on our customer success and renewals across our vendor stack. [00:01:36] Vince Menzione: Thank you for being here. [00:01:37] Nicole Dziedzic: Okay, [00:01:37] Nicole Dziedzic: thank you. I’m excited. Awesome. [00:01:39] Erwin Visser: Yeah. Uh, great to be here again. Thanks, uh, fin for, for having us and a lot of familiar faces. So, uh, Erman, Viser, uh, I recently changed roles, so four weeks ago, uh, in Microsoft. I’m, uh, I just, uh, started to, uh, to lead the, uh, the Cloud Solutions Strategy team, uh, still in GCPS, so our global channel organization. [00:02:01] Vince Menzione: And Mira, great to see you again. [00:02:03] Mira Ayad: Same here. Yes. I’m looking forward for this conversation. We had so much fun last time. [00:02:07] Vince Menzione: Yes, [00:02:08] Vince Menzione: so [00:02:08] Vince Menzione: good. [00:02:09] Mira Ayad: My name is Mira Ayad . I’m the GM for a global Microsoft marketplace. My team leads the strategy and operations. I’ve been with Microsoft for seven months, I think, but this is not my first rodeo. [00:02:21] Mira Ayad: This is my fourth time boomeranging to Microsoft. Yeah. [00:02:26] Vince Menzione: And for context for people, we have talked about marketplace quite a bit, but the conversation has expanded at Microsoft in, in bigger ways. Uh, before, was it November that. REO was announced. [00:02:39] Nicole Dziedzic: Yes. [00:02:40] Vince Menzione: Yes. We’ll talk about that. But maybe you, you talk a little bit about the reseller enabled, uh, offers and, uh, and maybe we’ll take, we’ll take us through that and then how Ingram has been a great partner, and of course, Erwin’s organization has been really front and center with some of this. [00:02:55] Vince Menzione: So let’s go there for, let’s go first tell us, tell us about, about REO. Sure. For those and, and your, your role is, um, we had Cy on stage yesterday. But your role is front and center with the channel, with the with the reseller community. Right. Taking marketplace into the resellers. [00:03:12] Mira Ayad: Sure. So, uh, Cyril is my partner in crime. [00:03:16] Mira Ayad: He leads the marketing for marketplace. Um, my team focus across all personas that hits marketplace from an ISV to channel partners, buyers, and even the Microsoft sellers themselves. Like how can we bring that vibe and that energy? To bring marketplace, to be front and center. Um, REO is, um, a feature that we’ve launched back in November and it’s, it was a very strong statement from Microsoft of how we’re bringing the channel partners into that marketplace journey. [00:03:45] Mira Ayad: With RE Reseller enabled offers, we allow partners to own the private offer that they can extend to their customers on behalf of the SDCs. So kind of bring that scale mechanism for SDCs to access that channel community and for the channel partner to remain the trusted advisor and provide not only marketplace, um, products, but Microsoft services their own professional services. [00:04:12] Mira Ayad: And wrap that and provide a one-stop shop for customers. [00:04:17] Vince Menzione: And it’s really lit up organizations like Ingram. Nicole, I like, it’s been a maybe a minute here, like talking about the evolution of Ingram. ’cause I think back at the old role of the DTI credit, availability of product and delivery, right? Yeah. The kind of the three things. [00:04:34] Nicole Dziedzic: Yeah, and those are still really, really important to the core of how we go to market. ’cause I think we heard yesterday, every dollar of software, uh, requires a dollar of hardware. So it’s not anything that we’re getting away from. But I think, you know, the marketplaces and the automation, and really where we’ve been transforming our business over the last six to 10 years is how do we take some of that transactional work away from our partners? [00:04:57] Nicole Dziedzic: Make it simpler so that you can really focus on more strategic areas. Marketplace has been a, a heavy part of our go-to-market and something that we’ve been embracing for many years now, um, and seen a lot of success in helping the partners on that journey and helping the vendors really accelerate that with the partner community and the end customers. [00:05:15] Nicole Dziedzic: But it’s also really enabled us to look at how do we wanna show up into our partners differently, right? So as we automate our business. Help our partners automate their business. We have the opportunity to upskill our own resources. And so some of the key areas that we’ve really been focused on is our post-sales motions, and how do we really ensure that the partners customers are leveraging the technology, optimizing it, and adopting it in a much faster pace. [00:05:45] Nicole Dziedzic: So that the investments that they’re making are netting an ROIA lot quicker. Those, uh, those have been things that we have accelerated across our vendor stack. Um, and I think it’s gonna become much more important as we continue to see technology evolve, especially around AI and co-pilot’s. A huge part of what we’ve been really focused on for the last year. [00:06:05] Nicole Dziedzic: Um, the biggest thing that we’re really seeing in the market today. Not just within the MSPs, but within our end customers is that they struggle in terms of how they really get the ROI out of it quickly. Um, and so our team is very human first. Uh, we do have digital motions, but really human first to really dive into the different personas. [00:06:25] Nicole Dziedzic: How do we help them attack that from an end customer perspective? How do we really help them drive value out of those solutions? [00:06:32] Vince Menzione: So what does enablement look like for them? [00:06:34] Nicole Dziedzic: Yeah, so, um, I loved the quote, uh, from some of the folks in the last session because it’s really about meeting our customers where they are. [00:06:42] Nicole Dziedzic: And so it is a, I always call it we play in the gray and we love to play in the gray all day. Um, because our partners and our our partners customers wanna interact differently. And so we wanna make sure that we have, um, ways to interact with them across. Stack both from a digital standpoint where you can really drive efficiency through digital messaging and marketing, um, all the way up to high touch. [00:07:03] Nicole Dziedzic: So those larger customers can get, uh, hands-on training and enablement. We can do it on behalf of our partners or with our partners to really drive that into the end customer, and then that enables us to really customize it. So what personas are we going to engage with? What are the key features we’re looking to get out of it? [00:07:20] Nicole Dziedzic: Um, and largely what are the outcomes that that company is driving towards over the next 1, 2, 3 years, so we can always stay ahead of what their needs are. [00:07:29] Vince Menzione: Nice. So Erwin, what is Microsoft doing to enable this distribution channel to be more effective with partners? [00:07:36] Erwin Visser: Yeah. Uh, it’s a great question. And, and Nicole, I I love how you, uh, and, and Ingram is, is kind of really leaning in mm-hmm. [00:07:43] Erwin Visser: In driving these customer outcomes and, and helping your partners that even if needed, kind of working with your partners or stepping in front of your partners to help drive these outcomes. ’cause I, I think that’s, uh, we’re. Uh, it clearly ev you, you need to meet the customer where they is. But, uh, having helping customers adopt ai, adopt these new AI solutions agents, I think that is going to be super important for partners to drive, uh, incremental value and also the ROI for themselves as well as for the, for the customers. [00:08:14] Erwin Visser: But Microsoft is, have we, um, one of the things that we are heavily investing in at this moment is our skills platform, our scaling platform. So we, we, if, if people have followed us, we kind of revamped it in the last three, four months. Uh, and we are really not just investing now heavily in technical skills, but also project readiness skills for partners as well as sales skills. [00:08:37] Erwin Visser: Uh, like how do you sell in this new world of, uh, of ai. So where you can see, uh, uh, incremental, uh, ongoing investment in our scaling platform. Um, the other thing that we’re, we’re really working on at this moment, uh, with our. Tech team is, is building more helping partners to build like standardized service offerings and also understand this what’s, what is the capability they need to be successful in and, and become ed themself. [00:09:05] Erwin Visser: And, and we’re doing that also in partnership with the, with income. So income can use kind of some of these, these frameworks than to, to leverage them for their partners and then help with, uh, with that enablement. [00:09:18] Vince Menzione: So Mira when we think, so we think about it from a couple different lenses here, right? [00:09:22] Vince Menzione: Because we’ve got the Microsoft first party products that are, that are being offered through distribution channel to customers, and then we have what I call third party, right? Mm-hmm. Which is a lot of what the marketplace does. It does both. But I think about the marketplace, I think about ISVs, I think about agentic ai. [00:09:40] Vince Menzione: How do we, how do you bring it all together? [00:09:43] Mira Ayad: Um, the way I think of marketplace, and you and I talked about this before, yes, it’s that intersection where SDCs ISVs services and solutions meet. First party solutions meet professional services provided by system integrator and all wrapped up to provide that complete solution for customers. [00:10:04] Mira Ayad: So marketplace, kind of that perfect intersection for all of those parties to meet, um, from a customer perspective depends on the segment. We all know that marketplace is born and raised to be an enterprise tool. Now we’re seeing more and more s and b customers coming trying to leverage marketplace. [00:10:20] Mira Ayad: Yeah, [00:10:20] Vince Menzione: very much so. [00:10:21] Mira Ayad: So the role of enablement and how we activate the channel to really be front and center, more proactive as they go and talk to their SMB customers. Find the ways to monetize their solutions and their services for the SMB customers so they can adopt that marketplace. Because with everything that’s happening in the industry, one thing we know for sure that marketplace transformed how procurement of software happens. [00:10:46] Mira Ayad: Yes. And it’s here to stay. [00:10:48] Vince Menzione: Very much so. Very much so. And Nicole, I’m interested too on, on this side because we, we have, this is the first year that we’ve invited quite a few MSPs into the room as well. Right. We were very much ISV and reseller and, and SI focused. Uh, this time has changed like no other. [00:11:05] Vince Menzione: Right. We’ve been talking all morning about all this agentic ai. As an as an MSPI, my my sense is like I need to have my hands on the steering wheel for my customer at all times. And how are you thinking through it? How are you working with those organizations on driving some of that? [00:11:22] Nicole Dziedzic: Yeah, so again, it’s about meeting even our partners where they are. [00:11:26] Nicole Dziedzic: And so one of the things that we’ve recently released at Ingram is our MCP server. And so how do we enable our partners to then connect their agent capabilities that they’ve built internally to grab the data from Ingram so that they can interact with us how they want to, you know, we have our platform and, and. [00:11:43] Nicole Dziedzic: We don’t wanna force everybody to go into a platform. And so that server is gonna enable you to build capabilities internally in the tools that you’ve already invested in so that you can, again, refocus your energies and your teams, um, on selling on these new go-to markets that enables you to grab the data that you need and. [00:12:03] Nicole Dziedzic: Essentially a snapshot of your account when you’re buying through distribution, all with a really simple click of a button. I know I, I oversimplify it, but I’m not that technical. Um, but it is really a click of a button. And so as we continue to release capabilities, API feeds, if you’re connected via that server and you have those agent capabilities already internally, then it’s as simple as us just continuing to release and you’ll continue to be able to grab that information. [00:12:28] Vince Menzione: Mira’s gram’s approach, what you’re starting to see across most of the distribution channel. Yeah, [00:12:34] Mira Ayad: more or less, yes. Like we, we’ve seen, we’ve partnering with Ingram on, on multiple fronts. Uh, there’s another feature that we bring and Ingram has been our, uh, partner in crime, which is syndication, which we push the marketplace listings into the Ingram portal to support what Nicole just said. [00:12:52] Mira Ayad: So partners get to use the tools that they are using today. We’re meeting them where they are. We’re not forcing them into one platform over the other. Um, I think enablement. The role of enablement and the distributor as an enabler is going to grow even more. Uh, switching that message of how can you sell a task oriented agent versus a solution [00:13:17] Mira Ayad: Yes. [00:13:17] Mira Ayad: Um, is a, is a game changer. And we also see, I I like to say this, like distribution are now becoming an aggregation and a distributor. Yes. So they get to aggregate all that solution between all hyperscalers marketplaces. And find that core enablement so partners can be a plug and play and use their core competency to sell and be that trusted advisor for their customer instead of wasting time trying to figure out where to get enabled or how to get enabled. [00:13:44] Mira Ayad: Mm-hmm. So absolutely a hundred percent the aligned. [00:13:46] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Enablement seems to be a big theme here, right, Nicole? And, and, and you’ve got some new products is MCP server and. Some of the things you’re doing there as well. [00:13:55] Nicole Dziedzic: Yeah, I would say even above and beyond the, the MCP server for the automation, you know, enablement enable is kind of our core function of our enablement strategy and enable ai, enable MSP are two of the most recent ones that we’ve released to market. [00:14:10] Nicole Dziedzic: Um, one of the things that we’ve really identified. Especially within the M-S-P-S-M-B and mid-market partner community is that there’s still a struggle in what does AI actually mean for my strategy and out to my end customers. And so we’ve created paths to enable our partners, MSPs, their end customers on how do you build that strategy for AI that’s both going to create outcomes for your end customers, um, but also be safe and secure as you kind of bring it to market. [00:14:39] Vince Menzione: Erwin on your side, on the marketing side, and you just shifted roles. You were [00:14:43] Erwin Visser: Yeah. Know. Yeah. Piece. Well, I didn’t forget everything that I did. Okay, good. No, I, it was only last week. Right. I’m, I’m getting older, but I still have a little bit of memory. Last year, uh, the, the, um, yeah, I wanted, uh, react quickly on the, on MSPs, especially think it’s incredible time. [00:14:59] Erwin Visser: And, and, uh, and, and so you, I think most people probably know that Microsoft, this, uh, our fiscal year start on July 1st. So May, uh, uh, April, may up to June is like really our crunch time for planning. So we’re in the middle of it. But, and, and without seeing, like giving you too much like insights or details, but. [00:15:18] Erwin Visser: We, we believe there, uh, is an in significant opportunity, almost like the golden age for MSPs in the next years. [00:15:25] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:15:26] Erwin Visser: Uh, if they are able, the, the partners that are able to embrace ai, and we, we kind of think about it in, in maybe in three different like steps or, or framework of clearly, uh, being a customer, zero. [00:15:41] Erwin Visser: And I assume a lot of people, or a lot of people talked about it in the last day and a half, s

Don’t get left behind in the AI shift! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this critical conversation, Vince Menzione sits down with Shannon Sigmon, Marc Harpster, and Jeff Mesnik to uncover how the rapid pace of change in the Google Cloud Marketplace and AI agent integration is forcing organizations to completely rethink their go-to-market strategies. They break down why traditional three-year business plans are dead, replacing them with agile 100-day sprints to keep up with the shifting ecosystem. The panel reveals that leveraging your Adaptability Quotient (AQ) and turning data patterns into actionable co-sell motions are the only ways to survive the upcoming “agent age” and maintain a competitive edge. https://youtu.be/xIaABKU1jmM Key Takeaways Consistent messaging is required to gather actionable data and build trust with channel partners. Three-to-five-year business plans are obsolete, and leaders must now operate in 100-day sprints to keep pace with hyperscaler changes. Google Cloud Marketplace uniquely supports channel partners by allowing them to own the customer relationship and recognize top-line revenue. The rise of AI agents is shifting discovery away from traditional SEO, requiring ISVs to adapt how they provide access to their tools. Creating interactive content variations from a single asset helps train AI agents to discover and prioritize your solutions. Despite rapid digital transformation, human connection remains the ultimate deciding factor in enterprise software purchases. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Adaptability Quotient, Google Cloud Marketplace, agentic age, co-sell motion, digital sales hub, private offers, propensity to buy, AI pattern analysis, hyperscaler CRM, interactive trivia content, product-led discovery. Transcript Shannon – Marc – Jeff AUDIO Podcast [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: That becomes the core of your data analysis because if you’re not submitting consistent content and submit, you know, consistent information, then you’re not gonna get information back. [00:00:13] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us. The way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:25] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner [00:00:26] Vince Menzione: Podcast. I’m Vince Menzione your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the [00:00:46] Vince Menzione: strategy. [00:00:47] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:57] ——-: We have another incredible group of leaders coming up here and, uh, and friends of ultimate partner and, uh, Susan, do you need me for, okay, good. Come on up. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna invite you up and then have you each. Introduce yourself, uh, to this conversation. Shannon, it has been a great to see you. Yeah, great friend. [00:01:18] ——-: Been in, it was in Boca. Mark. Great to have you. Good to see you, sir. Jeff, great to have you. Uh, this is incredible. I’m, I’m excited for this conversation. So, uh, yeah, we talked about aq. We talked a little bit about AQ in this last session. Don’t, didn’t we? Yeah. [00:01:34] Shannon Sigmon: A little. [00:01:34] Vince Menzione: Why don’t we go, why don’t we have you, I wanna have you each introduce yourself, your role, your company mission, and, and, and everything here. [00:01:40] Vince Menzione: So why don’t we start with Shannon. [00:01:41] Shannon Sigmon: Um, hey, thank you Vince for having us again, um, here in Bellevue. It’s been great to meet with everybody and see some old friends. Uh, I’m at Software One, so Shannon Sigman, um, based on the East Coast, but I work at Software One I’m responsible for. Um, in my sales role, I’m responsible for our channel and digital sales organization in North America. [00:02:00] Shannon Sigmon: And then I also have, um, responsibility supporting Regina Ma and Freddie and our leadership team as the chief of staff. Um, and we’re focused software one, if you haven’t worked with us before, we’re focused on helping, um, helping our customers and partners deliver real financial impact in their business so they can afford some of the, the cool to do some of the cool stuff you were talking about in the earlier session. [00:02:20] Shannon Sigmon: And it’s, for us, it’s really about coming in on the front end and helping, um, our customers and our partners understand what they’re doing in their software stack, their cloud stack, and then how to, um, optimize that, rationalize the strategy and, and the implementation of of solutions. [00:02:36] Vince Menzione: And a global leader in the marketplace in [00:02:38] Shannon Sigmon: That’s right. [00:02:39] Shannon Sigmon: The, the number one Microsofts, um, we [00:02:41] Vince Menzione: used to say re reseller or ls. We used to all these different, [00:02:44] Shannon Sigmon: yeah. We, um, it’s funny, I was speaking last night. We fall into the scale solution provider. We’re d with Google and AWS. But, um, we operate very differently on the, on the North America market as a more of a boutique, uh, personalized experience than what a traditional dity is. [00:02:59] Shannon Sigmon: I’m less about the transaction and more about the impact and the, the outcomes and, and helping partners with their go-to-market strategy. [00:03:07] ——-: Awesome. Yeah. And sitting next to you, Marc I’ll let you introduce yourself ’cause this kind of ties in very nicely in [00:03:13] Marc Harpster: Yeah. [00:03:13] ——-: In terms of the work you do. [00:03:14] Marc Harpster: Uh, thanks Vince. [00:03:15] Marc Harpster: Uh, hi everyone. I’m Mark Harpster. I am part of the Google Cloud Marketplace organization. So, uh, guy who you just heard from on the last panel is my boss. Uh, I run strategic initiatives within the marketplace team. So this includes our channel program. Uh, so everyone who is. Uh, the partners who like to resell, uh, ISV software out our marketplace. [00:03:38] Marc Harpster: Uh, I have a team who works with, uh, all of you, and that includes distribution. Uh, and uh, then I also, we run, um, the, some of our, like the go to market strategic initiatives. So we have a. Uh, customer credit program that ISVs can take advantage of to help incentivize deals going through marketplace, uh, propensity to buy, uh, data that we can share. [00:04:02] Marc Harpster: Mm-hmm. Uh, a number of different programs along those lines. Uh, basically, uh, we’re we’re helping. You know, customers find the solutions that they want to buy and helping them buy from the who they wanna buy from. [00:04:14] ——-: Yeah. And you were out early. I mean, you’ve been in the, the, I I feel like Google was leaned in very early on the channel. [00:04:20] Marc Harpster: Yeah. [00:04:20] ——-: And it was a couple years now, right? [00:04:22] Marc Harpster: Yeah. I joined Google about two and a half years ago. Uh, I was, you know, at, at another, worked for another cloud marketplace before that. So I’ve, I’ve been in the marketplace space for, uh, over a decade now. Uh, I’m really passionate about it. And with the, to touch on your point, Vince, I think the one key advantage of Google is, you know, within the, our channel partners, uh, we have a huge, uh, partner network, uh, of, of, you know, channel resellers and, uh, system integrators. [00:04:52] Marc Harpster: Uh, and we actively want those channel partners to, you know, own the customer relationship, including all of the billing. Uh, channel partners tend to love this because we’re the only cloud marketplace that really supports sort of the ability to recognize top line revenue for the channel partners. Uh, and so that’s been a real, uh, you know, distinguishing factor. [00:05:11] Marc Harpster: And one thing I’m really excited about within our marketplace. [00:05:14] Vince Menzione: You got it right. Awesome, Jeff. Good to see you, sir. [00:05:17] Vince Menzione: Good to see you. Thank you. Thank you for having [00:05:19] Jeff Mesnik: me. Good to have you. [00:05:20] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:05:21] Vince Menzione: Tell us a little bit about your organization, about content amx. [00:05:24] Jeff Mesnik: Well, I’m honored to be here with, uh, these two. Yeah. [00:05:27] Jeff Mesnik: You know, and, and Vince obviously [00:05:29] Vince Menzione: Thank you. [00:05:29] Jeff Mesnik: But you know, our organization is really about coming back, and I’m not trying to plug tackle by you saying this, but we’re doing the blocking and tackling for organizations another. [00:05:40] Vince Menzione: That’s why I named the tackle. [00:05:41] Jeff Mesnik: Yeah, I know. It’s, it’s, it’s part of my every conversation now and I have to think about it, but we basically believe in the idea that trust is starting by consistency and expectation. [00:05:55] Jeff Mesnik: So a few years ago I was listening to, um, an event where Tim Couch and, um, Michelle Ragusa, McBain were talking and they said, partners respond to. You meeting and greet, you know, exceeding expectations. So one of those expectations should be consistent messaging to them and consistent messaging for them to send out to their customers. [00:06:15] Jeff Mesnik: And then the next step is that becomes the core of your data analysis, because if you’re not submitting consistent content and submit, you know, consistent information, then you’re not gonna get information back. So that information back then turns into sales opportunities because you’re not looking at. [00:06:34] Jeff Mesnik: Clicks or having a marketing person say, Hey, you know, this person just stopped by my booth. Or Hey, they downloaded a white paper. It’s patterns using AI to analyze and address and look at patterns and turn those patterns into actions. So, you know, we’ve been talking Shannon and Mark and I about those patterns and how to. [00:06:55] Jeff Mesnik: Respond to them to maybe do a co-sell motion if that’s what’s necessary, or to make sure that the partner is ready for the next step. We’re doing a program for Microsoft. Whoops. So we’re doing a program for Microsoft. Do I still have it? [00:07:11] Marc Harpster: Yeah, you’re [00:07:11] Marc Harpster: good. Um, that en enables the partners to learn about AI and then we can understand where they are in their AI path. [00:07:22] Vince Menzione: Awesome. So Shannon, uh, Regina, man. Freddy. Yeah. Also a great friend of, ultimate Partner. Been on stage, was on stage here a couple years ago. We talked about adaptability quotient. Uh, we, we took that, we took that back. Now we use it all the time. And I, you know, I want, I wanna cover with you what that means to your organization. [00:07:40] Vince Menzione: A lot has changed. [00:07:41] Shannon Sigmon: Yes. Still. Yeah. [00:07:42] Vince Menzione: Still changed. Yeah. And you work with multiple hyperscalers, so take us through like, how, how, how does. What is now Software One used to be crayon, now it’s software one Crayon, or it’s just software one. Now let’s talk about all the change and how you’re absorbing it, and then how are you taking it to market and being successful. [00:08:00] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah, it’s interesting. We spent time, gosh, two, three years ago now, um, talking about adaptability being the next superpower [00:08:07] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:08:07] Shannon Sigmon: Uh, of workforce, right? That it wasn’t just about having the experience, but with the rate at which. The pace at which change was happening, having, uh, uh, employees foundationally focused on curiosity and learning and con constant development. [00:08:23] Shannon Sigmon: Um, and my goodness, uh, this year alone, right? We we’re. We, it’s hard to keep up. Right? So this idea of creating a full three to five year plan, we’re, we’re creating sprints plans. Yes. Right. And sprint strategies. And so I do think when we look at our integration of the two companies as Crayon and Software one come together globally, um, that has been a critical mass. [00:08:47] Shannon Sigmon: Uh, issue for us to overcome, but also to get our employee base one feeling comfortable with the pace of change because it can, for those people who are, are not change agents, it can be really uncomfortable and, and stress inducing. Um, but also giving them space to, to try things, fail fast and learn from it. [00:09:07] Shannon Sigmon: And. Um, it, it, it infuses that adaptability quotient, infuses entrepreneurial spirit within the organization a bit. Um, but it has become, it is the superpower of the next generation is how, how quickly can you adapt to change, but not just adapt to it as it’s coming, but stay ahead of it, um, and stay ahead of what’s happening in the industry through communities like this so that you’re skating towards the puck, not waiting for the puck to hit you in between the eyeballs. [00:09:34] Vince Menzione: Yeah. How long are these sprint. I can’t even imagine doing a three-year plan any, any longer. Right. [00:09:39] Shannon Sigmon: I mean, we, there’s some intentionality behind it for us. So my, um, partner in crime, Sean, uh, er, who leads our rev ops, uh, function in North America, we, we sprint pretty fast. So we do leadership offsite every three months. [00:09:52] Shannon Sigmon: Um, and it’s not like it does, we don’t sit in a meeting conference room like this quite often. There’s. We’re running an Airbnb and we’re living and breathing and talking and tumbling rocks together in a real productive way. Um, and it forces our leadership team to not just work at an operational level, but like really down in the trenches at a personal level together to solve problems for our people. [00:10:15] Shannon Sigmon: For our culture, for our business future. And I think that has helped us stay ahead of what’s coming at us from both the hyperscaler community, from the economy, uh, and global, some of the global trends that we’re seeing. It helps us stay ahead of that. And I mean, as leaders, we can, we can conflict and, and, uh, debate in a closed, safe space to get to work through some of that. [00:10:38] Vince Menzione: Mark, what are you seeing? I mean, we were just talking to D about all the significant advances Yeah. In your organization and you work with all these amazing top resellers in the industry. Mm-hmm. Uh, Tony Voya is an old friend of mine’s. Been on the podcast a hundred times. Yeah. Ran another organization’s one of [00:10:54] Marc Harpster: Yeah. [00:10:54] Vince Menzione: Also one of the large, yeah. [00:10:57] Marc Harpster: Yeah. Tony’s great. Um, it’s interesting you mentioned working in sprints. We, we ourselves are even adapting into sort of the notion of like. What are you doing in the next a hundred days? [00:11:07] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. [00:11:07] Marc Harpster: Right? You can’t, that six months, a year is too long. It’s too long. So, you know, that’s just internally, uh, within Google Cloud. [00:11:14] Marc Harpster: But, uh, our, you know, I see this across, if, if we go back a decade ago, uh, you know, ISVs had to learn how to change to, to just to, to list a PayGo product in a marketplace. [00:11:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Yeah. [00:11:28] Marc Harpster: Right. A whole new business model. Uh, and then, then we. Introduced the notion of like, Hey, it doesn’t have to just be pay, right? [00:11:36] Marc Harpster: It’s, yeah. Now we’re going to introduce the concept of a private offer, right? And how does that work? Right? And so you heard a lot of, uh, insights in the last panel about some of the changes you need to make to your sales organization and how do you adapt to that, right? And then there’s the change of like, well, what about the channel partners? [00:11:52] Marc Harpster: Right? Yeah. So every channel partner. Uh, in that I’ve been working with for the last eight, nine years, make the pivot to like, oh, we still have a place here. We have all these customer relationships and connections and hey, we can sell these things too. Right? But they have to figure out how the channel private offers feature works, right? [00:12:10] Marc Harpster: Um, distribution. Right. Then suddenly we’re, we’re, we’re bringing distributors back into the cloud marketplace world, you know, and they’re actually pushing us for like brand new things, like, Hey, we wanna, we want more APIs, right? And so I, I’ve seen. The entire community of partners. Be, be able to adapt to meet the customer where they are. [00:12:30] Marc Harpster: Right. And, and take advantage of the customer benefits of buying through marketplaces. And so now we’ve got another, another moment of great change, right? As we head kind of into the agent age. And every one of us is gonna have to, to be adaptable again. Yeah. And I think the notion of like. Whatcha gonna do in the next a hundred days? [00:12:47] Marc Harpster: Or like, what, what, what is the first thing that we, what are our priorities? How do we focus on, this is going to be key, right? ISVs need to, to understand, hey, how do, how do agents change the way we, uh, allow customers to access our tools and our software? Right? Uh, the channel needs to then understand like, well, what are we reselling agents? [00:13:07] Marc Harpster: Are we creating our own agents? Yes. Like, how does this change us? Right? And so it’s across the board, uh, and it’s gonna be a really. Fun, you know, rest next few months. [00:13:16] Vince Menzione: What are you seeing with regards to that? I was thinking about that as well. Like does the ISV create the agent or does the, the, the, the channel partner, the reseller, the Gs, I mean the GSIs [00:13:25] Marc Harpster: are involved here as well. [00:13:26] Marc Harpster: Certainly are, are, are, you know, I think DI mentioned this in the last panel. They, they’re, they’re creating agents, uh, you know, all over the place right now. But a lot of ISVs are as well. They recognize that they need to adapt. Right. And so I think we’re getting. Um, we’re getting really good participation, uh, from. [00:13:46] Marc Harpster: All sorts of partners and even, you know, the, the kind of traditional, uh, like what I call a reseller, they’re starting to figure it out as well. Right? Like, do I need to list my own agent? How do I do that? Right. And they’re coming to us seeking some guidance right now. Yeah. Are [00:14:01] Vince Menzione: you? [00:14:01] Shannon Sigmon: Yeah, I mean, I think we look at ourselves as customers. [00:14:03] Shannon Sigmon: You already heard that yesterday. Yeah. A lot on, from some of the Microsoft community. Um, we we’re starting to see pockets and um, we’re, we’re actually running our own company-wide hackathon in June. Um, specifically to intersect with copilot, Gemini, Claude, how do we get our teams on the ground level? Um, I loved what was said earlier, but it’s gotta be a, a bottoms up, tops down approach. [00:14:28] Shannon Sigmon: And the good thing for us is we have leadership support at the top down on, on the tinkering, on the learning, on the implementation. And now we’re working to build the skillset from the bottom up so that we can take some of those use cases to our customers and our partners and, and start to learn and adopt along the way. [00:14:45] Vince Menzione: So Jeff, you’ve been working with channel partners on the marketing side for many years on their go to market strategies. What are you seeing on your side o

Don’t miss the marketplace revolution! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode of the Ultimate Partner Podcast, Vince Menzione sits down with AWS Marketplace leaders George Maroulakos and Arif Razvi to uncover the rapidly shifting ecosystem of technology procurement and partner transformation. They dive deep into the evolution of buyer experiences, the critical necessity of executive alignment, and how agentic AI is redefining software discovery and consumption. If you want to accelerate deal velocity and ensure your business isn’t left behind, this conversation outlines exactly why integrating the AWS Marketplace into your core co-sell motion is no longer optional. https://youtu.be/Avp0sIyxRU8 Key Takeaways Embracing the AWS Marketplace should be viewed as a natural extension of your co-sell motion, not an interrupt-driven exception. Successfully leveraging the marketplace requires top-down executive sponsorship to overcome internal friction across legal, finance, and revenue operations. Partners must prepare for global expansion by ensuring local entities and currencies are wired up to meet buyers where they are. Agentic AI and natural language queries are leveling the playing field for software discovery, moving beyond traditional SEO-driven presence. SaaS pricing models are shifting toward consumption and outcome-based structures, demanding highly detailed product metadata. The speed of deal closure is drastically increased when partners are prepared to transact seamlessly through the marketplace. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags AWS Marketplace, partner transformation, buyer experiences, hyperscalers, co-sell motion, revenue operations, strategic alignment, agentic AI solutions, outcome-based pricing, metadata optimization, software discovery, private offers, global expansion, deal velocity, cloud centers of excellence. Transcript Arif Razvi and George Maroulakos Audio Episode [00:00:00] George Maroulakos: From my perspective, think about marketplace as a why not as opposed to a why. [00:00:06] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:17] Arif Razvi: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. [00:00:22] Arif Razvi: And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, [00:00:26] Vince Menzione: partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:39] Arif Razvi: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. [00:00:44] Arif Razvi: Let’s start. [00:00:48] Vince Menzione: I’m excited to, because we were talking about some of this earlier with Matt, but I thought this would be a great conversation. I’m gonna ask each of you to introduce yourselves, George and Arif, and your roles. ’cause you have two very unique roles. Uh. Contrasting roles, I would call it, within the AWS Marketplace Organization. [00:01:06] George Maroulakos: Yep. Happy to do so. So I think Vince just didn’t wanna say my last name, so that’s why I’m gonna introduce myself. Mayor. Very, very good. So Mayor Laki, George Meki, pleasure to meet. Hey, I can say that, uh, all of those that I haven’t met before, lots of familiar faces as well here. Uh, so it’s really great to see. [00:01:21] George Maroulakos: Uh, I’m part of the AWS Marketplace team and our center of excellence. That focuses on buyer experiences. So like why is a buyer guy here in this partner session? And I think, you know, I’m gonna help to try to bring some perspective around what our buyers see as the value for using marketplace and. [00:01:40] George Maroulakos: Working with all of these great partners that are here in the room and, uh, you know, the experiences that we see in helping to drive, you know, the blood to all organs. I’m using that a lot, Alison, to copyright it. It’s, it was really good. I love that, that analogy. But, um, for, but for both our partners as well as for our customers. [00:01:59] Vince Menzione: That’s awesome. [00:01:59] Arif Razvi: Hey everybody. I’m Arif Roski. I’m based here in New York City, although I’m a Celtics fan. Um, uh, go, go. I, I still supported the Knicks through the championship and I’m very happy for them. So excited to be here. Excited to be among, uh, other channel and alliance leaders. I’ve spent my entire 25 plus career in channels and alliances. [00:02:20] Arif Razvi: The last seven years, uh, on AWS marketplace where I lead, uh, a couple of functions. One is I support all of Matt Ian’s feature launches. So from a go-to market perspective, uh, I support his launches. I also focus on international expansion of marketplace. So, uh, Matt alluded to this earlier. I’ll mention some, I’ll talk about some stuff in a little bit. [00:02:39] Arif Razvi: And then, uh, we do some deep engagements with some of our most strategic partners to help them accelerate and unblock their marketplace business. By embedding a subject matter expert from my team into their organization to really help drive, uh, adoption of marketplace. [00:02:55] Vince Menzione: So important. Both of your roles. [00:02:56] Vince Menzione: By the way, this is standout roles. I, you know, I. I don’t want to get into trouble here. I talk about other hyperscalers, but I said this with Matt on stage earlier. You guys have been at the forefront of driving marketplace in such a strong way, having somebody who’s customer focused, right? And that lens is so important. [00:03:15] Vince Menzione: I don’t feel, I feel like that’s missed so many times. And then you also have. You know, quite a bit of an important role here in terms of what you’re doing in embedding resources. ’cause a lot of times people get lost in the process and it seems to be the, the common currents. So, um, really great both sides of the same equation here, right? [00:03:33] Vince Menzione: Buyer led, partner built, uh, let’s start George here. Um. Let’s talk about how buying has changed. Right. We go back to the early days of marketplace. It felt like it was a listing at first and it started to become important. Organizations like Work Span started to come to fruition and started to drive, at least in my part of the world. [00:03:53] Vince Menzione: And then we started talking a lot more about Marketplace. And of course the, the cus customer commits really started driving things in a different direction. You’ve got the customer, so talk about what your journey’s been like. [00:04:05] George Maroulakos: So I’ve been with Marketplace nine and a half years, which is pretty long time since the beginning of it, and watching the evolution of, of where things have come and where they started. [00:04:15] George Maroulakos: And I remember, uh, I was covering the, the northeast region when I very first started and working with, uh, you know, different enterprise accounts and financial services and, and, and healthcare and life sciences, and talking about this. This creation that occurred called, called AWS Marketplace, and even folks within AWS didn’t really know what that meant or how to talk about it or sell it. [00:04:38] George Maroulakos: So there was this creation of a infield based business development function to help supplement the account teams and the value and the importance of marketplace as a part of a customer’s AWS journey. And when I first started the, the, the highest, uh, or most frequently subscribed to products that existed were. [00:04:57] George Maroulakos: Uh, Amazon machine images a amis and it’s very specifically open source amis. So think of Bantu or Cintas as the predominant things that were being subscribed out of marketplace. So, um, by definition, not really revenue generating. You’re, these are not the a hundred million dollar transactions or the billion dollar club that we talk about today. [00:05:19] George Maroulakos: It was very much helping. The builders go again, go back 10 years, uh, who are just getting started with the cloud and how could they find partner solutions that they trusted or that they felt were secure and helping them to start to build out and migrate their workloads into, into AWS. Um, so I existed before the. [00:05:39] George Maroulakos: Very first private offer was transacted. Nice. Um, there’s actually a, a gentleman towards the back, uh, who helped with one of our very first private offers. I see you back there, Joe. Nice, nice. Um, so we, we worked on, uh, uh, uh, really big transaction with, uh, with, at the time AppDynamics, uh, and, and helping to get. [00:05:58] George Maroulakos: You know, a customer really up and running with their implementation that, so watching over the 10 years from, you know, the builder mentality of, of getting started with the cloud to really embracing all kinds of partner based, um, solutions that go along with AWS. It’s really been, uh, you know, a, a rocket ship you referenced earlier, moving to the top right quadrant, if we want to use the, the Gartner analogy, and I think we’re at another. [00:06:24] George Maroulakos: Inflection point because with what’s going on with Ag agentic solutions, the way that our customers are finding and discovering different partner solutions is better than ever I would think. And I think it gives much more of a equal opportunity in playing field for all partners of all shapes and sizes because you’re not driving your presence based on SEO or whether or not you have the best Google search results. [00:06:53] George Maroulakos: With AgTech and how you differentiate your solutions, you’re gonna be able to really get yourself in front of more customers more quickly. And as Matt talked about earlier, the, the, the really big penetration that we’ve seen thus far is real, is on the discovery piece, the, the research area, the pre-purchase activity, so validate what’s available. [00:07:13] George Maroulakos: So I think marketplace has really evolved over the 10 year, nine and a half years-ish that I’ve been there. And I think it’s gonna continue to change here in the coming months ahead. Yeah. [00:07:23] Vince Menzione: Any predictions? [00:07:25] George Maroulakos: Yeah, I, I think, you know, the, I, the, the importance of marketplaces is only going to continue to grow. [00:07:32] George Maroulakos: Uh, and I think we’re going to see, you know, even more innovation and expectation from our customers on being able to find the right solutions and being able to procure and deploy them as quickly as possible. [00:07:44] Vince Menzione: Nice. Arif, from your side. Partner transformation. So, you know, embedding resources with the partners. [00:07:51] Vince Menzione: Right. So you basically help kickstart a lot of the, the efforts, right? George? George is looking at it from the customer side, and then you’re kick-starting it on the partner side. [00:08:00] Arif Razvi: Yeah. Either kickstarting it, uh, on the initial stages with a strategic partner. Yeah. Or accelerating their adoption of something that’s already there. [00:08:07] Arif Razvi: Right. So what we’re seeing, what I’m seeing a lot of more recently is partners who say, I didn’t know you had capabilities for us to sell into Korea or Japan, or we just, we just launched India. Yep. Matt alluded to this easier, uh, earlier that we’re making it easier for partners to expand globally. And now partners are realizing, wait a minute, I can match my. [00:08:26] Arif Razvi: Uh, my business processes on marketplace, so revenue recognition, tax collection, locally, local invoices, and now they’re starting to set up multiple entities outside the US to meet those buyers, uh, where they are. [00:08:41] Vince Menzione: Nice. And you mentioned having these resources. How do you determine who gets resources and who? [00:08:47] Arif Razvi: Well, there’s, uh, staging and there’s, uh, there’s qualification mechanisms we use. We work with the PDMs for the partners. So any PDM, uh, any pd DM managed partner can be nominated for, uh, what, what we call a compensation. [00:08:59] Vince Menzione: So you’re overlaying that organization sense. [00:09:00] Arif Razvi: We’re overlaying the PDs. We’re not replacing, we’re only doing time bound sprints to unlock very specific activities. [00:09:05] Arif Razvi: Very [00:09:06] Vince Menzione: cool. So it’s not a poll. Yeah. Cool. You’re not, you’re not there forever. [00:09:08] Arif Razvi: No. [00:09:08] Vince Menzione: You’re there to get the job done. We [00:09:09] Arif Razvi: did that before. Uh, yeah, we’re, we’re doing short sprints now. [00:09:12] Vince Menzione: Yep. Let’s talk about how the buyers are using marketplace. You’ve done some really in, we talked about this earlier with Matt, but we’ve talked about some of the innovative things you’ve done. [00:09:21] Vince Menzione: You know, being, being able to embed into a website and in the storefronts. All these things seem to be unique to AWS. Talk to us about how the buyers are using the marketplace today. And [00:09:31] George Maroulakos: yeah, I think, you know, Matt talked about earlier the. Pre the, the preconception around why customers use marketplaces for the financial incentives, the, the financial benefits that go along with it, whether it’s direct incentives that are associated with the individual product that’s out there, or the Association of Marketplace to our private pricing agreements and the ability for. [00:09:55] George Maroulakos: Transactions that occur in marketplace to count towards those commits. Um, I’m gonna amplify a, a particular point that Matt made, uh, in his talk that, you know, we have many more customers who do not have PPAs with AWS than those that do. And the volume of transactions that take place in marketplace. [00:10:11] George Maroulakos: Dwarf, uh, in volume from those that, uh, are occur from our PPA customers. So yes, there are very large transactions that occur and there is Ben financial benefit that goes along with it. But there’s many other value points that our customers find from discovery. From ease of use, from consolidated billing, from post-purchase, um, you know, management and governance that goes along with it, and reconciliation that’s available, that’s, that exists. [00:10:36] George Maroulakos: Um, you mentioned storefronts. I’m really excited. That was one of the most exciting launches. That’s why I reminded him when he was talking about it, uh, around, you know, what that means. And it’s both a presence for, um, our partners and being able to create their own storefronts on behalf of, of customers or within their own property, but also for our buyers directly too. [00:10:54] George Maroulakos: Take that next generation of something that was previously, you know, our private marketplace and curate a catalog that is very specific and intentional for the things that they’re interested to innovate with and the partners that they’re interested in using. And so I think meeting our customers where they’re at. [00:11:10] George Maroulakos: And being, you know, marketplace anywhere and everywhere is I think really important for our customers. And then the other aspect, you know, in terms of how our customers use marketplace, there’s more than one persona at our customer that we need to be, be, be aligning with. Right. Interesting. We typically talk about procurement and the value points that procurement find in marketplace, but just as important as, as the technologists. [00:11:32] George Maroulakos: It’s the Cloud centers of Excellence. It’s the innovators who are looking for those business applications or those infrastructure solutions that exist and making sure that we have the right things from the right partners available to them. So we see value all over the place with our customers and how they inter interface with [00:11:47] Vince Menzione: more. [00:11:47] Vince Menzione: You brought up something really interesting, insightful, is the fact that all the different personas in the organization that are touching the marketplace, right? [00:11:54] George Maroulakos: And it’s at different points of the journey, right? Yeah. So while there may be early discovery and research and experimentation going on from, you know, the technologists or, or, or the, or the, the, the business application owners, um, as it progresses through the, the, the. [00:12:09] George Maroulakos: The opportunity lifecycle procurement and sourcing and legal, and the shared services then become a more important part of, of making sure that we get those opportunities closed and launched. [00:12:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah, and that was one of the things we were talking about earlier is the fact that how, how, uh, it, it, the work arduous it could be. [00:12:25] Vince Menzione: To go through that whole process at a customer side. Right? ’cause they have to. [00:12:29] George Maroulakos: It is, and and you know, I think when Cloud first got started, it was quite scary for procurement, right? It became another version of Shadow it. And we were seeing things that were getting purchased on P cards because they could quickly stand up infrastructure versus waiting for the IT team to do it. [00:12:44] George Maroulakos: And so now you introduce all of these other things that. Procurement kept near and dear to their heart, and here comes another wave of, is this truly positive disruption? Is it going to affect what’s, what I’m doing affect really my goals and objectives of supporting the company. And as you, you know, you continue to express the value of marketplace, they start to see, hey, this is actually very complimentary and helped me can get better control and governance in a way that I. [00:13:11] George Maroulakos: Perhaps didn’t have before with what was going on inside the cloud. [00:13:15] Vince Menzione: So this is a question for both of you actually, but I was thinking about these partners in the room and what did they get wrong? Like what are they doing? Like what are the things we always talk about, things that they’re doing right? [00:13:26] Vince Menzione: We’re having the happy talk about all the great success that’s been going on, but what is your advice to partners that maybe are not getting it right? Like what, what, what are the things you see that. The easy stumbling blocks that could be fixed. [00:13:38] Arif Razvi: Yeah. Well, probably the easiest is, uh, waiting to talk about marketplace at the last minute and not making it part of the full commercial journey [00:13:45] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:13:45] Arif Razvi: That the sellers will go through. Right. So, um, but that includes being able to have those internal conversations from the executive level, getting that executive sponsorship from marketplace upfront. That filters down through the rest of the organization. So you’ve gotta get rev ops teams, finance, legal, you know, the marketplace terms, the, the standard, uh, contract that goes into your listing has to be approved by legal. [00:14:08] Arif Razvi: Uh, and then you get down to the sales teams, making sure that you’re not penalizing sales teams for doing transactions on marketplace, which will create friction, then meeting buyers where they are, right? So local entities, local currency, um, having all that wired up. Uh, I met with a, a partner yesterday at Summit who is literally wiring up 10 new regions, 10 new entities in 10 new locations on marketplace in advance of what they know is a

Don’t miss this massive channel shift! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode of the Ultimate Partner Podcast, host Vince Menzione sits down with Alexandra Zagury, Corporate Vice President of Channels at Microsoft, to explore ecosystem shifts, partner-led growth, and AI transformation. https://youtu.be/9jrSGX5bM90 Key Takeaways Microsoft’s telemetry and propensity data offer unprecedented insights that many partners are currently failing to unlock. Partners must evolve past basic licensing models and build comprehensive managed service stacks across the entire customer lifecycle. Establishing an AI Center of Excellence on the Microsoft platform is critical for capturing future market share and technical intensity. The modern tech ecosystem demands a shift from product-led growth to true partner-led growth driven by multi-partner collaboration. Renewal engines targeting 110% to 125% retention require an always-on motion starting well in advance of contract expiration. Investing in sales readiness and precision velocity training ensures that end sellers can effectively articulate the value of the Microsoft platform. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Microsoft, telemetry, Hyperscalers, channel, small medium enterprise, telcos, hosters, SSPs, Cisco, CSP, agentic GTM, propensity data, SPX, PUPP, cloud descent, MSPs, managed XDR, Agent 365, skilling, co-sell, renewals, flywheel, AI Center of Excellence, enterprise Transcript Alexandra Zagury Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Alexandra Zagury: One of the things that I think is the best kept secret at Microsoft is the telemetry that we offer our partners. [00:00:08] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. [00:00:22] Vince Menzione: I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology. Partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:41] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s [00:00:46] Guest: start. [00:00:50] Vince Menzione: I am thrilled because I get to have a leader that is somewhat new in role and is the corporate vice president of channels for Microsoft. And so Alex is here to, is joining us for the first time at Ultimate Partner. I’m thrilled to have you. Thank, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Welcome, welcome. [00:01:14] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Thank you. You and I are gonna be in the center seat in the middle. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We wanna. So I am thrilled. Um, you’re relatively new in your role at Microsoft. [00:01:24] Alexandra Zagury: Seven months. [00:01:25] Vince Menzione: Seven months, [00:01:26] Alexandra Zagury: yes. [00:01:26] Vince Menzione: Wow. That’s a, that’s a crazy. So take us through, ’cause for those who don’t know you, but a little bit of an introduction, your title, your role, CVP, and uh, your remit. [00:01:37] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about that and what your organization is focused in, in your mission. Yeah. [00:01:41] Alexandra Zagury: So hi everybody. Really exciting to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Vince. I always love to be with partners and with the channel. So my, I came to Microsoft to lead a new role, which we call Global Channel Sales, and it was part of the strategy of Microsoft to really bet on the growth in small, medium enterprise. [00:02:04] Alexandra Zagury: With the channel partner led growth. So my remit is really to lead our managed partners, but also to lead the strategy when it comes to the channel. Very specifically looking at the telcos, the distributors, the hosters. The sis and, uh, the SSPs of course. And, and so my role can be summarized in one word growth, and that’s what we do every single day is map our ambition to your ambition and figure out how we actually conquer this age of ai. [00:02:40] Vince Menzione: It’s a pretty big role. It’s a pretty, you know, I forgot about hosts ’cause we don’t, we don’t talk about them as much these days in the cloud. [00:02:48] Alexandra Zagury: Still a lot [00:02:48] Vince Menzione: of opportunity. You’ve got, and you’ve got all the telcos as well, which are pretty significant organizations, right? Lumen Field, just around the corner. [00:02:56] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. Right up the. Right up, I said across the river, but it’s across the pond in Seattle. And, uh, what does that look like from an organization perspective in terms of dollars? Are you allowed to disclose numbers? [00:03:08] Alexandra Zagury: No, we [00:03:08] Vince Menzione: don’t talk numbers. Okay. And, but you have a long career in this type of environment, in this role. [00:03:15] Vince Menzione: 10 years at Cisco, right? [00:03:17] Alexandra Zagury: Mm-hmm. [00:03:17] Vince Menzione: Tell us a little bit more about your background, [00:03:18] Alexandra Zagury: please. Yeah, sure. Um, well I started out as a, a sales leader. Uh, actually I started out in banking, if you wanna go all the way back. Um, but I fell in love with the channel actually, when I was at Yahoo, believe it or not. Wow. [00:03:32] Alexandra Zagury: Because it was the first interact sales model that I had the privilege to operate in, and I really understood. Stood the power of going through a channel. And then I was at Blackberry where I, I, I also, um, well had various sales leadership roles, but our model was all through, was all through the channel. [00:03:51] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. Um, some startups and then help [00:03:54] Vince Menzione: in those days too, right? [00:03:55] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah. It was all sps and I learned from Jim Balze the channel fundamentals. So, um, and then ended up, of course, at Cisco the last. Nearly 11 years, which I think is also one of the greatest channel companies. Yes. And really has thrived in a partner, partner led growth, and in a partner led model. [00:04:12] Alexandra Zagury: And so when, when Microsoft called, I mean, this was just the opportunity of a lifetime. To lead the channel during an era where we’re all getting disrupted, we’re all having to blueprint new systems, new ways of working, where go to market is getting identified, and we’re all having to figure out how to become customer zero ourselves, but then also how to go to market. [00:04:36] Alexandra Zagury: With, with agents. And so this was the, the most exciting time that I could think of to join the Microsoft ecosystem and really take us to the next level. [00:04:44] Vince Menzione: Well, your background is perfect for this. I, I, Rodney Clark is a friend, has been a guest on the podcast and in, in the studio, and I think of Cisco is the quintessential channel company. [00:04:56] Vince Menzione: Like when I think about how channel got created and how it worked well, it was always Cisco that did it. So give us like your perspective now, like seven plus months and like how does this feel like you’ve You’ve got a big remit and, uh, various, uh, routes to market. We’ll call them, uh, channels to market. [00:05:14] Vince Menzione: So take us through a little bit of that, like Yeah, sure. [00:05:16] Alexandra Zagury: Describe [00:05:16] Vince Menzione: the transition, what it’s been like [00:05:18] Alexandra Zagury: for you. So one of the things we’re focused on is supporting the channel through the transformation, and we look at it in a couple of lenses. The first lens is really helping the channel become customer zero. [00:05:29] Alexandra Zagury: We really believe that the partners that invest in. Actually identifying their own processes and their own go go to market are the channels, are are the partners that it can actually win because if you are using it, you’re gonna be able to sell it. The second layer is all about technical intensity, and I’m very passionate about this because I see it from two lenses. [00:05:51] Alexandra Zagury: One is. I would like each and every of our partners to lead in building an AI Center of Excellence based on the Microsoft platform. It is a unique opportunity. I can give you lots of numbers, right? We’ve all heard about the trillions of agents that are gonna be here by 2030. We’ve all heard about the tam. [00:06:12] Alexandra Zagury: I mean, our TAM is going from 777. Million to over a billion, uh, to over a trillion. I, it’s, the numbers are just enormous, insane, right? Over half a billion of customers in our base that are using, that are, that are based already on the Microsoft platform. So all the goodness of our IU IQ platform can be unlocked with all the services that the partners can build. [00:06:36] Alexandra Zagury: So investing in that technical skilling and building those practices are gonna be, is gonna be essential. The third part. The third pillar is all about ag agentic, GTM. So once you’re actually using, uh, the Microsoft platform, you’re gonna have to reimagine all your business’s pro processes, your sales processes, and the more that you are integrated into how we do, how we do things. [00:07:00] Alexandra Zagury: One of the things that I think is the best kept secret at Microsoft is the telemetry that we offer our partners. Yeah. I mean, it’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen the quality of propensity data. And now I’m gonna give you the ABCs, which is please, A SPX, which is where we get all our copilot data, PUPP, which is our proposal upsell, uh, planner, right, cloud descent, where you can actually get your next action directly to your sellers. [00:07:27] Alexandra Zagury: There is just so much goodness that we give, which is part of our, our investment in partners. Which takes me to the fourth pillar, and that is all about value alignment and one of the things that I’m very focused and I bring with me from, from Cisco and the work that I did with MSPs is really thinking through what is that value exchange between us and the partner. [00:07:49] Alexandra Zagury: I believe that I’m in the business of earning your trust. Earning your preference. And, and, and we do that by really mapping that value alignment. So not just, one of the things that the whole industry has copied from Microsoft is really looking at our incentives across the customer lifecycle. Yes. So really mapping the value alignment across the customer lifecycle, not just at the point of the deal. [00:08:13] Alexandra Zagury: ’cause that was the whole purpose of CSP. That’s right. The investments we make in tele telemetry, the investments we make in our go-to-market assets and having those bi-directional feedback loops so that we can be continuously improving. So those are sort of the things that I’m thinking about every day. [00:08:29] Alexandra Zagury: There’s a couple of others as we lead and support you in this transformation. ’cause I think of my job as to supporting and driving growth with you so that we have that joint ambition. But also supporting the transformation that both of us are on this journey. [00:08:44] Vince Menzione: And Microsoft was the first with Jay McBain was with us yesterday, and we talked, we’ve talked about this before, but you were the first company to take and look, get rid of the old metal systems, right? [00:08:55] Vince Menzione: The bronze, silver, gold, mm-hmm. And move to basically a point system for partners so that they can come at it from a kind of a global perspective on how they drive success. What was, um, what did you learn about this partner community, your first months that you didn’t expect? [00:09:12] Alexandra Zagury: Can I say something controversial? [00:09:14] Vince Menzione: Absolutely. Okay. [00:09:14] Alexandra Zagury: I love, [00:09:14] Vince Menzione: we love controversial, [00:09:15] Alexandra Zagury: so I think one of the things that I was surprised was that I didn’t see all the partners really unlocking the value of CSP. Yeah. What do I mean by that? When Microsoft moved to the Point System, and I was on the other side, really, I was so jealous of CSP when I was running managed services. [00:09:34] Alexandra Zagury: Here’s an offer that is for partners, for Partner that gives you that initial. Guarantee in terms of the margin that helps you throughout the customer life cycle with all the incentives and, and programs that we have. And I didn’t see, I mean there are some partners, but I was surprised not seeing more partners really building their value stack and their services across the lifecycle. [00:09:59] Alexandra Zagury: And I think there’s such a great opportunity now to do that. That was one of the most surprising things I thought. Oh my gosh, there must be so many, so many services stack, so many people really unlocking, unlocking that, that value. That was a, that was a little bit surprising. [00:10:14] Vince Menzione: Why? Why do you suppose, why do you suppose that was happening? [00:10:17] Alexandra Zagury: I think some of the things that we were listening here, there’s some, sometimes complexity. There are things that we still have to. Get better on, and I’m one of the first ones to say that like our partner experience, we have, um, you know, a lot of focus right now on partner center and ensuring that we’re identifying it. [00:10:36] Alexandra Zagury: I don’t know if I can say it, but, you know, one of the things that we’re looking at is replicating internally. We have Agent J. That supports our sellers through the sales process. Nice. We’re looking at having something similar for our partners. Very cool. Getting some claps there. So, yeah, so, uh, I think, you know, that I, some, there are some lockers that we, we have to acknowledge a lot of them are operational and comes with being a 50-year-old company. [00:11:02] Vince Menzione: I, I’ll give you my perspective too. I wanna get your thoughts on this. ’cause I got to, I’ve gotten to know this MSP community, which is a, you mentioned managed services and that, um, I think that some of them, well, I think Microsoft is leaning in, in a much bigger way. Um, we had Jose on stage yesterday and just the, the energy around the room, there he is, he’s back here. [00:11:23] Vince Menzione: The energy in the room around the MSP community is palpable and it maybe it wasn’t there a few years ago. Maybe some people got off the bus, so to speak, like they weren’t really paying attention mm-hmm. To all the change and all the investments. That you men, you’re mentioning or being made to support this, would you, what would you say about that? [00:11:42] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah, I’d say that that that is correct, but I’d also say that what I learned, you know, leading MSP at Cisco was that. All the stars have to be aligned, right? And if one thing is not right, if you don’t have product market fit, if you, if you, if you don’t have a good way to, uh, consolidate your offer, if you don’t have that investment in practice development, like there’s a series of things that we need to get right. [00:12:07] Alexandra Zagury: And I think Jose and I spent a lot of time thinking through those things and we’re, we’re ready to, to welcome the community and specifically around security. I mean, that was the second thing that I was really surprised because I lost so many deals on the other side to Microsoft, and I was like, and then I come on this side and I’m like, there’s all this opportunity everywhere. [00:12:28] Alexandra Zagury: I look underneath this chair, this opportunity, and I’m like, why are people not going after it? There is the opportunity to build managed XDR solutions, the opportunity to reinvent the song. There’s, there’s just so much opportunity and I think people get so stuck in the. Just thinking of it from a licensing model and not thinking it from the, the full on end-to-end value that you can then unlock through the best licensing model on the planet. [00:12:55] Alexandra Zagury: And so, look, we’re here, we’re, we’re ready to talk to all of you and, and really figure this out ’cause we are gonna place really bet big bets next year on ensuring that we’re growing with the MSP community. [00:13:08] Vince Menzione: So what are you personally focused on in changing Microsoft to drive this. [00:13:13] Alexandra Zagury: Well, uh, I don’t know. [00:13:14] Alexandra Zagury: Changing is a, is a, is a big word. Well, I like evolution, change, [00:13:17] Vince Menzione: evolution, evolving. [00:13:18] Alexandra Zagury: You know, I [00:13:19] Vince Menzione: transition. [00:13:21] Alexandra Zagury: I think there is, there is a couple of things that I’ll say that one of the things that I, I’m really focused on right now, the first one is skilling. We’re at a time of such transformation. That investing in skilling, and if you look at our skilling model, it has four pillars. [00:13:37] Alexandra Zagury: The first pillar we’re best in class, in which is certification specializations, and making sure that our ecosystem is certified to go to market. The second one, which we call project ready. It’s sort of how we help you, uh, technically skill the folks that sit in your practices. And there’s more work to do there, and there’s more that you can learn about how we can actually help you. [00:13:59] Alexandra Zagury: And then the middle part I’m obsessed with right now, which is sales ready and tech sales ready. So it is ensuring, because AI is new for everybody. Yes. It’s a muscle, it is a proposition that you have to sell it’s value that you’re selling. I, I love what the gentleman from Lenovo was talking about. It’s, it’s that CSB always on motion. [00:14:21] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. And so really getting very crisp to the end seller at the, at the reseller. For example, at the end, seller at the partner about why Microsoft. Why now, how do I sell and how do I win? And giving them the assets, the competitive battle cards, the, the, the ability to end objection handling all these. Great, we have them. [00:14:45] Alexandra Zagury: I mean, the amount of content we have, but it’s about doing it at what I call precision velocity. [00:14:51] Vince Menzione: Precision [00:14:51] Alexandra Zagury: velocity, right? Which is this concept of how do we get very precise at a persona level. So that we get the velocity of impact. And so I’m, I’m very obsessed with that right now. And there’s two other things I’m very obsessed with, right? [00:15:04] Alexandra Zagury: The other one is this practice building, ensuring that we are together building these AI centers of excellence, um, especially for all our managed partners. This is something that I’ve put on, uh, every single PDM in our org is gonna, is gonna be talking about that. And then the third one is one that I find super interesting, which I think all of us. [00:15:25] Alexandra Zagury: Have a lot of work to do, which is partner to partner. [00:15:29] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:15:29] Alexandra Zagury: If we look at a customer outcome, thank you. A customer outcome is built of many partners, right? There’s so many different touch points. I think some folks talk about seven partners in, in a customer outcome, and so how do we actually. Use agents, use agent solutions to suddenly unlock this opportunity because most of the time you’ll see an SSP with an si, maybe an ISV in the middle of a transaction to deliver on that customer outcome. [00:16:04] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. So what can we Microsoft do? And I’d love ideas, right? I haven’t cracked this. I don’t think the indus

Don’t miss the AI partnership revolution Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode, Vince Menzione sits down with Amit Sinha from WorkSpan and Marc Monday from ServiceNow to dissect the rapid evolution of AI-native partnerships and the shifting dynamics of the channel ecosystem. They explore how the hyperscaler co-sell model has transformed into a complex strategy of asymmetrical collaboration that demands unprecedented speed, simplicity, and scale from publishers. By integrating AI agents to orchestrate workflows, manage high-risk renewals, and automate low-dollar deals, companies can activate their sellers and drive explosive, exponential growth in their partner programs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP4cFBcCI9Q Key Takeaways The partner channel is no longer just a piece of the strategy; it is the entire strategy for winning in 2026. Modern co-selling is an asymmetrical collaboration where publishers must often do more than fifty percent of the heavy lifting. Implementing AI agents within partnerships can lead to massive revenue impacts, such as a 24% higher lift on renewals for companies like Boomi. True scaling requires moving beyond traditional time-and-materials consulting toward outcome-based frameworks for customers. Activating sellers through continuous AI-driven account orchestration is the ultimate key to unlocking exponential ecosystem growth. The market is moving faster than ever, necessitating that partner enablement and roadmaps shift to agile, sprint-based cycles rather than long-term rigid plans. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags AI native, ecosystem shifting, hyperscalers, Work Span, ServiceNow, lifecycle incentives, cloud native, consumption led, DocuSign, Gong, Boomi, workflow orchestration, asymmetrical collaboration, CRM integration, marketplace private offers, high propensity, seller activation, agentic solution, outcome based consulting, LLM control tower. Transcript Amit Sinha and Marc Monday Audio Episode [00:00:00] Marc Monday: We have to be soup drop dead simple and we’re gonna talk about that nice. In this world. It has to be simple. Even though under the covers it’s very complicated, [00:00:10] Vince Menzione: you can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us. The way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:43] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room [00:00:46] Marc Monday: changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:52] Vince Menzione: And, uh, two incredible friends up on, uh, up on stage. But I think I’m just gonna have my, one of my first friends come up. Amit Sinha from Work Span, a great, great friend and supporter. We’ve been together since the beginning, since the very first ultimate partner in Dallas when we commandeered Microsoft facility. [00:01:12] Amit Sinha: Yeah, [00:01:12] Vince Menzione: you have a little bit that you’re gonna share first and then we’re all gonna come join you. [00:01:16] Amit Sinha: Absolutely. And [00:01:17] Vince Menzione: then we’re gonna have my other great friend, mark Monday on us on stage with us as well. So yeah, [00:01:21] Amit Sinha: what a privilege. Uh, what a privilege. Vince, you do an amazing job as a community and, uh, incredible. [00:01:27] Amit Sinha: Shout out to Alexandra. Uh, we work together at Cisco talking about lifecycle incentives across the whole lifecycle. So amazing work done there as well. So. Very quickly, I’m gonna talk to you about AI native partnerships. A quick motivation. That’s me. Of course, we are using Nano banana to cover that. [00:01:45] Amit Sinha: That’s me looking up a Yellow Pages. I will date myself. That’s, uh, McDonald’s coming to India and me looking up, uh, the nearest McDonald’s, right? And this is me now booking Uber Eats Ma and I had this real experience yesterday night. I flew in from Sapphire in Orlando and I was hungry. Ma said, let’s, let’s get Uber Eats. [00:02:06] Amit Sinha: And we had a great. De this is digital native, right? We had no idea the world would transform this way, but completely new ways of working. Okay. Um, and, uh, another great experience that Mike, my co-founder and CEO seated the back half, I spent a decade at SAP, uh, doing hana, which was a database product, but it was on premise. [00:02:28] Amit Sinha: We had these racks and our whole gig was actually take an amazing HANA database with this server mounted, deployed. Wow. The CIO and the CFO, that this is the most amazing thing. And they would not say, Hey, you can’t take that box away, because it’s such a good insight that I get for my, uh, analytics product, right. [00:02:47] Amit Sinha: So that’s the old way. And look at us. We are all cloud native, right? Cloud has gotten to a place where it’s not just about infrastructure, running things and meters and stuff like that in a scalable way. It is a also source of innovation. New capability, new business model, consumption led business model. [00:03:07] Amit Sinha: Whole new way of working, right? So this comes to the new world now, what does AI need to look like? We heard all the amazing speakers talk about, uh, you know, the promise of ai, right? But you have a choice. Uh, you have a choice to do it yourself or, uh, especially as partnership professionals, right? When you do it yourself, you have this chat bots and stuff that you get from all the major. [00:03:33] Amit Sinha: You can always get more productive, but that’s about half an hour saved. The bar is too low there. So this is an amazing piece of, uh, research put together by all the experts. Vince, thank you for doing that. Uh, we had Jay McBain lend his voice as well. We had Rob Moyer with all his, uh, decades of, you know, insight and wisdom as to what would the future with AI look like, uh, encapsulate in that. [00:03:57] Amit Sinha: So go ahead, take a picture. Uh, this is not gated. Um, beautiful piece of content has also new insights from leading firms. AI native, I would dare say frontier firms who are like DocuSign or Gong who are really pioneering AI native partnerships, Boomi, and how they’re powering their renewal business case across AWS Google and Microsoft Marketplaces. [00:04:21] Amit Sinha: Uh, this really talks about that. And here, uh, this is the thought leadership that we bring to the table. And again, this is not a vendor pitch. This is, you know, as you elevate from the low bar about making yourself productive where you’re cut and paste, uh, into a chatbot, your context so that you can get a better co-sell email out there. [00:04:40] Amit Sinha: You DIY, this thing. But if you think of working with works span, these are three things that you should think about. First is imagine instead of cut and paste, you have your entire partnership context right there. And because the context is there, the right better together story, the right case study, the right partnership documents, the right opportunity and accounts that intelligence not only informs you, but also your team in a, in an extended way, and even your partnership in an extended way that’s fully automated. [00:05:13] Amit Sinha: Second is it’s not just informing you or sensing you, it is also acting. And I think this is where there are, you know, death by a thousand cuts if happening in the world where all this time gets taken up, right? But if you have an agent that scales in ly, whether you are big mature partnership, you got lots and lots of accounts and opportunities to cover, the agent can do that. [00:05:36] Amit Sinha: Or if you’re a new partnership, how do you get to market quickly? With the right assets, the right get to market content. This can work both ways. And lastly, how do you secure this partnership is done in trust. So you should have an agent for every partnership, uniquely your partnership with Microsoft, your partnership with ServiceNow, your partnership with uh, AWS and Google. [00:05:59] Amit Sinha: They all get a different agent. And the point here is these agents can work in a circle of trust and the boundary that gets established. So via work span, come talk to us outside. And with that, Vince, let’s uh, bring Mark along. Come on, mark. [00:06:17] Vince Menzione: Alright. I am gonna have you and then Mark, uh, yeah. Want mark in the middle? [00:06:22] Marc Monday: Oh, uh oh. [00:06:24] Vince Menzione: So, uh, let me move over so I get back to the picture slide. Look at those two handsome gentlemen up there. Uh, thrilled to have you Mark as well. Uh, for those of you who don’t, because you’ve been, you were just in Boca with us this Yeah. This winter. [00:06:39] Marc Monday: That’s right. [00:06:40] Vince Menzione: And, uh, tell us about your new role at ServiceNow. [00:06:43] Marc Monday: Well, I have the absolute privilege of leading the partner channel at ServiceNow. Yeah. Um, it’s comprised of our partner programs, our program gives and gets, and importantly our five routes to market, our consulting and implementation partners, our resell partners, our service provider partners, our hyperscaler partners, and importantly our build partners. [00:07:03] Vince Menzione: I love it. I love it. So let’s talk about the partner programs and why they’re so critical to ServiceNow right now. [00:07:08] Marc Monday: I think in this world scale is everything, and so this profession has always been a bit mercurial and a little bit of a black box for organizations. What does the partner team do? What does that look like? [00:07:21] Marc Monday: But what we have to continue to do is explain, this is your force multiplier. Working together in collaboration helps you scale beyond your individual numbers. And that’s really the thing that we’re focused on is how do we drive that? And I have three big things that we have to focus on is we have to be sup, drop dead simple, and we’re gonna talk about that [00:07:40] Vince Menzione: nice. [00:07:41] Marc Monday: In this world, it has to be simple. Even though under the covers it’s very complicated. We have to be incredibly fast. Agility is the key in this very moment. And then as I said, with that becomes the scaling element and the force multiplier. [00:07:56] Vince Menzione: And you have spent many, you, well, we both worked at Microsoft together. [00:07:59] Vince Menzione: It’s [00:07:59] Marc Monday: true. [00:07:59] Amit Sinha: Way back way. [00:08:00] Marc Monday: I feel like you’re punking me having me right before lunch. Like I remember back at Microsoft, you did something to me, so I’m gonna have you right before lunch. [00:08:07] Vince Menzione: It’s, no, it’s really terrific to have you. But, uh, so yeah, you, you mentioned about like the change and the specificity and the clarity around it. [00:08:16] Vince Menzione: Amme you have, uh, broken the model, so to speak, working with ServiceNow, right? Yeah. You went from being a traditional. I’ll call it co-sell Engine Marketplace Company. Uh, tell us, tell us, tell us about the innovation that’s going on in the room. We’re working with ServiceNow. [00:08:31] Amit Sinha: Absolutely. Uh, when you think of co-sell, the first mine goes to just co-sell with the hyperscalers, right? [00:08:36] Amit Sinha: Because they kind of pioneered and started this in a unique way. We, of course, got started with Microsoft eight years ago, doing not just co-sell and P two P, but since then AW S and Google right. You would be surprised to know that we do about 10% of AWS sales through work, expand co-sale. Right. Just [00:08:53] Vince Menzione: wow. [00:08:53] Amit Sinha: But that’s where we started. Where we ended up is really looking at all partner types and all motion types and. Mark and I disagreed and he, he really pushed me hard on this. Yeah, and the point here is if you look at your build partner motion, it’s also a co-sell. You build, then you co-sell and go to market, [00:09:11] Vince Menzione: right? [00:09:12] Amit Sinha: If you think about your services partners, right? You have a product. They have amazing last mile services and digital transformation. Uh, capabilities, and again, there’s a coastal motion there. So where we world works span eventually was not just coastal with hyperscalers, but across all partner types. And Mark, thank you for pushing us on that. [00:09:31] Amit Sinha: Yeah. And being a pioneering partner on works span with us. I really appreciate [00:09:34] Marc Monday: this. It was a fun rumble we got there. [00:09:37] Vince Menzione: So why does it matter now for ServiceNow specific? [00:09:40] Marc Monday: Yeah. I mean the reality is, um, I’m gonna say something provocative. We’re, we’re all friends. Yeah. Um, Cosell iss probably a misnomer. It’s not a 50 50 coequal relationship. [00:09:53] Vince Menzione: Yeah. You don’t walk in together holding it back. [00:09:55] Marc Monday: It’s asymmetrical collaboration. I love that. And I want to put the stake in the ground. The co-sell motions that have been created by the hyperscalers are wonderful. The pipe has been opened, but the reality is the publisher. Has to do a lot of the work and the systems are there, but the key is not just connecting into partner center as an example. [00:10:16] Marc Monday: Yeah. But building your own infrastructure and processes. That’s where the magic comes together, and that’s where we really drive scale. And so if we approach co-selling is asymmetrical collaboration and recognizing that you probably need to do more than 50%. When a, when a a team collaborates on co-authoring a book, it’s not like someone’s writing every other word, and it’s exactly 50%. [00:10:40] Marc Monday: Or if a pilot, a co-pilot is with a pilot on a plane, they’re not doing exactly 50% of the work’s, [00:10:46] Vince Menzione: right? No. [00:10:47] Marc Monday: This asymmetric approach requires that we do a lot of the work on our side. Yeah. And that’s where AM and team have really helped us a ton. [00:10:55] Vince Menzione: And ServiceNow was known as a ticketing solution back in the day. [00:10:58] Vince Menzione: Right. And you’ve kind of, I mean, it it, it started that way. [00:11:01] Marc Monday: We have a wonderful heritage 20 plus years Yeah. Of workflow orchestration. Yeah. And in a diggen world, what are we really doing? We’re orchestrating workflows, and importantly, we need to govern those workflows and we need to sequence them in a meaningful way. [00:11:17] Marc Monday: And so our vision of a control tower across any hyperscaler, any LLM, any workflow, any system of record, any time, that’s the key to everything. [00:11:27] Vince Menzione: And so now you’ve taken the work span approach and driven it across what I see, like taking, taking this. This stack, we’ll call it. Yeah, the tower. Yeah. And then applying all of the methodologies and best practices on what we’ve called co-selling and ecosystem orchestration, essentially is what it really is. [00:11:46] Amit Sinha: Absolutely. [00:11:46] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:11:47] Amit Sinha: Yeah. And we are thrilled to partner with ServiceNow on this. So ServiceNow, as you guys know, uh, release their CRM product. So we got in at the ground floor on that opportunity and with the now assist agents as well. What we’ve really built is an integration between work span as a platform. [00:12:03] Amit Sinha: And ServiceNow, CRM as well. So if anybody is using that all the way from ServiceNow opportunities to Marketplace private offers, you can a genetically do that. Of course you can do it on Salesforce Hub, spot and Dynamics, but now ServiceNow is an additional option on that. I wanna really double click though, mark, on your point around asymmetry around this, when we say six to seven partners are gonna surround the end customer, right? [00:12:27] Amit Sinha: Yes. They will come at different points in time. Yes. Right? And they will also have different roles to play. So just as you think of a team, right? A soccer team for that matter, or a football team, pick your analogy right. Not everybody’s equal. Right? There’s always a qb. There’s always somebody who holds the prime on the deal. [00:12:45] Amit Sinha: There’s always a role to play. [00:12:46] Marc Monday: Yeah, [00:12:47] Amit Sinha: and I think what’s beautiful about our partnership here is when you look at it applied to services partners, it’s about building billion dollar businesses around ServiceNow, using their competency, but knowing the kind of joint accounts you need to go pursue in order to. [00:13:03] Amit Sinha: You know, burn down their inventory or, or co-sell alongside. If it’s the build partner, it’s about attacking an industry vertical or a joint account there. Right? So knowing very intelligently who to partner with and when to bring them on is the AI orchestration that is key in this partnership [00:13:19] Vince Menzione: here. Yeah. [00:13:19] Vince Menzione: So important. ’cause you, it isn’t single threaded this, this asymmetrical approach. [00:13:24] Amit Sinha: Right. So [00:13:25] Vince Menzione: incredible. You just ha you just finished your big event. I was hoping I did spare Share with us a little bit of your perspective on what’s been changing and how your ecosystem is evolving. Uh, I had Jen Odes in the studio. [00:13:38] Vince Menzione: That’s right. As you know, back in the fall. Fall, go back and watch it again. Yeah, it’s available. Great. Great podcast interview. Yeah. And you’ve been on stage at our events before and we’ve had that as a podcast, but take us how things are changing from the partner type perspective. We have MSPs in the room. [00:13:53] Vince Menzione: I know MSPs are, I know again, hands on the steering wheel. So important, right? Yeah. This technology is so complex. How are you thinking about ecosystem in your role? [00:14:03] Marc Monday: Yeah, I said earlier it’s about simplicity, speed, and scale. Yeah. Last week we had our big customer event knowledge, and on the first day we had our partner event. [00:14:13] Marc Monday: I think the biggest thing that’s happening right now is the pace of change is a bit overwhelming at times. And keeping pace with that is super critical. So what we’ve tried to do and what we announced last week was a lot of investment in giving our channel partners the exact same tools that we use in our business, right? [00:14:32] Marc Monday: So we were really focused on. Um, delivering business value. And so we took our, the solution that we use or the tools that we use for, um, delivering, uh, business value through our partners. It’s an assessment tool. Um, we’ve syndicated that to our partners. We’ve made that available. We also put a little bit of a stake in the ground around what do customers expect right now? [00:14:56] Marc Monday: Um, the time and materials business is gonna be under a tremendous amount of pressure. Some studies are predicting that it could be. Compressed by as much as 30% customers are looking for outcome based. Yeah. Um, they may stop on that journey and, and have something that’s fixed fee. But the reality is everyone is expecting value from the, the technology that they buy, and particularly from an agent perspective. [00:15:21] Marc Monday: We really leaned in on that and published what I think is a pretty g

Don’t get left behind on AWS! Don’t get left behind on AWS! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode, we go deep inside the AWS Marketplace with Louise Strandoo, who spent nearly a decade building AWS’s marketplace business from the ground up and now leads partner development for AWS’s data, analytics, and storage practice. We break down why operational excellence has to be in place before you ever enable your sales team, why executive sponsorship from the top of the organization is what keeps a marketplace strategy from collapsing into a single point of failure, and why product-led growth is no longer optional now that buyers, and increasingly AI agents, expect to try, buy, and deploy software without waiting on a human to close the loop, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwyAP7yVy3I Key Takeaways Success on AWS Marketplace requires a comprehensive framework like COST, not just a simple checklist of tasks. Your product must be something customers actually want to buy, not a subpar offering used merely to test the waters. Operational excellence is required to ensure your marketplace motion has the sustainability to scale globally. Product-Led Growth (PLG) is essential for enabling frictionless procurement, especially as buyers shift toward agent-driven AI solutions. Executive sponsorship is critical; building a strategy without leadership buy-in will prevent it from gaining real traction. Sales alignment ensures reps are appropriately compensated and friction is removed, preventing them from avoiding marketplace transactions. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Louise Strandoo Audio Episode [00:00:00] Louise Strandoo: Salespeople, rightly so. They don’t wanna introduce something that’s going to add a complexity to the deal. They’re like, why would AWS wanna be involved? [00:00:11] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI’s remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:22] Louise Strandoo: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi. Own [00:00:26] Vince Menzione: your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:45] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:53] Louise Strandoo: And Louise Strand, come on out. Come on up. Uh, our first, our first [00:00:59] Vince Menzione: Amazon executive at, at this session. Not our first ever, but our first at this session. [00:01:06] Louise Strandoo: Happy to be [00:01:07] Vince Menzione: thrilled to have you. I, why don’t we sit down on an, um, I’ll have you sit here and, you know, you get, take one of the ultimate partner pillows with you since you’re a first assignment attend. [00:01:15] Louise Strandoo: Wonderful. [00:01:16] Vince Menzione: Uh, [00:01:16] Louise Strandoo: good [00:01:17] Vince Menzione: to hear. So great to have you. I thought maybe we’d start, maybe, uh, with you, uh, explaining your role. Then we can start talking about costs, which is the subject is like near and dear, and we’ll talk about that, about what that is. But I want to keep people on their pins of their seats right now. [00:01:33] Vince Menzione: So tell us, tell us more about you and your role and your journey at AWS. [00:01:37] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, well thanks for having me. Good to see everybody in the room. Um, so my name’s Louise. I have spent the better part of the last nine and a half years at AWS and I spent almost that whole time, probably around eight years. In AWS Marketplaces business Development organization, um, I joined to help startups figure out how to scale their business on the marketplace. [00:02:00] Louise Strandoo: And from there, I grew into a number of different roles, helped ISVs figure out how to scale their marketplace business of all sizes. Um, I worked with some of our top sellers on the marketplace, figure out how to really scale their revenue through the marketplace. Today I am actually the lead of the data analytics and storage partner development team. [00:02:20] Louise Strandoo: Nice. Within the US Tech partnerships organization. So it’s been a really cool transition to go from like all marketplace focused. And throughout that time, marketplace kind of became the center of partnerships. Yep. Within our partner program. Um, so now I manage PDMs and partners and we still talk a lot about marketplace. [00:02:40] Louise Strandoo: Also everything else that we do as a partner. So it’s, um, it’s been a fun journey. [00:02:45] Vince Menzione: And we were talking about this earlier, like you started with Marketplace and then moved out where all the other organizations started from partnership and moved into marketplace. Mm-hmm. Almost the other up. And you have built a framework costs [00:02:59] Louise Strandoo: mm-hmm. [00:03:00] Vince Menzione: Characteristics of successful sellers. And I have a set of operating principles about successful partnering. So I’m really intrigued about this conversation. I was hoping you could walk us through it, like what are these characteristics and where do most partners fall short in terms of characteristics? [00:03:18] Louise Strandoo: Yeah, so, um, like all really good things, cost was an effort that I built alongside a bunch of other really smart people. And we started to have this conversation about what does, uh, you know, what does success look like? We we’re focused in the beginning, in my marketplace journey on getting. Partners to sell on the marketplace, getting them to list and adopt the features. [00:03:41] Louise Strandoo: And of course they’re like, why would we do this? And we’re like, that’s a great question. Let’s figure out like really what the why of this whole thing is. And as we started to get partners who were startups and some of our really large partners activated, we started to see all kinds of value and how marketplace was helping co-sell and all this good stuff. [00:03:59] Louise Strandoo: And we needed to figure out like how do we identify what is like the lightning in the bottle? So we looked across some of the most, uh, hypergrowth companies on the marketplace. Mm-hmm. Some of those startups that had really propelled into major success stories. And then some of those like really scaled enterprise sellers, the one [00:04:17] Vince Menzione: that got to a billion dollars. [00:04:18] Louise Strandoo: Exactly. The market, our billion dollar market market. Billion dollar sellers. Right? Yep. And we looked at what are the common characteristics that all of those partners embody. Yes. And how do we kind of. Define a framework that is not a checklist because a lot of us were doing that at the time. Here’s all the things that you should do to make it work well. [00:04:34] Louise Strandoo: It doesn’t really work from partner to partner. Everyone has a unique go-to market strategy. Yeah, so we developed costs to kind of be this overarching tool that partners can use to say, do we have the right kind of fundamental approach to how we’re going to market with AWS and how we’re thinking about the marketplace. [00:04:51] Louise Strandoo: Do we have the right tools to like bring our overall go-to-market strategy to A AWS and to the marketplace so we’re not doing two separate things. That was sort of the genesis of the idea. Makes [00:05:02] Vince Menzione: a lot of sense. [00:05:04] Louise Strandoo: So, um, the characteristics, there’s six of ’em. I won’t go into detail about every single one. [00:05:11] Louise Strandoo: Oh, [00:05:11] come [00:05:11] Vince Menzione: on. We’ll do that one. Yeah. We have some people in the room that are gonna be intrigued by this. Go ahead. [00:05:16] Louise Strandoo: So, um, the first pillar is. Partnership with AWS, you can’t do marketplace without figuring out what, what’s your overall partner strategy, right? So how are you using the partner programs to drive differentiation in your business? [00:05:30] Louise Strandoo: Yep. How are you using our funding programs to elevate the parts of your business that you really wanna accelerate? Um, and how are you thinking about your partner strategy with AWS overall? [00:05:40] Vince Menzione: Interesting. [00:05:41] Louise Strandoo: The second one is, uh, selection on AWS marketplace. [00:05:44] Vince Menzione: Product selection. [00:05:45] Louise Strandoo: That’s right. [00:05:45] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:05:46] Louise Strandoo: You gotta have a product on the marketplace that your customers wanna buy. [00:05:49] Louise Strandoo: I think the biggest thing that partners have done wrong over the years is they think, let’s do crawl, walk, run. We’re gonna put something up there that we’re not, you know, really excited about, but we’ll see how it does and then we’ll try to invest from there. [00:06:03] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. [00:06:04] Louise Strandoo: If you put something out there that nobody knows how to sell, then that you’re not excited about, your customers aren’t probably excited about it either. [00:06:09] Louise Strandoo: There’s no reason it’s gonna do well in the marketplace. [00:06:10] Vince Menzione: Yeah. It makes no sense to me. [00:06:12] Louise Strandoo: Yep. So you gotta have something good. You gotta have your marquee product, and then you wanna use features that are gonna help buyers actually access that product in a way that’s frictionless. Yeah. The third one is operational excellence. [00:06:25] Louise Strandoo: So that’s looking at how are you structuring your organization and investing in all the right processes that you need to scale the business. Reporting at a global scale, understanding how to recognize revenue and thinking about all of the in-between moments of. Being on the marketplace, creating an offer, how does your sales team gonna get in touch with you when you need to send that offer out? [00:06:47] Louise Strandoo: And how are you making sure that an alliance person isn’t trying to find an outlet in a random corner of an airport to send a private offer to a customer? All of that structural stuff to make the, the motion scale. [00:07:00] Vince Menzione: So we’re talking product led growth versus. One off or [00:07:04] Louise Strandoo: all of it? All of it. Okay. No matter what kind of partner you are, you have to have operational excellence. [00:07:08] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. To make sure that your marketplace and your partnership motion has sustainability and scale. The next two, I’ll kind of go through fast. There is, yeah. Um, partner commitment to marketplace revenue. So what do you really want Drive from a revenue perspective, right. How do you get your leaders bought in on that, and how do you set a goal that dictates what you’re doing? [00:07:28] Louise Strandoo: And then how do you define sales alignment? From a structural perspective to say we’re gonna remove friction that could get in the way of the field selling this thing. We’re gonna remove things that are, um, negating reps from wanting to go through marketplace because it’s impacting their comp. Yeah. Or it’s really hard. [00:07:46] Louise Strandoo: All of that kind of structural stuff goes into the sales alliance. [00:07:49] Vince Menzione: So there’s, yeah. I wanted to take this apart a little bit too, if you don’t mind. No [00:07:52] Louise Strandoo: problem. [00:07:53] Vince Menzione: Because I think about this a lot. So when you start talking about an organization, you’re talking about what this, we’ll call it an ISV Sure. Or an si, but. [00:08:00] Vince Menzione: You know, ISPs primarily is where it all started. They need to get their internal operational excellence. Right, exactly. Which means their, their ops piece. Yep. And their sales execution. They’re gonna to market all those things. The sales alignment side. Is that their sales teams [00:08:18] Louise Strandoo: correct. [00:08:19] Vince Menzione: Are compensated properly so that they don’t go around the systems. [00:08:22] Vince Menzione: Exactly right. They’re aligned. They’re aligned to go drive the right results. [00:08:25] Louise Strandoo: Exactly. [00:08:26] Vince Menzione: Because they’ve made commitments as well. [00:08:28] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. [00:08:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:08:29] Louise Strandoo: And I always talk about marketplace, like it is transformation. It’s different. It’s not what you’re doing today. [00:08:35] Vince Menzione: That’s right. [00:08:35] Louise Strandoo: Salespeople, rightly so. They don’t wanna introduce something that’s gonna add a complexity to the deal. [00:08:43] Louise Strandoo: They’re like, why would AWS wanna be involved? Stay away. So if that is already there and then on top of that Mm, they don’t get paid as much when they go direct. [00:08:53] Vince Menzione: Right? Right. [00:08:54] Louise Strandoo: They’re not gonna go through the market nice. [00:08:55] Vince Menzione: No, they’re not. [00:08:55] Louise Strandoo: They’re not gonna bring anything to you and the partnership team saying like, Hey, we really wanna figure out how to make this engine work with AWS So we have to do as much as we can to remove that friction from the experience. [00:09:06] Vince Menzione: So, you know, you mentioned private offers, which made me think about like product-led growth versus private offers. ’cause it’s, it feels like marketplace from the beginning. It’s changed. It [00:09:15] Louise Strandoo: has, [00:09:16] Vince Menzione: you’ve been doing this for a number of years. You were first to market with a marketplace. There was, I’ll call a lot of friction because there was channels and other, other routes to market direct selling. [00:09:27] Vince Menzione: Tell us, take us through some of those experiences. Yeah, yeah. Like what was that like? And then obviously you built cos because you had a lot of field engagement with these organizations trying to get them to go do it the right way. [00:09:38] Louise Strandoo: Right? [00:09:39] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:09:39] Louise Strandoo: So it’s interesting actually, when we built the marketplace. [00:09:42] Louise Strandoo: It was completely like a product-led growth motion, as in let’s just figure out a way to let AWS customers find amis in the marketplace. Developers are gonna go get it, and they’re just gonna buy it without any additional push from the field or like co-sell. That doesn’t need to happen. Then we heard from customers, Hey, this is great. [00:10:02] Louise Strandoo: But what we really want is also to be able to buy bigger contracts. We wanna customize our contracts, we wanna negotiate price when we’re buying this on behalf of, you know, large organizations. We’re not just buying what’s on the shelf. We need something more custom. So we introduced this concept of private offers to make sure that we could bring all of that customization into the process. [00:10:23] Louise Strandoo: And then we heard from customers saying, uh, we want to purchase from our preferred channel partners. We really wanna make sure that we’re, you know, not losing that source of, um, engagement with our really critical partners. So we had to figure out, hey, how can we make it so that we’re not competing with the channel? [00:10:41] Louise Strandoo: ’cause we’re not really a channel at all. Right. So we had to go and build our platform that allowed for channel partners to sell through the marketplace and augment that private offer piece to say, Hey, if you want, you can have a channel partner resell your product through the marketplace. So today we kind of see all of those as just different routes to market and different ISVs are gonna embrace different routes to market. [00:11:04] Louise Strandoo: First, the really important thing about costs is that it’s. Pushing partners to think about bringing their go to market strategy that works outside of the partnership to the marketplace. Mm-hmm. So if you’re an ISV that doesn’t sell with channel today, don’t start with channel partners on the marketplace. [00:11:21] Louise Strandoo: Right. If you don’t do product-led growth today, probably figure that out before you start doing it on the marketplace. Yeah. But if you’re doing those things, if you’re not doing those things, you should look at why not, and could we be doing those things and then we have the ways to bring it into your strategy with AWS marketplace. [00:11:38] Vince Menzione: So what separates the partners who kind of build this flywheel of success that you describe from those who treat it maybe as a side project? And do you, do you see less and less of that today too? I wanna, I wanna ask you. [00:11:50] Louise Strandoo: No, I think, um, the more mature the marketplace gets [00:11:57] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:11:58] Louise Strandoo: The more obvious some of the, uh, characteristics of success become and the more important. [00:12:06] Louise Strandoo: Embodying that framework becomes for partners as they grow to become the next billion dollar seller, right? And become the next a hundred million dollar seller. Um, I think a couple things come to mind for me. The first thing is that like at AWS overall, we talk a lot about like resilient architecture. We talk a lot about what does it look like to drive successful transformation. [00:12:29] Louise Strandoo: All of that has to happen in the partnership. Partners that have really strong marketplace motions with AWS, they do not have single points of failure. They are not expecting an alliance lead to manage everything and then have the business collapse if they leave. [00:12:46] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:12:46] Louise Strandoo: They figure out how to delegate and get buy-in from leadership so that they have multiple folks invested in the strategy for multiple angles so that there’s scalability and sustainability. [00:12:58] Louise Strandoo: Without that. You could do all the things right with costs and if there’s res, if there’s no resiliency, if there’s, if there’s a single point of failure, it doesn’t scale and it doesn’t last. [00:13:09] Vince Menzione: It’s so funny ’cause you haven’t seen my seven principles of, of successful partnering, but we talk about growth mindset, we talk about executive commitment and then clarity on your vision and what you’re hoping to achieve. [00:13:21] Louise Strandoo: Yeah. [00:13:22] Vince Menzione: Like that’s your internal victory. You’ve gotta get those things right. That’s exactly what you just said. A hundred [00:13:26] percent. [00:13:26] Louise Strandoo: And you can’t, you, you know, like if you don’t have that executive sponsorship, [00:13:30] Vince Menzione: yeah, [00:13:32] Louise Strandoo: great. You’ve done the cost framework, but where are you gonna go with it? [00:13:35] Vince Menzione: And it’s not just the sponsorship, it’s. [00:13:38] Vince Menzione: Up in, from the top of the organization all the way down to the selling floor. Completely. Right? [00:13:42] Louise Strandoo: Completely. [00:13:42] Vince Menzione: Everybody has to be aligned. Resources, investments all need to be aligned to this. Mm-hmm. [00:13:47] Louise Strandoo: Mm-hmm. [00:13:47] Vince Menzione: We’re speaking the same language earlier. A hundred percent. I love it. I love it. I love it. Um, so what does, we talked about product-led growth, but I want to maybe jump in here a little bit more. [00:13:58] Vince Menzione: Because I think it’s, it’s becoming more

Don’t miss this massive SMB partner shift! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this pivotal episode, we sit down with Jose Gomez Cueto, Microsoft’s SMB leader for the Americas, to uncover the monumental shifts happening within the partner ecosystem and the $20 billion cloud opportunity currently on the table. The discussion dives deep into Microsoft’s commitment to the CSP channel, the explosion of AI agents, and why shifting from traditional headcount growth to outcome-based results is critical for survival. From navigating the complexities of the marketplace to the urgency of becoming “Customer Zero” with AI tools, this conversation provides the roadmap every MSP needs to thrive in the new era of technology. https://youtu.be/QE-1w7GeyPM Key Takeaways Microsoft operates a $20 billion cloud revenue business in the Americas alone, with 80% driven by the channel. The Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program is now Microsoft’s primary hero motion for the fourth region. The currency of SMB growth is shifting away from headcount and moving directly toward AI-driven outcomes. MSPs must transition from traditional IT outsourcing to strategic business process consulting to survive. Failing to proactively adopt and secure AI tools creates massive liability and shadow AI risks for organizations. IT providers are urged to become “Customer Zero” by deploying and testing Copilot and autonomous agents internally before selling them. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags CSP, Agent 365, SMB cloud revenue, outcome-based selling, Copilot for business, Defender for business, shadow AI risks, AI agent deployment, Purview data security, Marketplace API integration, autonomous agents, Customer Zero, Microsoft Americas segment Transcript Jose Gomez Cueto AUDIO PODCAST [00:00:00] Jose Gomez Cueto: And, and you know, if I might say something that is confidential, avid Vince, uh, to be quite honest, please, please, uh, by definition, a marketplace is eliminating intermediaries. [00:00:11] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. [00:00:13] Vince Menzione: The ecosystem is shifting beneath us. The way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:23] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:45] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:55] Vince Menzione: I am absolutely thrilled for our, our next guest. Um, some of you heard me talk about this maybe earlier or in various pockets of conversation. Um, I believe both the SMB market is an, is an incredible opportunity. We’ve called it the Acre of Diamonds at Ultimate Partner at previous events. And then the MSP community, which I want to thank so many of you to for coming, coming on board now. [00:01:25] Vince Menzione: ’cause we’ve had some MSPs that have come to all our events. And doubled, tripled, quadruple the sizes of their business. From what they’ve learned in these rooms. And so we invited our next guest to come. Oh, Jose, come on up. Jose Gomez Cuerto is the leader of Microsoft’s SMB business for the Americas. Come on. [00:01:43] Vince Menzione: Come on over. Come on over. Sit down with me. And I was so thrilled to get this gentleman to come join us. His team is doing incredible work. I got to meet some of his team actually earlier this year. And we know each other for many years ago. [00:01:56] Jose Gomez Cueto: We do. [00:01:56] Vince Menzione: When I was at Microsoft, right? Yeah. So, so great to see you again. [00:01:59] Jose Gomez Cueto: It’s a pleasure to be here. Uh, thanks for the invitation. I’m thrilled to be here. And thank you all for making time, uh, or traveling here. Uh, this is the best time. To be in the industry. [00:02:10] Vince Menzione: It’s an incredible time. [00:02:11] Jose Gomez Cueto: Yeah, [00:02:11] Vince Menzione: it’s an incredible time. So sit down. Yeah, sit down. Let’s, yeah. So let’s talk about you and your organization. [00:02:17] Vince Menzione: Um, let’s talk, well, I, I, I wanna bring this up because it was like, the noise I heard in the room when I was, I went to Interven earlier this year. Yeah. Is, does Microsoft Care about this market? And, um, I was at Microsoft many years, we worked together when I was a, a gm. And, uh, it was run differently back in the day. [00:02:37] Vince Menzione: Yeah. And there’s been a lot of changes to what we call the SME and C business now. Mm-hmm. Uh, and the SMB business, which you run. So let’s talk a little bit about your organization, where you sit in the organization, and then I want to kind of dive in a little bit about what’s changed. ’cause a lot has changed for the better. [00:02:54] Jose Gomez Cueto: Yeah, it’s a great question and I think that that’s what a lot of people think about, uh, SMB and, and who’s SMB and, and who’s at Microsoft and who do I talk to. So, [00:03:02] Vince Menzione: yes. [00:03:02] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, even though I know a lot of, uh, friendly faces in the room, I think it’s a great, uh, starting point. Vince, so. Basically, uh, I am responsible for what we call the small and medium business, uh, segment. [00:03:15] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, we can also call it small and medium enterprises. Uh, I would say that it is not a monolith. Uh, we do have, uh, subsegmentation, I think that our friend Jay was talking about up to 20 subsegmentation. Uh, we think about it for simplifi simplification purposes on three. Uh, so we have, uh, the smaller organizations, the medium-sized organizations. [00:03:36] Jose Gomez Cueto: And then what we call top point manage, which is basically large enterprise that we simply don’t have an account management team, uh, assigned to. And we are the happy recipients of many of those, uh, every year. Uh, so I would say that, uh, a best definition would be also anything that is unmanaged and is primarily driven through the channel. [00:03:54] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, we run in the Americas approximately more than $20 billion of revenue, uh, on cloud. Uh, that’s [00:04:01] Vince Menzione: crazy. [00:04:01] Jose Gomez Cueto: So, and 80% of that is done. Through companies that are here, [00:04:05] Vince Menzione: $20 billion of business. [00:04:07] Jose Gomez Cueto: Yeah. So, um, the, the Americas region that I’m, uh, representing and under my responsibility includes basically three sales units, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. [00:04:18] Jose Gomez Cueto: Yes. Latin America is more fragmented because we have multi-country and multi, uh, subsidiary, uh, structure. Just to recap a little bit of what you asked me rewinding on what has happened in the last two or three years. Yeah. We brought basically, uh, probably something that you might remember from you were there. [00:04:36] Jose Gomez Cueto: I, yes. Uh, which is bringing the segment, uh, with the channel together. So, uh, I think that, um, uh. Earlier in the morning, uh, Steven was, uh, talking about it, what we call S-M-U-N-C, which is, uh, this segment with the channel. And the main reason is to drive, uh, that synergy, uh, and making, uh, a very bold statement that many of you might remember in the last two years, uh, Judson and Ralph, uh, heter or, or new, uh, president for this, uh, fourth region. [00:05:05] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, ’cause we call it fourth region. Yeah. ’cause the other one is our enterprises. [00:05:08] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So Asia, Americas Exactly. And, and EMEA. Then you’re the fourth region. [00:05:13] Jose Gomez Cueto: We’re the fourth region. So, so, um, making CSP, uh, our hero motion, and that is fantastic news. I, I started, uh, part of my journey, uh, in, in the channel, uh, way earlier in distribution in the year 2000. [00:05:30] Vince Menzione: Yep. [00:05:30] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, and fast forward, I would say 2011, we were launching the first commercial SaaS offering, which was Office 365. Um, I had the privilege to be, uh, leading the launch globally for that. Uh, but then we, the first thing we did was build a channel, and that was called syndication. And basically the precursor of that, uh, became CSP, basically putting, uh, the partner or customer in the middle, the partner around it for the, not only the, the opportunity, but also the responsibility to serve the customer. [00:06:04] Jose Gomez Cueto: 360 from, uh, presales all the way to, uh, uh. Upsell cross sell, and in between deployment, uh, things, uh, around, um, servicing, bundling offers, uh, troubleshooting and support, et cetera. So, uh, back to your question was, this is a very important thing because we’re basically, uh, making our channel the scale and, and the vision that we have is, is that we are gonna be continuing to scale through the channel. [00:06:33] Jose Gomez Cueto: So, um, one last thing I say, uh, in terms of the organization that I think is important for everyone to understand, and I’m gonna go a little bit into more org structure, is that we, we have these three sales units that are geographic. But, uh, what we’ve done this year is to have, uh, more depth on the solution area. [00:06:50] Jose Gomez Cueto: So you might remember that, uh, we’ve simplified them, uh, same as we used to have 8, 13, 13 areas. Now we have only three Oh yeah, same, same, uh, in the solution area. So we have, uh, the AI business solutions. Uh, cloud and AI platforms. And then, uh, security and my team basically mirrors that structure. And we have, uh, team members, uh, primarily, um, our partner, solutions specialists that are, their job is to work with companies like you. [00:07:17] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, some few we do, uh, direct in others. What we do is work with, uh, our top distributors, and I think we have, uh, in the room many of those. I think Google is gonna follow up, uh, for PAX eight, and that’s, uh, how we’re going to market now. [00:07:31] Vince Menzione: So just a little bit of context too for me. ’cause I, I, I had heard this at another event. [00:07:36] Vince Menzione: Yeah. And I just wanted to share this. Um, when I was at Microsoft, we, we did not put the right emphasis and energy and resources in the s and b market when I was there, or, or it was fragmented. Every group did it differently. You remember those days too, right? Well, with public sector, we didn’t necessarily have a team focused, and every business did it a little bit differently. [00:08:00] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. And I think one of the contexts you, you mentioned Ralph and being in Ralph’s organization. Yeah. Pulling that all together and creating the fourth region created a lot of focus that didn’t exist. And consistency in terms of execution. I think that’s what you’re talking about here. Right? And then also the fact that like, we didn’t, I don’t think we had a sep, an SMB leader back in, back in the day. [00:08:22] Vince Menzione: Like we didn’t have somebody that we can go to to think about the MSP community the way we do today. Mm-hmm. Right. We were just, they were just almost like unmanaged entities out there. Yeah. Was that, would you, would you agree with that? [00:08:32] Jose Gomez Cueto: Yeah, I, we went through several iterations that, uh, you might argue, uh, were painful or not. [00:08:38] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, ultimately what we’re committed is to simplify the partner experience. And make that the same for the customers. But what we have is now one center of gravity, uh, a global SMB organization. We have three area leaders. And uh, and that helps us, uh, to be quite honest and in confidence. And you and I talked about it, Jose, this is a forum for, uh. [00:08:58] Jose Gomez Cueto: Speaking the truth. Uh, we, we, we have to fight the gravitational force of the managed space. The company has a big enterprise footprint, so, uh, many of us have become, uh, the chief agitators, uh, to fight the good fight, uh, for SMB. Uh, try to under unpack, uh, in every single conversation with senior Execut. [00:09:17] Jose Gomez Cueto: What is an MSP? And no, it’s not data consulting or one of the large, uh, global design. Uh, and then we explain what they do and then what is a two tier channel, how do distributors work? And, uh, and what about this and what about that? So I think that that has been, uh, a great, uh, progress and a lot of that can be reflected, uh, into how we’re, hopefully everyone in the room is seeing it in how we’re going to market. [00:09:40] Jose Gomez Cueto: I’ll give you two examples. [00:09:41] Guest: Yes. [00:09:42] Jose Gomez Cueto: Um, for, for quite some time. We, we have very limited, uh. Product truth. That’s what the lingo that we use internally, uh, related to offer that were targeted to SMB. And I would say that, uh, business premium, uh, for M 365, uh, was the fact to offer. But now we’ve been able to in, uh, increase, uh, the not so not only commitment, uh, but also the investment that we’re doing as a company into launching offers. [00:10:08] Jose Gomez Cueto: So we have a co compiler for business that is. At a lower price point that has, uh, the same capabilities at the enterprise, uh, that we’re, uh, doing that we also have some security, uh, offers, uh, that are now unattached to business premium, which is our hero motion for sub 300 space. So you start to see, uh, an important trend and it’s great to have jobson at a CEO, uh, of the commercial business capacity because, uh, we’re making things happen. [00:10:34] Jose Gomez Cueto: So what I would say is that I love coming here to these forums. A lot of my team members are here. We’re here to learn. We’re the learner. All we, we, we don’t know much. We need to learn more. Uh, and, and just keeping us honest in terms of bringing that, uh, ethos of, of the customer that most of you are serving and, and, and things that we can improve to get better to deliver value. [00:10:58] Vince Menzione: Yeah. And the speed at which you’re moving has been pretty fast. It’s been very nimble. Like I, I, I’ve been watching this progression. It’s really like you, you’re really leaning in. I was actually hoping because I could ask you a bunch of questions. Yeah. But we have such a great audience and for the first time we really have opened it up to a lot of MSPs in the room. [00:11:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah. And I know you, you wanna get some interaction with some of these folks as well. I thought maybe we would open if you’re okay with this. Yeah, absolutely. I’d rather than I go off script a little bit. I’d rather open it up to some of the MSPs in the room. We’re sitting here eager to learn how and, and what Microsoft is going to do to help. [00:11:35] Vince Menzione: Because I think the opportunity, I personally think the opportunity is huge right [00:11:38] Jose Gomez Cueto: now. Yeah. Let’s do that and well, we get, uh, warmed up. I would say that. [00:11:43] Vince Menzione: So we need some mics. Yeah. [00:11:43] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, something that I’m, that I’m seeing, uh, Vince, and, and, and a question that many of you might have is why now? And, and why this an, an exciting, an exciting time. [00:11:54] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:11:54] Jose Gomez Cueto: Um, and I would say that, uh. Right now we’re seeing, obviously Jay talked about it and, and the big transformation, but it’s a once in a generation or one in a lifetime. Yeah. Uh, shift of the entire platform. Uh, and, and a lot of the scenarios are even maybe scary, but what we see is huge opportunity. And from an SMB perspective, uh, the biggest thing that excites me is moving from, um, something that was. [00:12:23] Jose Gomez Cueto: More related to size, and now we’re moving to outcomes. So, so think about the future of SMBs, uh, with agents and things being measured on outcomes. And, and what this leads to is, uh, Jay talked about it as well, and sorry Jay, it’s such a good job that I keep quoting you. Um, we do that a lot. Uh. You got it. [00:12:49] Jose Gomez Cueto: So you talked about, uh, I noticed that Bill Gates when he said, you know, uh, uh, a pc, uh, in every desk and what we see is every human empowered with agents. Yeah. Especially in work. And what does that mean, that the currency changes being, because what you’re gonna be able to, to envision. Not in the, in the, in the near future, but now is an agentic explosion where then, uh, the currency is outcomes? [00:13:14] Jose Gomez Cueto: Yes. So if you think of an SMB growing, it’s not growing on, on, on full-time employees or headcount. It’s growing on the ability to do more through agents. So, so I think that’s an important thing and, and that’s something that we’re working very closely with our all, all our channel and the offerings that we’re launching to market as well. [00:13:32] Vince Menzione: I also think about the MSPs as being perfectly positioned because what you described, the new, the new model, the future customer and the outcomes is gonna require hands on the steering wheel at all times. [00:13:44] Jose Gomez Cueto: Yes. Yeah. So on that one, and still waiting for some, uh. Someone that is not shy to ask questions, but we’ll, we’ll keep going in the meantime. [00:13:52] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, I, I think that, uh, we are learning, all the [00:13:55] Vince Menzione: MSPs are lined up over here. I’m marching them all. [00:13:57] Jose Gomez Cueto: We, and, and I almost know by name all everyone in the first two rows. Yes. Uh, so, so, uh, I might pick on them. Uh, they’re too shy, but, but we’re learning together. Uh, Vince, uh, the important thing is, is the transformation, uh, and the opportunity, but also the risk of, uh, not acting. [00:14:17] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, what we were seeing, uh, for the first, uh, year or two was kicking tires, people testing, uh, ai. And now what we’ve seen is basically, uh, a full adoption. Uh, of the agentic technology, not even adoption of the tools, but embracing the technology. So I, I want to give you, uh, two specific, uh, examples or data points we have, uh, just in the Americas, more than almost 9 million, uh, people using copilot chat. [00:14:49] Vince Menzione: Wow, that’s amazing. [00:14:50] Jose Gomez Cueto: So imagine, uh, the, the potential that is there for people that are actively using the tool. Yeah. Uh, to en enable new scenarios of doing things. Uh, another example, and I think I have, uh, someone in my team here, is Amber in the room. Amber Kinney? No, she left. Okay. So Amber runs, uh, cloud and ai, uh, uh, or Azure platform. [00:15:12] Jose Gomez Cueto: Uh, her team has deployed, uh, more than, uh, 11 agents internally for our partner solution specialist, uh, from. Simple agents that will, uh, tell is if a specific deal is eligible for a pre-sales or post-sales program. And comparing all the complexity of our programs, oh my [00:15:29] Vince Menzione: goodness. [00:15:30] Jose Gomez Cueto: All the way to, to, to managing a pipe more effectively of opportunities. [00:15:34] Jose Gomez Cueto: So what we’re seeing is real. This is not something that people are just kicking the tires. It’s like this is the opportunity. So back to, to the point of m ms. P uh, is, is about learning together on how to transition. To, uh, a model that is gonna be based on outcomes. And, and we were discussing, uh, I was with some of our distributors, uh, many of them in the last two months in

Don’t Fade and Die in AI Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Matt Yanchyshyn, VP AWS Marketplace, Rekha Thangelapalita, Elastic GSI Leaders; Allison McFadden, Accenture AWS Leader; and James Kang of Nvidia join Ultimate Partner. In this panel discussion, leaders from Elastic, Accenture, Nvidia, and AWS dissect the urgent shifts in the ecosystem, emphasizing that partners must adapt to AI and agentic co-selling or risk fading away completely. The conversation explores the necessity of deep co-engineering, the power of multi-product solutions in the AWS marketplace, and how automated agents are now replacing traditional human sales pipeline progression. By embracing data readiness and strategic collaboration, organizations can survive the “token maxing” era, effectively scale their enterprise opportunities, and align with NVIDIA’s five-layer strategy to dominate the new cloud landscape. https://youtu.be/zUkL4Wqsa68 Key Takeaways AI agents will automate the majority of AWS partner co-selling attachments and opportunity progressions this year. Partners who fail to embrace agentic workflows and automated governance face the existential risk of fading into obsolescence. Successful multi-product offerings require a “blood to all organs” approach that benefits the client, the ISV, the GSI, and the hyperscaler simultaneously. Nvidia’s “five-layer cake” model emphasizes that successful outcomes at the application layer automatically drive growth for all underlying infrastructure. The “token maxing” phenomenon is forcing enterprises to seek cost-effective, open-model alternatives to scale their generative AI securely. Integrating GSIs and ISVs on the AWS marketplace significantly increases enterprise deal sizes and long-term customer renewal rates. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags strategic collaboration agreement, data readiness engine, agentic co-sell, semantic layer, token maxing, five layer cake, accelerated computing platform, open models, cloud consumption, multi-product solutions, partner central agents, propensity data, automated opportunity progression, generative AI governance Transcript Matt Y and Panel Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: You have a choice. You can embrace them and figure it out and get governance and, and make your data available. Um, use the partner, central agent, move to Agen Co-sell, or you can fade and die. [00:00:11] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:22] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi. Own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:44] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because [00:00:46] Vince Menzione: being in the room changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:51] Vince Menzione: We’ve got some amazing leaders joining us. So I think probably for a little bit of context, maybe just start with Rika. You can introduce yourself, your role and, uh, what, what you’ve been doing at Elastic. Yeah. [00:01:03] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, sounds great. [00:01:04] Rekha Thangellapalli: Hi everyone. I’m Reka and I lead GSI Alliances at Elastic. Um, for the past 14 years, I’ve had the pleasure of building different kinds of partner ecosystems across companies such as SAP. MuleSoft, Salesforce, Coupa, and now Elastic. Um, I wanna thank Ultimate partner and Vince for having us here today. Thank you and the panel of these incredible speakers for joining me on stage. [00:01:31] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, very excited for the conversation today. [00:01:33] Vince Menzione: We love Elastic, and you’ve had some of your other leaders on stage at other events. As such, the quality of your leadership team is amazing. Thank you. [00:01:42] Rekha Thangellapalli: I wholeheartedly agree. [00:01:45] Allison McFadden: Excellent. Um, hello everyone. Allison McFadden. I lead our North America AWS practice at Accenture. [00:01:52] Allison McFadden: Uh, I’ve been there for five years, and truth be told, it was my first partnership role, my first formal partnership role. Uh, so I can take some tips from all of you in the room here today. Prior to that, I was 21 years with IBM, and I got into partnerships because my last role at IBM was actually trying to build. [00:02:14] Allison McFadden: Linux business on the mainframe, and I had to have partners. I had to have partners to help me with workloads to run there. So I kind of learned, uh, trial by fire. But I’m excited for the conversation today. Excited to be in this room and excited to talk about what we’re doing with, uh, elastic. Thank you. [00:02:34] James Kang: Uh, my name is James Kang. Nice to see and meet everyone here. Vince, thank you for the opportunity. Thank you [00:02:38] Vince Menzione: for being here. [00:02:39] James Kang: Um, I’m with Nvidia, so I help manage the AWS partnership at Nvidia all up. Um, I guess fun fact, I’m former AWS and so I see a lot of very familiar faces here in the front row. Uh, former colleagues and then current friends. [00:02:56] James Kang: And so, uh, looking forward to the conversation. [00:02:59] Vince Menzione: Great. Well, we’ll start with an easy tia. Matt. This is not directed to you, directed to the others. So what does a successful AWS partnership look like from your C? So we’ll start with Eureka. [00:03:09] Rekha Thangellapalli: Sure. So from an ISV perspective, I think we really are looking at three things. [00:03:15] Rekha Thangellapalli: Uh, mutual investment building together. And scaling together. So when we talk about mutual investment, elastic recently signed a five-year SCA or strategic collaboration agreement with AWS. And while that is a significant milestone in our partnership, for us, what matters more is what it represents, and that is really a long-term commitment from both companies. [00:03:39] Rekha Thangellapalli: Towards product engineering, um, and joint go to market initiatives to deliver value to customers over time. And that’s what we see is that the best partnerships really compound and they build upon each other every year. Um, they don’t necessarily kind of reset every year. Um, next we talk about building together. [00:03:59] Rekha Thangellapalli: So, um. When we talk about joint solutions, we want to deliver solutions that are better together and the customers have to see us that way. And so whether it’s search, observability, or security, we’re looking at taking to market solutions that we can’t or necessarily don’t wanna take on our own. And finally we talk about scaling together. [00:04:22] Rekha Thangellapalli: And this is where marketplace, for instance, plays a big role, um, when customers can draw down on their cloud commitments, transact online and go from, you know, pilot to enterprise scale adoption in hours, not days. Um, this is when really everyone wins. Um, and this is also where partners like Accenture play a critical role. [00:04:47] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, you know, the incredible amount of expertise that they bring, uh, the managed services capabilities and, um, their data assets actually play a huge role in having our customers realize that value faster. And, um, like Vince mentioned, at the end of the day, best partnerships are all all about creating kind of that. [00:05:07] Rekha Thangellapalli: Self-sustaining flywheel. And so it starts with investing together, building something unique, and having the customers realize that success faster because that success is really the only thing that’s gonna keep that flywheel going for everyone involved. I [00:05:26] Vince Menzione: absolutely. [00:05:26] Allison McFadden: Okay, amazing. I’m gonna riff off a few things Ika said, but from a GSI perspective. [00:05:32] Allison McFadden: A relationship with a WSA successful relationship with AWS looks slightly different. Um, so I think the first thing that we think of in the GSI Community common thread is that the client outcome and delivering value for clients is what we, what we’re striving for. Um, and so the partnership with AWS in that case, um, um, it has to, it has to. [00:06:01] Allison McFadden: Look like one team in front of our clients. So we have to show up indistinguishable, and that’s with AWS and with an ISV partner, it has to look like one solution in front of the client, especially moments that matter. So board meetings, um, you know, the time we’re gonna sign a deal, like we have to look like one team, uh, and keep our our client outcome, um, first and foremost in mind. [00:06:24] Allison McFadden: The second thing, and this is I think where the magic of all the people in this room comes into play. We can have as many discussions at a CEO level as we want. And if our client teams on the ground are not working together, it falls apart. Falls apart directly in front of the client. Yes. And that is a really hard thing to do. [00:06:45] Allison McFadden: So I’m passionate about the alliance work because that that work is what makes it happen at the corporate level. [00:06:53] James Kang: Cool. Um. I’ll start here. So in Nvidia is a accelerated computing platform company. Um, if you asked. Anyone on the, on the street about a year ago, what is ai? A lot of times they would say AI is, is open ai, or it’s philanthropic. [00:07:12] James Kang: Um, Jensen and I’ll, I’ll reference Jensen a lot today, um, because he is our leader, um, but he also sets the strategy in the direction for Nvidia. He talks a lot about AI in the metaphor of a five layer cake. And in terms of the five layer cake, you start off with the foundational bottom layer being power and energy, which sustains. [00:07:32] James Kang: All of our data centers, you move up the stack in terms of chips. So things think of Foxconn, think of TSMC. Next you have the infrastructure layer. So obvious choice is AWS, and then you get to the models where you do have the philanthropics and the open ais. But finally in at the precipice, you have the application layer. [00:07:53] James Kang: Ultimately, the reason why I mentioned all different stacks of the layers, the five layer cake, is the fact that the application layer is the most important. And so when you think about. Partners like Elastic or ServiceNow Trend, ai, CrowdStrike. Every time you pull from the application layer and you see a success, it pulls all five different components of that layer up. [00:08:13] James Kang: And so ultimately, as I think about success, it’s it’s being able to develop these co-sell wins at the application layer and really demonstrating that through extreme co-engineering and co-design with all the different application. Infrastructure, power and energy layers in mind. Um, Jensen also likes to think of himself not only as the CEO and founder, but also as the, the chief Marketing Officer. [00:08:35] James Kang: We are a very event driven company, and so at our big events like GTC or at big industry events like CES or Computex, he likes to show up on the biggest stage, biggest stages and showcase the partnerships with not only ISVs and GSIs, but also with end customers. And so that’s what I think about when I think of SA success. [00:08:56] Vince Menzione: That’s a really good point. You talked about, Allison, you talked about having an alliance strategy, or at least you teed it up, so I thought maybe we would go there for a second. Right? Like, what does a great alliance strategy look like and why is it important to the success of the partnership? [00:09:11] Allison McFadden: Man, I, uh, I have so many opinions on this. [00:09:13] Allison McFadden: We could probably be up here all day. That’s [00:09:15] Vince Menzione: okay. [00:09:16] Allison McFadden: Um, no, I think. Uh, there, there are a couple things, and the first one that comes to mind is focus. We cannot be all things to all people. Um, so when it comes to think about some of the, the work we’re doing with Elastic, we have a very, very clear point of view on what client problem we’re solving, what clients we want to talk to. [00:09:38] Allison McFadden: It helps if, um, from an ISV perspective, if there’s a very clear fit in. The Accenture portfolio or whatever, you know, SI consulting partner. You’re working with a very clear fit in the portfolio and we know what we’re not gonna go after, what we’re not gonna spend our time on because we have, we have this tendency, there’s millions of people. [00:10:00] Allison McFadden: The ecosystem chart that, you know, Vince, you showed up there, there’s so many connections. There’s probably more connections there than there are atoms in the universe, right? So, um. Defining what we do together and what we don’t do together is the first thing that pops to my mind. [00:10:19] Vince Menzione: Reka, do you have a perspective on it since we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk next about what you’ve done together, but, and I also wanna get mass perspective as a hyperscaler partner here as well. [00:10:29] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, I mean from my perspective, I, I’m gonna, you know, kinda echo what Allison said is to be just maniacally focused. Yep. Um, because, especially from my perspective, so Elastic has three different solutions, right? We’ve got search, we’ve got observability, we’ve got security that map to completely different business units within Accenture. [00:10:47] Rekha Thangellapalli: And of course Accenture does a lot of things. And so, you know, when we first came together it was like. Okay, what are we gonna focus on? What industries are we gonna go after? Which segments are we gonna go after? Which customers, you know, um, outcomes are we trying to solve? And I think that sort of maniacal focus is the number one contributing factor to, to the fact that I’m like, up here on stage today. [00:11:12] Rekha Thangellapalli: Great. [00:11:14] Vince Menzione: Matt? Perspective? [00:11:16] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, I, I, I guess I was trying to. To add something, uh, additional from an AWS perspective, uh, when it comes to, you know, what does a great alliance look like? Uh, AWS is obsessed with data, you know, in data we trust. And, and so the best, um, and, and this goes sales business problem, and it’s not just the engineering teams. [00:11:34] Matt Yanchyshyn: And so, uh, you know, Accenture does a good job of this elastic, definitely. And if you can come to the table with, um, quantifiable proof of the value of customer outcomes and partnerships. Um, you’ll win all the time and it’ll be a durable relationship with AWS ’cause we really are this data obsessed company and, and even the most senior sales leaders. [00:11:54] Matt Yanchyshyn: Uh, and so what I mean by that specifically is like if you, if you can show like your a RR to land an a RR conversion ratio, like in in numerical format, it’ll light up our sales leaders and, and they’ll be all, and they will co-sell with you all day long. If you can show the, I mentioned this earlier, like the AWS service, uh, whether you’re consulting company or, um, elastic and, and how the shape of customer accounts change positively when we work together. [00:12:15] Matt Yanchyshyn: That type of sort of quantifiable data works particularly well from an alliance perspective. With AWS as a partner, we, we really are like this data in sort of results out company. Um, so I, yeah, that’s just adding to the great points that were already made. I would say specific to AWS that that’s key. [00:12:30] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. And I’m gonna bring up one more thing. I want to dive in on the, the joint value proposition, but you mentioned something that made a lot of sense and resonated to me about the organizations once you get out of partner, the partner world that we all know and love. Mm-hmm. Once you get down into a field organization or account management organization. [00:12:49] Matt Yanchyshyn: Not as much understanding and really organizations do a bad job here, honestly, in terms of enabling the field organizations. Do you agree? [00:12:58] Allison McFadden: I agree because I, I agree. And, um, you know, I think that’s one of the things, and, and I, I, when I joined Accenture, what we had was a lot of wicked smart architects delivering programs to clients in the field. [00:13:15] Allison McFadden: Very smart, very deep in AWS knowledge. Um, and that was awesome for the 10 clients they were staffed on and to get that understanding of how AWS works and I dream about lar, right? Like, this is a good, you know, but that takes real effort and real work. Yeah. And it’s, it’s um, almost like being a language translator. [00:13:37] Allison McFadden: Yes. For me. Yeah. So, you know, I had to deeply learn AWS so that I could. [00:13:42] Rekha Thangellapalli: Sure. [00:13:42] Allison McFadden: Teach my account teams. My account teams are really smart. They know who they’re selling to. They know their customers. They know what their customers need. They do not know what AWS has to offer always because they’ve got 20 partners lining up to try to tell their stories. [00:13:57] Allison McFadden: Um, they don’t know how to ask of the AWS team or the elastic team or the Nvidia team. Yeah. What they need [00:14:02] Vince Menzione: this co-selling piece. Yeah. [00:14:04] Allison McFadden: And so that is where, um. We had to build that muscle even around our AWS practice, which was a huge practice at Accenture, but we didn’t necessarily surround it with that kind of enablement and um, almost deal coaching layer. [00:14:21] Vince Menzione: So Elastic and Accenture came together. I dunno which one of you wants to lead this part of the conversation, but you will, right? Yeah. So tell us about the genesis of this and why. And a lot of people dunno what Elastic does, but you do some really incredible work. Like I, somebody told me one day was like, oh, you know, Uber, like, that’s elastic, powering all that. [00:14:41] Vince Menzione: Like, we don’t think about that. That the engines that you have and the, the backend to the customers, huge customers. [00:14:48] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so when AWS launched this feature last, um, reinvent where basically it allowed, you know, channel partners such as Accenture to be able to bundle up their services, their data assets with an ISV solution and put it on marketplace, um, you know, Accenture and Elastic immediately saw an opportunity. [00:15:09] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, at the time most customers were doing gen ai. But they were running into the same challenge, which was that their data just was not ready. And by the way, this is a problem we were solving. Outside of marketplace. I think the, the feature that you guys launched just gave us a way to package it up and to be able to create this repeatable solution, which we call data readiness engine for gen ai and put it on marketplace. [00:15:40] Rekha Thangellapalli: And, um, this to me was a success because. Each company had a clear reason to invest. Um, so for Accenture, they were able to, you know, create a very differentiated services led offering. Uh, for Elastic, we were able to expand on our AI story. And for AWS, um, you know, it drives marketplace adoption, increases cloud consumption, all of that great stuff. [00:16:07] Rekha Thangellapalli: And customers, of course get. A solution to a very real problem t

Don’t let the AI wave crush you. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Dive into the seismic shifts happening within the AWS Marketplace and discover how AI, self-service product-led growth (PLG), and advanced co-selling strategies are redefining partner success. Matt Yanchyshyn, VP of Marketplace at AWS breaks down the recent announcements from the summit, illustrating how agility and adaptation are crucial to surviving the new agentic future. From lowering professional services fees to the explosion of business applications like ServiceNow, this conversation reveals the hidden mechanics of modern cloud procurement and how you can position your organization to capture massive enterprise opportunities before your competitors do. https://youtu.be/gaWxU1kgCLk Key Takeaways Adapting to the new agentic future requires agility rather than fighting the influx of AI tools. Lowering the listing fee for professional services from 2.5% to 0.5% drastically improves partner economics. Organizations without a self-service or PLG motion on the marketplace are literally leaving money on the table. Millennial buyers increasingly initiate complex enterprise procurements through self-service and AI-driven research. New AI-powered opportunity scoring empowers partners to prove their value internally and to AWS. Marketplace success hinges on optimizing metadata for AI agents, not just traditional SEO. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: AWS Marketplace, agentic workflow, med pick scoring, phoenix.ai, Cara Cloud, branded storefronts, product-led growth strategy, intrinsic value boost, SaaS evolution, self-service motion, Databricks credit model, Trend Micro companion app, MCP servers, opportunity score tracking, PPA drawdown, concurrent agreements, AAMI structural debt, CXML procurement Transcript: Matt Y Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Matt Y: The ability to adapt with change and kind of roll with punches. ’cause a lot of people are saying like, agents are gonna destroy everything. And, and the opposite has been true. [00:00:08] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:19] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:42] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. [00:00:46] Matt Y: Let’s start. [00:00:50] Vince Menzione: And now on to the really important stuff. So, Matt, I don’t wanna butcher it ’cause I, a couple people have told me how to pronounce your last name and they said use the word magician and you’ll get close to it. But I’m just gonna introduce you as Matt Wy and I’m gonna ask you to pronounce your name on stage, but I want to have you join us. [00:01:08] Vince Menzione: So excited to have Matt wy. After a super busy day and night last night, come over from Brooklyn and join us today. Matt, so great to have you. Thanks. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Alright, so pronounce your name for us. [00:01:23] Matt Y: Anyone wanna guess? Ian’s? It’s like magician. [00:01:27] Vince Menzione: It’s not that hard, [00:01:28] Matt Y: it’s not that [00:01:28] bad, [00:01:28] Vince Menzione: but I don’t wanna butcher. [00:01:29] Vince Menzione: I wanted to let you do it. Good. [00:01:30] Matt Y: What calls me Matt White. [00:01:31] Vince Menzione: That’s great. [00:01:32] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:01:32] Vince Menzione: So 13 years. [00:01:34] Matt Y: Four coming up on 14 next month. Yeah. [00:01:36] Vince Menzione: Wow. Congratulations. Yeah. So you’ve been there, you’ve been there since the early days. And we, we had a conversation. I had some Microsoft, former Microsoft colleagues. Uh, Theresa Carlson, for those of you who knew the public sector business. [00:01:48] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Who started, I mean, Andy came out, it was so funny because I was there and she was hosting Andy for a dinner and with all the CIOs of the federal government. [00:01:57] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:01:58] Vince Menzione: And she was still at Microsoft and it was actually kind of an interesting time. And she came over and did a lot of great things for a number of years. [00:02:04] Matt Y: Yeah. She [00:02:05] Vince Menzione: and a lot of great [00:02:05] Matt Y: business. [00:02:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah. She really like, it went from employee number one to 7,000. [00:02:09] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:02:09] Vince Menzione: And you, you were, you’ve been there all that whole time. Pretty much. [00:02:12] Matt Y: Yeah, I guess when I started in New York, just down the road, we were, uh, in a Regis facility. There were like 11 of us in, uh, just sitting around a table and we had to speak quietly sometimes because there was a, um. [00:02:21] Matt Y: Some type of a financial services organization down the hall and they’d listen to try and get stock tips on Amazon. Yeah, [00:02:28] Vince Menzione: I love it. [00:02:29] Matt Y: Never leaked. That’s [00:02:29] Vince Menzione: good. I love it. [00:02:30] Matt Y: Yeah, [00:02:30] Vince Menzione: you probably got some great stories and, um, we won’t have time for today ’cause I wanna leave some room for conversations on marketplace end questions. [00:02:38] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:02:38] Vince Menzione: But I would love to invite you back for a real, like, in-depth podcast and I would love to get the whole genesis story. [00:02:44] Matt Y: Let’s do it. [00:02:45] Vince Menzione: We’ll do it. Okay, so let’s talk about, let’s talk about yesterday for you. Uh, some, some really big announcements as well. I thought maybe you could recap a little bit of what’s been going on in the marketplace business and it’s an, it’s been an exciting time. [00:02:58] Matt Y: Yeah. Yeah. You know what’s, I think what was really nice yesterday is it was sort of the combination of bringing, uh, our partner services like Partner Central and all those other services together closer to marketplace. We’ve been doing that over, over several years. So Marketplace has some of its own. [00:03:12] Matt Y: Big announcements, like, uh, we have a, we formalized our list and sell initiative. For example. We have a new, so it we essentially reducing the cost, uh, to list on marketplace through a partner program. [00:03:22] Vince Menzione: Yep. [00:03:22] Matt Y: And incentives associated with that. We have a new AI powered listing experience, which I think is particularly important ’cause I think many of you are like me and watching your SEO numbers go down and watching your agent traffic go up. [00:03:33] Matt Y: And so having, uh, an AI assistance in marketplace to optimize your listings for not just to, you know, retain what you can of your SEO, but prepare for the newent future and improve your GEO as we’re calling it. So that, [00:03:45] Vince Menzione: so it’s GEO now? [00:03:46] Matt Y: Yeah. You know, there’s a little debate right now in the acronym Moral A A EO versus GO I’m going, I’m on the G team, so, yeah. [00:03:52] Vince Menzione: Alright. GEO [00:03:54] Matt Y: It’s like the, the, yeah, they’re gonna win. They’re like the Knicks, but the, um, [00:03:57] Vince Menzione: yeah, yeah, exactly. [00:03:57] Matt Y: But yeah, so AI assisted, uh, I mean, making. The most of, like, essentially marketplace is an excellent conversion engine. And so using AI to help improve that conversion engine in the form of your PDPs for both humans and agents. [00:04:08] Matt Y: So that was an exciting launch. Um, I got the most applause when I announced that. We lowered, we made the economics better for, uh, consulting offers professional services, nice to marketplace. We lowered the listing fee from 2.5 to, to 0.5% and wow, it goes even lower in certain circumstances. So just improving the economics. [00:04:24] Matt Y: I’m really excited to. Really partner with a lot of you to reinvent services through, through the marketplace like we did with SAS and other areas. Uh, and we’re doing with agents right now. So that was a big one. And then a whole series of announcements around, um, how we’re making it easier and more cost effective and more efficient to partner with AWS. [00:04:41] Matt Y: So using AI to, uh, using med pick scoring to automatically progress opportunities so you don’t have to kind of wait on a human. To, to click and progress, you know, that that can take days. And, uh, if you, if you wanna have an opportunity and have that be cos sold with AWS, that can be through a mix of agents for the long tail and with humans in the, in the sort of top end and more complex. [00:05:00] Matt Y: And allowing AI to help all the partners improve their opportunity quality so that we can better co-sell together. So. Yeah, I said AI a lot intentionally. Um, [00:05:09] Audience Guest: yeah, [00:05:10] Matt Y: AI sort of in the whole cycle for buyers, for sellers, uh, for operational efficiency, cost of sales. So a lot of announcements. I think I hit the big ones, so yeah. [00:05:18] Matt Y: I’m Might have missed something there. There we go. [00:05:21] Vince Menzione: George. [00:05:21] Matt Y: Oh, and storefront. Yeah. Thanks George. See, I look at George to see what I missed. Uh, we, we acquired a great company called phoenix.ai late last year. Okay. And you, you actually were said Caresoft and Yeah. Be down. Uh, [00:05:30] Vince Menzione: yeah. [00:05:30] Matt Y: So if you’re familiar with Cara Cloud, they have a procurement portal. [00:05:33] Matt Y: It’s heavy use by the US government, and they, um. Uh, we, we acquired them, uh, the really great growth company. They have over 70 logos now, and they help you build a branded storefront on marketplace, which obviously is important in the government space. If you’re procuring on a certain contract with a certain reseller, um, you know, there’s a certain set of products you’re allowed to buy. [00:05:51] Matt Y: But what we’re finding is even down on Wall Street, you hear, um, enterprises are, are using storefronts for internal procurement and they wanna have a curated collection of, of partner products and, and your own ecosystems internally. So we’re selling to both customers. And also to channel partners to build custom storefronts, branded storefronts for, and [00:06:07] Vince Menzione: it makes total sense, right? [00:06:08] Vince Menzione: Yeah, because you wanna li you wanna limit the, the viewing and, uh, and get, because I mean, how many different listings do we have? Like over 30,000? [00:06:16] Matt Y: Yeah. Yeah. There’s, I think the official numbers over th we have over 36,000. I was checking from over 6,000 vendors. Um, it’s a lot. And, and that’s gonna explode with the AI powered, uh, listing, uh, experience that we launched. [00:06:26] Matt Y: We’re gonna make it easier. And I guess what I’ve been telling partners is. You know, customers aren’t clicking through categories anymore. They’re using AI to search. And so it doesn’t matter how big our catalog is, what matters is being found. And what matters is converting that buyer. So if you have a. [00:06:39] Matt Y: If you’re running a demand gen campaign for say, like, you know, life sciences in, in Jersey and there’s a specific buyer at j and j, you wanna capture, that person doesn’t wanna be just dropped onto a generic marketplace, 30,000 listings. They wanna be dropped in a very specific place where they’re seeing like life sciences offers from Accenture, for example, coupled with a life sciences power thing with Elastic, you know, like, but a solution. [00:07:00] Matt Y: And that they want to land in a curated place where that highly intention buyer can be converted effectively. So that, that’s what we’re doing with all this. [00:07:06] Vince Menzione: And that’s where the GEO comes in because [00:07:09] Matt Y: Yeah. ’cause that buyer might be an agent That’s right. With, and that agent has is even more fickle, honestly. [00:07:14] Matt Y: And you know, what used to be milliseconds for the human before they kind of click away is, is now perhaps microseconds. Yeah. And so, uh, you know, having the right metadata and, and the right positioning, uh, the right story that an agent or a human can pick up to ultimately. Uh, complete their product research and choose your product is, is critical. [00:07:30] Vince Menzione: Very cool. Very cool. So before I, I, I’ve been asked to ask you this because I, I’ve had this con, people have brought come to me and said, you gotta ask Matt about music. He’s a big music guy. And, uh, so what are your favorite bands? [00:07:49] Matt Y: So, I mean, the, the real answer is, uh. I, I go to about a show about every week. [00:07:54] Matt Y: As, as Mike Trill knows, uh, we heard a show last night. Um, we were, uh, just a few hours ago, really? And, uh, um, favorite band, uh, well, I’ll tell, I’ll tell a story. I, I had a side hustle with MTV for years. Um, I used to run a music website. Um, oh, that’s cool. I didn’t know that. It got, it got kind of popular. It got sponsored by, if, if anyone’s into like early hip hop. [00:08:16] Matt Y: It got sponsored by a group called Jurassic Five. ’cause he, one of them reached out to me and said, nice. Hey, uh, you know, I’ve been, I like your website. And he ended up paying for a web, hosting a Dream host, if you remember, of cost back then. [00:08:26] Vince Menzione: Oh, Jesus. [00:08:26] Matt Y: Because I was broke and couldn’t afford it. And then, uh, and then this band sent me like a, a single and said, Hey, you know, trying to get the word out about our little band, can you help us out? [00:08:35] Matt Y: And I put their, uh, I put their, you know, single up on my, on my website and it blew up. And that band is Vampire Weekend. So they’re kind of big now. Wow. Yeah. Um, and uh, that got picked up by like Vanity Fair and all these other guys. And then I got sponsored by MTV to essentially write. Music reviews for years on the side. [00:08:51] Matt Y: So I was working for the Associated Press, laying cable in sports and war and, and, uh, yeah. So Vampire Weekend was good to me that, that they, they kind of paved a way to go to a lot of free shows over the years and a lot of bands and see a lot of great music. But yeah. [00:09:03] Vince Menzione: That is very cool. And that, and how did that get your day? [00:09:05] Vince Menzione: WS It was just a, it was just the technology path that was like, [00:09:09] Matt Y: I mean, it’s a, it’s a, I guess it’s a bit of a long story, but, um, the. There’s many versions of this story. I’ll tell the, tell the one quickly. I was living for free in a Fulbright scholarship house in West Africa. You, we can talk about how that happened another time. [00:09:23] Matt Y: And, uh, a guy had sort of fallen down on the floor ’cause he’d had too much to drink. And I, I sort of lay down beside and be like, Hey man, are you all right? And, um, he, uh. He worked, he, he worked for the Associated Press and next day I had the job, um, being West Africa, head of technology for West Africa. [00:09:37] Matt Y: And because of that, um, and as I learned years later, the AP didn’t have dr they had no disaster recovery. Yeah. And I, I can tell you that now ’cause um, you know, 16 years since I worked there, but they, uh, I put the DR in, um, on AWS and we’re talking like, yeah, 16, 17 years ago. This is early. It was early days. [00:09:56] Matt Y: And I, I swear to God, I paid for. Uh, our AWS bill using, um, taxi receipts, fake taxi receipts that I bought in on Nigerian market, um, because there was no budget and so, you know, it was like 30 bucks. [00:10:08] Vince Menzione: I was gonna say swipe a credit card, but they didn’t [00:10:09] Matt Y: knew that this is the entire press this before. [00:10:11] Vince Menzione: This is before, yeah. [00:10:12] Matt Y: Yeah, like the entire ap. Um, and, uh, so AWS called me like, who are you? Like, why, why are you paying on like this like low limit credit card for like the ap? Like, who are you? And, uh. Next day I had the job. Well, a week later I had the job with aw WS. That so cool. So that’s the story’s [00:10:29] Vince Menzione: cool thing. [00:10:29] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:10:30] Vince Menzione: Very cool. [00:10:31] Vince Menzione: Uh, sports teams. So Knicks fan. [00:10:34] Matt Y: Yeah, I mean, I like the Knicks. Um, they’re h hockey, I’m not allowed to say anything different. No. I appreciate them. Uh, I’m a Raptors fan. I grew up in Toronto mostly. Yeah, yeah. Uh, so, and you know, when they won, uh, that was very exciting as well. So no, Nicks are great. I like the Knicks. [00:10:49] Matt Y: Nothing against the Knicks. Um. They’re fine. Yeah. [00:10:54] Vince Menzione: Hockey, hockey fan. Favorite hockey teams? [00:10:56] Matt Y: Oh yeah. Itron. Maple leaf. Maple leaf. Yeah. They’re gonna, they’re gonna win. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Um, like every year they’re actually, we [00:11:02] Vince Menzione: have some Canadians laughing in the sand. [00:11:03] Matt Y: Well, the leaf are, are, are the Knicks of hockey? [00:11:05] Matt Y: Like Yes, they are. You know, it’s 67 years out, coming up on 68 since they won, so That’s crazy. 53 is nothing. I know. Pain. So. Yeah, definitely the least. Yeah. [00:11:15] Vince Menzione: I love it. I love it. It’s so cool. Yeah. So what was the, uh, what was the, what was the last concert you went to? [00:11:22] Matt Y: Well, literally last night. Oh, it was last, [00:11:23] Vince Menzione: oh, that [00:11:24] Matt Y: was actually concert were my favorite bar in the world. [00:11:26] Matt Y: This place called Sunny’s. Uh, it’s, you know, I, I took Mike and, and Matt from, from Texas and from TGS down there to sort of see my neighborhood and they’re like, where are we? And I’m like, yeah, I live here. Uh, sort of an industrial part of Brooklyn. And, and we went to see, um, I dunno what you would call it, like. [00:11:40] Matt Y: I guess it’d be like roots music. There was a woman with an accordion and a guy with a big cowboy hat. Yeah, it was, it was fun. Yeah. [00:11:47] Vince Menzione: That is so funny. Alright, we’re gonna shift back years. Um, important time right now for partners. What, what should partners be looking out for the most? What would you say to them in terms of what’s the, what’s their real headline for them? [00:11:59] Matt Y: Well, I, I, you know, to borrow from you actually, you know, I liked, uh, the, the principles you had up there and, and with agility, um, you know, there’s a lot of fud flying around right now. You know, people. People were like, oh, it’s the demise of sis with the arrival of ai, you know, everyone’s gonna be using agents. [00:12:13] Matt Y: And then it turns out it’s been a huge boon for most, uh, you know, system integrators and consulting companies that I work with. They all have, you know, the, the good ones especially have vibrant consulting practices now, and everyone is deploying fds, uh, you know, um, the new, the new cool acronym. But it’s, it’s essentially created a huge opportunity for the consulting space. [00:12:31] Matt Y: Uh, and similarly, uh, you know, there there’s this narrative around the sa sa apocalypse, which I really hate, you know, ’cause it was, uh, premature and kind of a trigger reaction from the stock market. And, you know, just look, look what Snowflake did. And, you know, they did w

Unlocking billions in cloud marketplace revenue. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ This powerful panel discussion featuring leaders from Google, Tackle, and dbt Labs dives deep into the explosive growth of cloud marketplaces and the radical shift toward AI-driven go-to-market strategies. With hyperscaler backlogs nearing half a trillion dollars, the conversation unpacks how top-tier organizations are transforming their compensation models, aligning executive buy-in, and navigating the complexities of co-selling to capture committed customer budgets. From the rise of AI agents acting as metered SaaS to the essential operational investments required to scale marketplace revenue from 10% to over 50%, this session provides an actionable roadmap for software companies ready to dominate the 2026 partner ecosystem. https://youtu.be/LSj49f5FEII Key Takeaways Hyperscaler backlog commitments represent a massive, nearly half-trillion-dollar addressable market that completely changes the budgeting conversation. Successful marketplace selling requires complete executive alignment, right down to the CFO, and strategic adjustments like spiffing sales teams for marketplace transactions. The AI category is experiencing staggering 18x year-over-year growth, forcing companies to pivot toward an “agent-first” go-to-market model. Shifting from traditional channels to cloud go-to-market demands a multi-year, intentional investment in operations, people, and technology. System integrators are evolving into software companies as they build orchestration agents to manage fragmented, end-to-end workflows. Leveraging cloud commitments bypasses standard 12-15 month budget cycles, allowing for significantly faster deal closures and larger initial lands. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Google Cloud Marketplace, hyperscaler backlog, cloud commitments, co-selling strategies, AI agents, metered SaaS, product-led growth, rev ops, B2B sales transformation, ecosystem shift, channel strategy, system integrators, Deal registration, private offer APIs, digital transformation, software procurement. Transcript: Insight to Revenue- The State of Cloud GTM [00:00:00] Dai Vu: These are all things everyone has to do to get to that first five to 10 deals, and then 10, 20, 30% of your business through Marketplace. [00:00:09] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:21] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology. Partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:43] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes [00:00:46] John Janke: everything. Let’s start. [00:00:52] Vince Menzione: And we have an incredible session. The way that we wanted today to, to, to start the day up was like, let’s talk about what’s happening right now and let’s get three leaders in this space to come up and talk about the world and how it’s a rapidly evolving. So I want to invite to the stage dvu from Google is a great friend of Ultimate Partner. [00:01:14] Vince Menzione: Are you guys ready? Are you guys micd up already? Okay, good. Good. John Yanke, the CEO and Founder of Tackle, and Sean Todo, who is an incredible leader with DBT, but also an old friend of mine. We worked together on Microsoft Days. Good to see you gentlemen. Thanks Sean. Great to have you with us. [00:01:37] John Janke: They stuck me on the side ’cause they said I’d block the screen if I sat in the middle. [00:01:41] Shawn Toldo: You still block it a little bit. [00:01:42] John Janke: And that picture’s from like 1985. I, I, we do have to get that. I had way darker hair. It was, uh, 10 year, 10 years at a startup. Makes you turn white. [00:01:52] Shawn Toldo: Mine’s the exact same right now. So it’s all good. [00:01:55] Shawn Toldo: Mine’s AI generated. Yeah. [00:01:57] Vince Menzione: Well, you know, guys, I just took it all off at that point, you know, it’s like good. Yeah, but you lose enough of it. You pull it out over the years. Yeah. So, uh, some really exciting times. Uh, you, we gotta spend some time at you at our breakfast. That’s right. A couple weeks ago. [00:02:13] Dai Vu: A lot of folks here, too. [00:02:14] Vince Menzione: A lot of folks that are here were at that breakfast, and I thought we’d spend a few moments with you talking about all the exciting things that have been happening at, at Google. I mean the, yeah, the businesses just to, first of all, the numbers were house. Outstanding. Congratulations. [00:02:28] Dai Vu: That’s right. [00:02:28] Vince Menzione: Yep. [00:02:28] Vince Menzione: Really, some really great numbers. Commitments are off the charts. [00:02:32] Dai Vu: Yes. [00:02:32] Vince Menzione: Crazy off the charts. [00:02:33] Dai Vu: Yes. [00:02:34] Vince Menzione: Yes. Uh, and then there’s a lot happening in this little world called ai, which makes a ton of sense. Yep. I was critical about Google in the beginning because you had all the assets, but Microsoft leaned in first. [00:02:45] Vince Menzione: Uh, but now it’s like things have evolved, uh, quite a bit since those first days. Absolutely. In, in November of 2022. So, uh, take us through a little bit. Let’s, let’s go through [00:02:56] Dai Vu: it. Yeah. I could talk for quite a bit of time because obviously we came out next, yeah. At the end of April, and then we had our earnings announced, but shortly thereafter. [00:03:03] Dai Vu: But, but real quick on next, uh, for folks who attended, uh, you know, the way they framed, uh, the discussion was they showed this AI integrated stack, and that’s how they frame the keynote because we position ourselves as being the only vendor that provides this. Fully integrated stack from custom silicon all the way to the apps and agents. [00:03:23] Dai Vu: And a lot of the announcements were, were focused in those areas. Um, uh, I won’t go through the, the long list, but I think the big ones coming out of next were, uh, certainly the eighth generation TPU we announced, so we actually split this into two specialized chips for training and inference. Uh, so that’s, uh, that was a big piece. [00:03:41] Dai Vu: Uh, but the big one that we announced was this, uh, Gemini Enterprise. Uh, agent platform. So think of it as the comprehensive platform for companies to basically build scale, govern and optimize their agents. And of course, once they have that, they can bring that into, uh, what we call a Gen Gemini enterprise app, which is really the front door for AI for. [00:04:03] Dai Vu: All customers and all employees to manage a mix of agents, um, as part of their daily workflow. And, uh, and a big part of it is, you know, certainly they’ll have some custom agents, but we think a lot of the agents will come from the ecosystem. And obviously there was a big announcement around what we’re doing there. [00:04:21] Dai Vu: Um, and in fact, one of the things that’s interesting is this shows the evolution of, of marketplace in our, in our partnership, which is we’ve taken a lot of the marketplace experience. And brought it into Gemini exp uh, Gemini Enterprise app, right? So search, discovery, uh, the ability to invoke agents, uh, in context. [00:04:39] Dai Vu: I think that’s gonna be very powerful as we think about the evolution, uh, of, of go to market. And then the last thing maybe I’ll highlight is this, um, is. 750 million, uh, investment fund that we’re gonna drive with the broad partnership. So this cuts across all partner types, global system integrators, uh, uh, you know, AI, pure plays, uh, ISVs, uh, the big management consultants as well, uh, because we recognize that partners are gonna be critical to drive business transformation with our end customers. [00:05:08] Dai Vu: So we’re investing around things like. Technical enablement, access to our product teams, access to our FDE for deployment engineers, and then a lot of incentives to drive usage and deployment. So, um, so a lot of, a lot of activity and obviously the ecosystem’s gonna be very critical for us to drive that impact’s. [00:05:25] Dai Vu: Fine. And the last thing, I know we’ve going on and on fine, but the last thing I’ll just mention is just on the earnings announcement, uh, Vince touched on the backlog, so people have been tracking Yeah. Two quarters ago. We were 155 billion on the backlog, and then a quarter later we were 240 billion. And then in the last quarter, just recently, 462 billion. [00:05:46] Dai Vu: So obviously that’s a, a massive signal of customer intent, but more importantly, it’s a, it’s, it’s a addressable market for this ecosystem to go after as well. [00:05:54] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Almost a half a trillion dollars. Yes. In commitment. So a lot, a lot of reason why we should be on the marketplace. [00:06:01] Dai Vu: Absolutely. Absolutely. [00:06:02] Vince Menzione: Um, each of these gentlemen have some things to talk about as well, about their companies and the exciting things that have been happening. [00:06:08] Vince Menzione: I’m gonna start, John, I’m gonna start with you because Tackle has, has transformed quite a bit since the last time you were on stage with us. I thought maybe introduce the company. Take us through the transformation and then we’re gonna do the same thing with Sean with his organization. [00:06:21] John Janke: Yeah. Thanks. Uh, thanks Vince. [00:06:23] John Janke: Great to see everybody. Uh, John Yanke, GM of Tackle at App Direct. So the big news there is Tackle was acquired in Q4 by a company called App Direct, and I think the why behind this app, direct Powers, marketplaces, they run 400 marketplaces around the world for telcos, for ISVs, for system integrators, channel partners. [00:06:42] John Janke: And we were talk like, when you build a marketplace and diagnose this, stocking the shelves is actually really hard. Uh, and we were talking to them about how could we connect the dots between the hyperscaler marketplaces, the iscs we support, and these additional routes to market. Uh, and that became more strategic and we ended up joining forces in December. [00:07:00] John Janke: And since then, the other part that’s really hard when you build a marketplace is how do you generate demand? Uh, so four weeks ago we acquired a company called Partner Stack. And Partner Stack does affiliate content. They have an affiliate content platform that allows you to connect with 150,000 content providers to be able to start to tell your story to drive leads to. [00:07:23] John Janke: Marketplace. So we think there is a tremendous opportunity to continue. We’re in the earliest days. I think the, you know, Jay, I was with Jay at Channel Partners a few weeks ago and he is like, we under called it, he didn’t say this on stage yesterday, but he is like, uh, the 82% growth. He’s like, we totally under called it. [00:07:40] John Janke: Uh, and I think just listening to dies commit level increase mm-hmm. Reinforces the fact that we’ve under called it. But I also think we’re at this tipping point in the market where all of the new capabilities coming out, we have to all rethink our better together stories. So I think the challenge to all partner leaders, it’s like, how do we. [00:07:58] John Janke: Figure that out. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a fun time. As we transform the way we worked. We wrote the first helping people kind of list, launch and sell through the marketplaces. And now to be able to take that to the next level to hopefully unlock the next a hundred billion of marketplace throughput. [00:08:13] Vince Menzione: And are we at a hundred billion? [00:08:15] Vince Menzione: ’cause that was the number, right? [00:08:16] John Janke: I mean that’s, that’s, that’s the number that’s talked about. I mean, we’re seeing the data signals we see, I mean, we will process 20 billion plus this year. Uh, and that number’s growing faster than Jay’s stated number. So I think we’re excited to see where this year lands. [00:08:30] Vince Menzione: We’ve come a long way from three years ago and we all got on stage and talked about marketplaces together. Right. It’s been, it’s been amazing. And then Sean, let’s talk about DBT. You’ve had some excitement. I know some things maybe we can’t even talk about yet on stage. [00:08:43] Shawn Toldo: Uh, yeah, go ahead. [00:08:44] Vince Menzione: No, I was saying I, I could, I’ll pre-announce things, but No, I’m just, uh, tell, tell us about DBT for those who don’t know in the room, sure. [00:08:49] Vince Menzione: Mean Yeah, that might help. [00:08:51] Shawn Toldo: So, uh, Sean Todo, I lead the partner business at DBT. I’ve been here about 18 months. Um, DBT really started as an open source tool. That help data engineers be successful in SQL transformation with cloud data warehouses? Right. And so back even to the Redshift days now into what I would call more the BigQuery, snowflake, Databricks fabric led days, um, DBT is the tool of choice amongst the data engineering community in terms of how they wanna drive SQL transformation. [00:09:21] Shawn Toldo: And so more recently, we kind of jumped into this kind of paid world. Which is why we needed to bring in additional experience leadership around go to market product, sales, et cetera. And so when I walked in the door, one of the things I noticed really quickly was we were running on AWS, which was great. [00:09:40] Shawn Toldo: We were doing some AWS marketplace stuff. We were running on Azure in Europe only. And one of my first strategies was we have to be everywhere, right customer. We have to meet customers where they are. And so we, uh, made some major investments to be on Google Cloud platform to then be able to really take advantage of marketplace, to then really be able to take advantage of the co-sell opportunities that exist in the field from a day, day-to-day AI perspective with Google. [00:10:07] Shawn Toldo: And it has been a hell of a ride. We launched on, uh, Google Marketplace in July of last year. We went to Google next and we were Google Partner of the Year. Wow. For data and analytics in a very rapid way. We’re now in three, uh, data centers around the, the world. So we’re here in the us, we’re in Frankfurt, we’re in uh, uh, UK as well. [00:10:30] Shawn Toldo: And so it’s been a pleasure to work with D and the broader team. Because the enablement we’ve had and the support we’ve had from that group has really helped our growth be up and to the right. The data point I would give is that when I walked in the door, we were 10% of our business from an A RR perspective was transacting through marketplace. [00:10:48] Shawn Toldo: Last quarter we cracked 40%. Whoa. We will be at north of 50, uh, next quarter. [00:10:53] Dai Vu: Wow. [00:10:54] Shawn Toldo: The other piece that Vince was talking about is we’re getting ready to merge with a company called Five Tran. And so there will be a new company name at some point down the road. Uh, pay attention on June 1st for a public announcement around that merger. [00:11:06] Shawn Toldo: Uh, but we’re really looking forward to what we’re gonna be able to do with folks like DI and the Google team as well as others in the ecosystem. Um, ’cause I think in this data world that we’ve played for so long. This trusted foundational element of data and what it’s gonna mean to context in the AI world. [00:11:23] Shawn Toldo: We’re in a very interesting place to really continue our growth rate at a high level. [00:11:28] John Janke: Yeah, that maybe just a comment something there. Start there. I think we, we used to hear people say we wanted to be strategic with cloud, go to market and get to say 10 or 20% of revenue. I think this like 40, 50%. Yeah. Th that’s where people are setting the bar these days. [00:11:43] John Janke: Yeah. So the numbers are getting really crazy. Yeah. Uh, and people are showing up and being like, I have to go big. Mm-hmm. So a huge change over the last few years. [00:11:52] Vince Menzione: Yep. What’s the experience you’re seeing as well? I mean, it, it was a huge amount of buzz at next. [00:11:57] Dai Vu: Yeah. I mean, so interestingly, um, you know, typically when, when people get started on the, on the marketplace in Cosal journey, I always try to caution them and say, this is, uh, this is like a multi-year. [00:12:07] Dai Vu: Yeah. Uh, process. You have to be very intentional. You have to invest. It’s not gonna be a thing where you just list and, and, and, and, and, and sort of this channel opens up. So in some ways, Sean is describing an acceleration that is not common, right? Uh, so they’ve done, we’ve done some amazing things together and we hope to keep that acceleration going. [00:12:22] Vince Menzione: What does that require, by the way? Is it engineering resource? I mean, there’s, I talk about executive commitment and maniacal focus. Yeah. But it’s all those things, right? [00:12:29] Shawn Toldo: Well, all of it. But we went to a QBR in Austin, and I put up a slide and I said, we have to do this. And everybody in our ETE agreed. So when you have a chief financial officer that’s bought into the partner business. [00:12:43] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. And I guess qualifying coming into this role at this company, I qualified the C-level staff. Uh, like are they really serious about partner or not? And it’s one of the reasons I took the role. So I think executive commitment was one thing. I think the second thing is we were really well supported, um, by the Google team across the board, right? [00:13:02] Shawn Toldo: Yeah. So folks, Indy’s team that we would work with regularly on, these are the things you need to do to have an effective marketplace offering. Here’s what you need to do operationally with folks like John and team and others that are in the market, right? That helped us a ton to be able to scale. And then the other thing that we did is we changed comp. [00:13:20] Shawn Toldo: So from our VP of sales levels down, we have a 5% kicker for everything that goes through marketplace. [00:13:26] Vince Menzione: Hear [00:13:26] Shawn Toldo: that everyone. So as soon as we incented the sales team, I love that, right? We, we created the foundation on the partner side, but then from top down on the sales side, they were all in. And as a result of that, the question would become, okay, which marketplace stage two sales cycle are we gonna go use? [00:13:42] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:13:43] Shawn Toldo: Who’s the right partner to go partner with? And then my team is reaching out to make sure that co-sell connection happens. [00:13:48] Vince Menzione: That is such a best practice, Sean, to, because there is, as a seller out in the field and we talk about, you talk to John, talks about rev ops all the time. But getting rev ops eng getting the field engaged in the right way. [00:14:01] Vince Menzione: ’cause it feels like it’s more work for them. ’cause they have to think, they have to have more conversations with their customer about their cloud commitments and things like that. Mm-hmm. And then getting them incentive to do the right things. The right behavior. [00:14:12] John Janke: Yeah. It’s a strategy process. People, technology problem. [00:14:17] John Janke: Yeah. It’s not just some flip API automation, go list something if you don’t like that top down v

Master the new Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Discover the tectonic shifts happening within the Microsoft ecosystem as Cyril Belikoff and Jon Yoo dive deep into the unification of the Microsoft Marketplace and the explosive rise of AI-driven commerce. This comprehensive discussion explores how the marketplace is transitioning from an incubation island to the mainland of Microsoft’s go-to-market strategy, allowing partners to tap into massive Azure consumption commitments. Learn how product-led growth, AI agents, and optimized digital flows are replacing traditional sales motions, making cloud marketplaces the default engine for scaling revenue in 2026 and beyond. https://youtu.be/cAeSIEXbnNo Key Takeaways Microsoft unified its various marketplaces into a single digital flywheel for customers to discover, try, and buy applications. Applications, such as Copilot certified agents, are contextually surfaced directly within Microsoft products to meet users in their flow of work. Customers are making massive Azure commitments, and purchasing full software stacks through the marketplace retires those commitments entirely. Cloud marketplaces have evolved from a secondary channel into the default go-to-market engine with triple-digit revenue growth. Partners must shift from deal-led transactions to product-led growth by optimizing their digital marketplace listings for AI and search engines. The future of software procurement will increasingly involve AI agents acting on behalf of organizations to seamlessly integrate multiple smaller applications. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Microsoft Marketplace, Azure commitments, AI agents, Frontier transformation, M365 Copilot, Foundry, digital flywheel, co-selling, product-led growth, ecosystem shift, SaaS distribution, REO, resale enabled offer, listing optimization, search engine optimization, agentic commerce, cloud go-to-market, revenue recognition, multi-party private offers, Hyperscalers Transcript: Cyril Belikoff and Jon Yoo Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Cyril Belikoff: Why do you have to outsource this or create this vi? Just edit the video right there yourself. Like why do you have to just go do the, as a marketer you want to create a beautiful piece of content, just go and create it. ’cause it can create it for you. Now [00:00:13] Jon Yoo: you can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering. [00:00:19] Jon Yoo: How AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:25] Vince Menzione: Welcome to The Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Manzione, your host. [00:00:30] Jon Yoo: We just wrapped up two days in Bellevue with some of the sharpest partner leaders in the business, and what we heard wasn’t incremental, it was tectonic. In this series, we’re going deeper into these conversations, the insights, the frameworks, the real movement we’re seeing in this market right now, because being in the room changes everything and we’re bringing that room to you. [00:00:55] Vince Menzione: And I am thrilled actually for this next one. Uh, I’ve had this opportunity to spend a little bit of time with this gentleman before, and welcoming him back is a pleasure and an honor. Cyril Beov, the vice president. I’m gonna botch up your title ’cause I always say marketplaces, but it’s much more than that. [00:01:14] Vince Menzione: So come on up, zero. And we’re gonna have a conversation and Cyril is amongst other things at Microsoft. Good to see you, sir. Yeah, [00:01:24] Cyril Belikoff: you too, [00:01:25] Vince Menzione: uh, is responsible for the, the Microsoft marketplace. [00:01:29] Cyril Belikoff: Are these your notes here? [00:01:30] Vince Menzione: These are, um, what is that? Yeah, these is gonna be our, our questions, so we, yeah, I, I need help sometimes so prompting, but, uh, so great to have you. [00:01:38] Vince Menzione: So just for purposes of title and context, ’cause your role is much bigger than just marketplace. Yeah. And we’re, we’re gonna sit down and John, is this me? Yes. And then John’s gonna join us. [00:01:47] Cyril Belikoff: Okay. Great. [00:01:48] Joe, [00:01:48] Vince Menzione: well, we’re gonna get started and start having a conversation. And we’ve, we’ve done some of these things before. [00:01:53] Vince Menzione: I’ve, I’ve had, you had me on your stage Yes. In your event at Alyssa Taylor’s event. [00:01:57] Cyril Belikoff: Yes. [00:01:58] Vince Menzione: And then, uh, we’ve, we’ve done some nice things together on stage, both at, at our event in Redmond last year. Yes. Then at our big, uh, ignite breakfast back [00:02:07] Cyril Belikoff: and forth, we had Vince come to our wider org and sort of, uh, I got to do the reverse. [00:02:13] Cyril Belikoff: And so interview him in front of a bunch of, uh, 500 marketers on what do we have to think about for partners. And so he gave us sort of the what’s going on in the partner ecosystem, how to think about it as we think about it, our marketing. [00:02:26] Vince Menzione: And I tried to be candid and represent this group. [00:02:28] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, that’s great. [00:02:29] Yeah. [00:02:30] Vince Menzione: Was wonderful. Thank you for doing that. [00:02:31] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. [00:02:32] Vince Menzione: You, you work, you work in an amazing organization. Um, I’ve known Alyssa for many years as well, and you’re an incredible leader. And I just, I wanna frame this maybe with a conversation about, ’cause we’re gonna talk about what’s changed, but, but I think it’s still important for everybody in the room to understand what you did and what your team orchestrated around market. [00:02:52] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah, [00:02:52] Vince Menzione: because it was fragmented, it was in different organizations, it felt very dis disorganized, I guess. Yeah. For lack of a better word. [00:02:59] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Thank you. Um, essentially we took it from incubation Island to the mainland Microsoft. I love it. Uh, GTM [00:03:07] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:03:07] Cyril Belikoff: Is the simplest way to think about it. Um, and, uh, come September last year now, uh, we unified the, the, the, the many marketplaces. [00:03:19] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, whether it was an Azure marketplace or AppSource and others, and we created the new Microsoft marketplace. Yeah. So one single place for customers to come, discover, try, buy, and for partners, software companies and other NSIs to put their wares up. And, uh, it was the first step in a vision for us to create this digital flywheel for us to bring our customers and our partners together in a more, you know, automated way. [00:03:47] Vince Menzione: Which it, it sounds crazy when you think about it, right? Microsoft has always been like the partnership leader, the leader in the technology, and to have fragmented marketplaces before, right? Yeah. And so what clarity to bring that all together. [00:04:00] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. It was a big, it was a big step for us and I think what we realized is that customers and partners were saying, Hey, uh, it’s all one place. [00:04:07] Cyril Belikoff: If I’m looking for a SaaS application or an agent or, and plug into teams or whatever it is. I just want to get it all in one spot. Uh, and, uh, and then we need you to connect us to your channel. [00:04:21] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:04:21] Cyril Belikoff: Uh, and your partners and, uh, can you build out, you know, partner capabilities for that Connects channel to software companies, to, to customers in a digital flywheel way. [00:04:30] Cyril Belikoff: Um, one of the things we actually also announced at that time was this concept of what we call. The marketplace framework. So it’s not just the fact that we have this digital experience or web experience, but that, um, applications that go into the marketplace, depending on the type of applications they get contextually surfaced within Microsoft products. [00:04:53] Vince Menzione: Okay. [00:04:53] Cyril Belikoff: And so if you’re, [00:04:54] Vince Menzione: explain that for this Yeah. For me and for this crap. [00:04:57] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. So if you are a, um, if you’re a co-pilot certified agent. M 365 copilot agent, you’ll be in the marketplace, but you’ll also be automatically surfaced inside the M 365 copilot, um, product. [00:05:11] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:05:12] Cyril Belikoff: Same for, uh, large language models in foundry, add-ins in teams, those sort of things. [00:05:18] Cyril Belikoff: ’cause it’s one thing to be where people go to discover Tribu, but users also go into these stores, whether it’s a developer user or an end user. They go in the flow of their work and they want to move quickly. Yes. And so, uh, so they have access. We think that’s very attractive. And the feedback was, Hey, that’s quite differentiated. [00:05:35] Cyril Belikoff: ’cause we have, uh, hundreds of millions of customers in these products every day. [00:05:39] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:05:39] Cyril Belikoff: And so giving our customers access, our partners access to it and improving their customer experience, um, has worked out well. [00:05:47] Vince Menzione: And something else you did too, because at one point, you know, we were talking about co-selling and single-threaded. [00:05:53] Vince Menzione: And Microsoft has this incredible ecosystem and channel. [00:05:57] Cyril Belikoff: Yes. [00:05:58] Vince Menzione: And it, it was totally disconnected from the whole marketplace strategy, right? Yes. Yeah. [00:06:03] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. So we, uh, um, we launched, I think in, uh, sorry. At that time in September, we launched five of our largest distributors who were also federating the Microsoft marketplace into their marketplaces. [00:06:16] Cyril Belikoff: And then in the November timeframe at Microsoft Ignite, we launched resale enabled offer [00:06:23] Vince Menzione: RO, [00:06:23] Cyril Belikoff: which is REO, which is a new capability that is proven extremely popular, that connects the software company and the reseller, you know, um, to go and do more deals at scale faster. So [00:06:36] Vince Menzione: we have, we have four of the Es in the room, [00:06:38] Cyril Belikoff: right? [00:06:38] Vince Menzione: Some of the four at the top. Five or six. And then also one of your largest resellers software, one is here as well. [00:06:45] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Great. [00:06:46] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:47] Cyril Belikoff: Great. So it’s, uh, we’ve been busy. [00:06:48] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:49] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Like I said, um, uh, much more work to do. But we are moving from like this incubation project to mainland get it integrated into our core customer, go to market, uh, so that our, uh, software companies and partners have access to those customers. [00:07:03] Cyril Belikoff: And then integration, uh, with the channel. So [00:07:06] Vince Menzione: it’s been a lot happening these last 12 months. Uh. Then Frontier, let’s talk about Frontier. That’s another piece of this. [00:07:14] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. I’m sure Steven touched on, uh, frontier Transformational or becoming Frontier or Frontier Firm. So probably not helpful to me rehash that. [00:07:23] Cyril Belikoff: I think in general. If you go to a Microsoft discussion or session and you don’t hear about frontier or Frontier transformation, please like, raise your hand and give feedback because that is, um, [00:07:34] Vince Menzione: I kept away from the word frontier with Steve. We were talking about it, but we weren’t using the term frontier. [00:07:38] Vince Menzione: Yeah. ’cause I feel like it gets overused. It’s, [00:07:40] Cyril Belikoff: yeah, it does. It’s, it’s sort of, um, what we try to do with it is articulate it in a way that it’s not just about AI for AI’s sake. [00:07:48] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:07:48] Cyril Belikoff: But it’s AI based on what the customer outcome is trying to, what the customer is trying to achieve on their outcome. Um, and so as part of that, of course, you know, agents, AI applications is a big part of what’s driving customers’ capability of, uh, to become frontier. [00:08:05] Cyril Belikoff: And, uh, the marketplace is part of that. ’cause they can either custom build that. Uh, or they can, you know, buy off the shelf, right? Uh, or, and actually in Combin they do mostly they do both, right? And so, um, in order to accelerate their ability to become more frontier, we have these, uh, partners that build, uh, third party solutions through a marketplace. [00:08:27] Cyril Belikoff: And then, uh, uh, those same partners or others that build bespoke solutions around that. So, um, a lot of momentum around, uh, AI apps and agencies, as you can imagine. Um, we have, I think, 5,000 plus AI apps and agents. [00:08:43] Vince Menzione: I was gonna ask you what you’re focused on now, but you, I think you’re tying into this now already. [00:08:47] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Um, so of course that’s important. [00:08:50] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:08:50] Cyril Belikoff: But really for us it’s about doubling down on driving customer, customer demand. How do we merchandise the right things that customers are looking for? How do we, uh, accelerate any of our flows? Like we will spend hours just looking at like the flow of one scenario. [00:09:07] Cyril Belikoff: Where is it getting stuck? How do we improve it? Um, and then how do we connect it to the channel? And, and what, what more things can we do like EO or multi-party private offers and the like, and we have. Probably an announcement a month in the next three or four months. [00:09:24] Vince Menzione: Oh, come on. Let’s, [00:09:24] Cyril Belikoff: that will, [00:09:25] Vince Menzione: I know, I know it’s early. [00:09:26] Vince Menzione: I know it’s early, but you, you’ve got some, I know you’ve got some things. Think [00:09:29] Cyril Belikoff: about the customer experience. Think about the channel integration and dream about [00:09:33] Vince Menzione: what maybe more of a global scale with some of the offerings, maybe, maybe. Um, so, you know, I, so I, the earnings, we talked about the earnings with Steven, but I thought that there was a very compelling number around the commitment number. [00:09:46] Vince Menzione: Yes. You and you run your Azure as part of your remit. We didn’t go through your entire remit. [00:09:50] Cyril Belikoff: Yep. [00:09:51] Vince Menzione: It’s not just marketplace. You also, you also own the Azure number. [00:09:53] Cyril Belikoff: Yep. [00:09:54] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about that. [00:09:55] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Um. You know, it’s, it’s exciting times for customers. They want to do things not only with us, but with everyone in the room. [00:10:04] Cyril Belikoff: Um, and they are making very large commitments, huge commitments over the next two to three years to spend on Azure. Um, and so it’s now our joint jobs to go and help them identify the right business outcome and go and, you know, consume that commitment. It is just a commitment. It’s not actual. Consumption. [00:10:27] Cyril Belikoff: Yes. And so it’s all of our jobs to take advantage of that. The, the customers are saying, Hey, we have line of sight to the types of things we want to go do over the next two to three years. Uh, probably not everything is, you know, i’s dotted and t’s across, but they have line of sight to most of it. Um, and how do we go help them drive that? [00:10:46] Cyril Belikoff: Um, and so from an Azure perspective, obviously that’s very encouraging for us. It, it allows us to. Invest in more data centers and more capacity that we are doing as fast as we can. Um, and then, um, and then of course on marketplace, the marketplace can retire. [00:11:04] Vince Menzione: That’s [00:11:04] Cyril Belikoff: that Azure commitment. That’s, [00:11:05] Vince Menzione: I wanted to make sure [00:11:06] Cyril Belikoff: people understand that the, in fact, not only the Azure component from the marketplace, but the full software stack from the partner, uh, the software company retires the Azure commitment. [00:11:17] Cyril Belikoff: So if it’s. Uh, I’ll make it up if it’s, uh, a hundred bucks and it’s 50 50, it’s not 50 50, but, um, I won’t disclose any percentages, but let’s say it’s 50 50, it’s much more for the software company, by the way. Um, if it’s 50 50, it’s not just like the $50 for Azure that gets retired. It’s the entire a hundred dollars that gets retired on the customer commitment, commitment, which is great for the software company. [00:11:39] Cyril Belikoff: It’s also great for the customer that they can, you know. Bring that through, uh, to, uh, to their Azure commitment. And we do the same thing with our sellers. So the marketplace sales retire our sellers compensation. So we’re like checking every box so that there’s no friction in the system. So that, so the partner, the customer, our sellers, they’re all juiced to go and. [00:12:03] Cyril Belikoff: Deals with marketplace. [00:12:04] Vince Menzione: I, I hope everybody un understand. I mean, I understand this. I hope everybody else understand this too. ’cause I, I was, watch, you know, I, I, I watched LinkedIn and I see people post things and somebody made a comment about how difficult it was to use Microsoft Portal. And I was thinking to myself, do you realize that there’s, I’ll say 150 billion, but it’s probably a bigger number than that. [00:12:22] Vince Menzione: That’s a total addressable market available to you if you’re a Microsoft partner. You can access these customer commitments. [00:12:30] Cyril Belikoff: Oh yes. [00:12:30] Vince Menzione: If you bring your product on Mark over 400 now [00:12:32] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. [00:12:33] Vince Menzione: You bring your product into the marketplace, you have access and the customer can retire that commitment. [00:12:38] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. [00:12:39] Vince Menzione: Without having to justify a new cost justification. [00:12:41] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. They don’t have to go to procurement. They don’t have to. Yeah. [00:12:44] Vince Menzione: Yeah. I mean, it’s a huge opportunity. [00:12:46] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. [00:12:46] Vince Menzione: So, um, so you’ve been focused on quite a bit. We wanted to invite John on stage. [00:12:53] Cyril Belikoff: Great. [00:12:53] Vince Menzione: John, you from Sugar is here. Where’s John? Is John in the house? Where’s John? [00:12:57] Cyril Belikoff: There he is. [00:12:58] Vince Menzione: Who’s also an expert in Marketplace. [00:13:00] Vince Menzione: A great friend of Ultimate Partner. Great. Hey, how’s it going? He’s a great partner of Ultimate Partner. Great to see you, sir. All the way from San Fran. Oh, actually we’re on your side of the coast, so, uh, it’s long. He looks [00:13:12] Jon Yoo: cooler than us [00:13:12] Vince Menzione: though. He, he always looks cool. I said that about time. [00:13:15] Jon Yoo: You know, I gotta be comfortable. [00:13:16] Jon Yoo: I gotta be comfortable. [00:13:18] Vince Menzione: So John, good to, good to have you. You’re thanks for having us. You guys are like, every time I see a post from you, you’re moving into a new office space ’cause you’ve outgrown your office space. [00:13:26] Jon Yoo: Yeah, we’re, we’re really excited about the new office. We have hvac, which is a, a big, big, uh, it’s a big thing. [00:13:31] Jon Yoo: Improvements, high ceilings, you know, the whole works h help [00:13:36] Cyril Belikoff: sometimes. Yeah, [00:13:37] Jon Yoo: yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we have our, uh, office opening party if anyone’s an SF on Ally first. [00:13:41] Vince Menzione: Nice. Nice. Yeah. Ma

The 7 Principles of Successful Partnering in the Age of AI Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this engaging session, Vince Menzione reflects on his extensive career transitioning from direct enterprise sales to building massive channel ecosystems, while unveiling the seven core operating principles essential for modern partnering. Highlighting tectonic industry shifts—from the PC and Cloud eras to the current AI revolution—Vince explains how traditional playbooks are becoming obsolete and why adopting a growth mindset, modeled by leaders like Satya Nadella, is critical for survival. He delves into the rising importance of hyperscaler marketplaces and co-selling, urging leaders to cultivate adaptability (AQ), emotional intelligence (EQ), and mutual trust to thrive in this rapidly changing tech landscape. https://youtu.be/5n8dqiamnmE Key Takeaways Traditional industry playbooks are outdated almost immediately due to the rapid acceleration of AI and market changes. Implementing a “growth mindset” is a foundational operating principle that can transform corporate culture and drive massive valuation increases. Executive commitment and clarity of vision are mandatory for aligning an entire organization around successful partnering. Building a strong brand story and maintaining a maniacal focus on OKRs turns strategic vision into executed results. The technology landscape has experienced massive tectonic shifts from the PC era to the Cloud, Mobile, and now AI, requiring high adaptability (AQ). Mutual trust remains the non-negotiable foundation for any successful professional relationship or partnership. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Vince Menzione, growth mindset, Satya Nadella, channel building, tech ecosystem, tectonic shifts, AI revolution, co-selling strategies, hyperscaler marketplaces, organizational alignment, executive commitment, OKRs execution, AQ strategy, mutual trust, B2B technology Transcript [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: Because I think we’re all paralyzed by AI and all the changes that are going on in our world, and playbooks are no longer good because they’re outdated the week after they come out. [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. What a list. Oh my gosh. I gotta tell you, I was just going back this morning and, and looking to see first of all the number, the sheer number is incredible. [00:00:36] Vince Menzione: But look at, look at all these top executives. These are, these are like market movers. The game changers. These are people that are doing more in our world, in our ecosystem than most others. And we are very fortunate to have the representation from these organizations. From these leaders in the room, and we try to curate an event that is more than a, a sales pitch. [00:01:00] Vince Menzione: We’re, in fact, we, we’re not a sales pitch. We’re all about, you know, helping you achieve more. And we try to frame that around operating principles. So, uh, a little bit of a roadmap lately. I mean, this started out like how did we get here in like, maybe five spots along the way. But, uh, for those of you who don’t know me and my background, and I’ve had an incredible career, I’ve been very blessed. [00:01:20] Vince Menzione: I did a startup that we grew from 6 million to 125 million. Went public on the Toronto Exchange. I’m still friends with the CEO, by the way. Helped, helped him grow and exit that company. Uh, I then followed one of the leaders there to go do a turnaround with Golden Gate Capital, and we took that and that’s where I built my first channel. [00:01:37] Vince Menzione: I went from doing enterprise sales as a direct seller, direct sales leader, VP to then going to building a channel. During nine 11, uh, this company was selling rugged notebook computers. Our biggest competitor was not a US company, and I spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill. I met with several congressmen and senators at a time when people did that, and they talked to each other. [00:01:58] Vince Menzione: And, uh, I built a channel. I got its a GSA schedule, and I understood. So I understood intuitively, even from that point in my career, how to move, how to shift from direct selling to building a channel, building a business around that. We became the growth engine of the company. One of my partners was one of the largest defense contractors, general Dynamics. [00:02:19] Vince Menzione: They had the big contract if you were selling to the US Army. And I knocked down the door basically and said, you got a partner with us. And that’s how we got the relationship established. And they wound up buying us for like 10 x what Golden Gate Capital had had spun us out for. And then Microsoft recruited me. [00:02:36] Vince Menzione: And for almost 10 years I was the GM of public sector partner strategy. And so I was, I was there and we’ll talk about Satya and other things, but I was there when we started the cloud. I was there when we pivoted the business from the old model and working with OEMs and trying to, to do things a different way to the cloud and co-selling and things like that. [00:02:56] Vince Menzione: And, uh, had a great experience. And then when I left I was like, oh, I’m just gonna go work for another big tech company. I started a podcast. I had a friend who said, you should do a podcast on partnering. You know a lot about this more than you probably think you do. And almost 10 years ago, I started a podcast in a spare bedroom. [00:03:13] Vince Menzione: And you know, it, it was, it built a following and there’s a lot of work, by the way, people, a lot of people do podcasts today. It was a lot of work for those of you. I congratulate anybody doing that. Uh, I went back inside for two years because I felt like I needed to go back into a big corporate environment. [00:03:29] Vince Menzione: And then I left during COVID and I learned a lot being at a big corporation about how hard it was to partner. Like it’s still hard. I don’t know how many people in the room feel this way. I know, I know the numbers are much better and Jay will talk through the numbers, but it’s not easy and a lot of organizations don’t understand it. [00:03:47] Vince Menzione: And that’s what we talk about here and we try to help people to achieve more and how to, how to get that mindset in the right place. But anyway, so. We started, we started doing the podcast after COVID, it took off. We did an event. Uh, there’s actually four of the five people that did partner. We called it Partner Mastermind. [00:04:06] Vince Menzione: We did an event about four years ago, uh, separately. And that led to Ultimate Partner. And it’s a long, the long history in the last four years of 10 events, like it’s been an incredible blast. And I want to thank each of you for being along this, this incredible ride with us as we continue to grow and expand. [00:04:24] Vince Menzione: We’ve been doubling every year for the last four years and um, I feel very blessed to be part of this. So I did wanna spend a minute with you on this. I don’t like the drain this slide, but I do wanna identify what I believe are seven operating principles of what makes successful partnering. And you know, you might say there’s eight, you might say there are other things I think about principles as opposed to tactics. [00:04:50] Vince Menzione: Tactics are transactional. They’re temporary and a point in time, and it’s how you respond and react to a situation. Principles are things you take with you, and that’s what we hope to do at Ultimate Partner. Take those things with you and then, then apply some of the things to the tactics that we need to have. [00:05:06] Vince Menzione: And so we talk about growth mindset. Uh, you know, depending on where you stand about Microsoft, these days, when this guy came in, stock was $36 a share. Okay. It’s in the four hundreds now. It was up to over 500 not long ago. He applied a different mindset. The first three things he did, Le got a copy of Carol Dweck’s book about mindset. [00:05:28] Vince Menzione: Growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Uh, he brought in Dr. Michael Vet, who’s a leading sports psychologist, like in, in the industry, who was the Seattle Seahawks sports psychologist. Mike’s been a podcast guest of mine. I’ve been to his studio. Um, and then he, we, he, he changed, he, he brought down, he took down the walls of the way Microsoft operated because leaders fought with each other. [00:05:51] Vince Menzione: They competed with each other for resources, for monetization, for everything. And he changed the mindset. Nobody’s a perfect CEO, but if I was to say to you who I think the best CEO of the last 10 years were, I’d give it to Saja Nadella, but it’s about mindset. It’s about changing or having the right mindset and applying that growth mindset to a successful partner. [00:06:12] Vince Menzione: Executive commitment, I talked about that. Other organizational will go nameless, but if you don’t, you can have the CEO down to the selling floor. Everyone needs to speak partnering, like in order to get it right in an organization. The whole company, the resources, the investments, the alignment, all has to align around partnering. [00:06:32] Vince Menzione: Executive commitment is incredible. Tony Saan took a small MSP to a half a billion dollar exit, took them to go, uh, Google Partner of the Year, seven straight years in a row. I think they’re eight this year. Uh, but Tony’s a good friend of mine. He is also been a guest on the podcast and, uh, somebody I’ve admired and worked with. [00:06:50] Vince Menzione: This is Dr. Michael Dravet. We talk about clarity, like once you get your mindset, once you get executive commitment, you then need to determine like how, what’s the vision? How do we drive success together? You need to turn, you need to know internally how to go do that. Then you lock arms with another organization and then you apply it to that partnership. [00:07:10] Vince Menzione: So that’s incredibly critical. Then, then you gotta do everything right? Like I always kid around about my days at Microsoft, we’d have these incredible meetings with leaders. They’d come meet with us at partner conference. I would literally go back to back for several days in the room. Slide deck after slide deck. [00:07:27] Vince Menzione: We’re high fiving at the end. [00:07:29] Vince Menzione: We’re gonna go do it [00:07:31] Vince Menzione: six months later. Crickets. Nothing happens, right? This happens a lot in partnering. Unfortunately, like we, we set up the right situation. We line everybody. We’re gonna go execute, we’re gonna drive results. You have to apply maniacal, focus, OKRs, everything to everything you do. [00:07:48] Vince Menzione: You need to apply. And by the way, you’re gonna hear from a lot of leaders here that do this type of work. So this is incredibly, uh, critical to success, brand and story. Like I wanna work with Microsoft. There’s gonna be probably 40 plus Microsoft leaders in the room, some of ’em sitting here and around the room. [00:08:06] Vince Menzione: How do you do that? Right? This is Ducks Raymond S. Good friend of mine at Point. I knew at point when they were just starting out. Scott Sackett is here. He’ll be up on stage. Uh, this man was expert on brand and story. Learn from people that are successful, how to be successful yourself, if you wanna be a top partner, if you wanna grow your business, whether you’re working with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or any of the other partners in this room. [00:08:30] Vince Menzione: You need to be very clear about your brand, articulate it well, and drive a story against that. And that’s really super critical for success. And then once we do all those things, we start driving a flywheel of success. Aaron Feiger and some of the other people in the room, Reese Barry, are gonna be talking about how they do that. [00:08:47] Vince Menzione: They will help these organizations be successful. Pick putting that stake in the ground and driving it. And then what happens is after you drive this incredible success, what does my partner do? My tech giant, the company I’ve been working with, they go change everything. The market changes, the dynamics change. [00:09:05] Vince Menzione: This thing in November of 2022 called AI Happens, Chad, GBT hits the market. How do I respond and react to that? I need to be adaptable. I need to drive an AQ strategy on top of my EQ and iq, and we’ll talk more about that. So these are the operating principles, and we lay it out as a, as a diagram. And by the way, you see mutual trust. [00:09:26] Vince Menzione: Trust has to be in every room without trust, you have no partnerships, without trust, you have no business success. Like you can get buy in business, you can get buy in life, but trust is foundational. And I was very blessed to have that like grain ingrained in me as a young boy. Uh, so that’s our, that’s our operating principles. [00:09:48] Vince Menzione: Um, I’m working on a book right now. It’s almost done though. We’re, we’re talk, we’ll talk about that more, but that’s, that’ll be in the book. Um, and then we’ve been talking about tectonic shifts and I don’t know who said it first, Jay or, or me, but I know who you said it in the studio several years ago. [00:10:04] Vince Menzione: Jay’s been in our, our Boca studio many, many times. But we’ve been talking about tectonic shifts and Oh my gosh, right? So think about, I want everybody to think about this for a second. If you’ve been around tech for a while. We’ve gone through several, like these 10 year phases, the PC era, the cloud era, the well, the cloud. [00:10:23] Vince Menzione: We had client server, pc, client server, we had cloud, we had mobile, and now we hit ai. Those eras all took a period of time, right? They didn’t happen overnight. Like there was a trend like five, six years, seven years, maybe eight years, and then COVID happened, and I believe that COVID was the acceleration point because. [00:10:44] Vince Menzione: We were all forced to do things we didn’t do before. People went out and bought PCs that didn’t have them. Kids had to learn from home. Healthcare was administered tele telehealth, we didn’t do telehealth before. We had like 5% of the population to telehealth before that, uh, our work environment changed, right? [00:11:02] Vince Menzione: We were doing Zoom calls or teams calls back when I was at Microsoft Days, but the world started doing it. Our life started to change. That’s why being in the room places like this is so important. And so that really has accelerated everything. And this, you know, all these things have been accelerating over time and these are significant shifts. [00:11:22] Vince Menzione: We have the three leaders of the three marketplace organizations coming on stage here. Uh, the three hyperscalers, because marketplace went from, we were talking about it like, this is really cool. You need to go do it. A few years ago. So Microsoft lowering the rates on it, and then everything changed and then everybody started accelerating and it became the fungible token. [00:11:43] Vince Menzione: ’cause we used to, we used to partner, we used to take spreadsheets and put ’em up against each other and try to figure out deals and fax copies of deals that came in and say, we want credit for this one. And then Marketplace became a way to create a fun non fungible token. And really drive your success. [00:11:59] Vince Menzione: And so we have all the leaders that are running marketplaces in this room, by the way. So this is gonna be like the most incredible rich conversation. Co-selling. Co-selling is a, you know, a non-starter day. You have to co-sell it. People, we used to do vendor channel, which means I had somebody selling my stuff that’s not happening anymore. [00:12:19] Vince Menzione: And Jay, we’ll talk about the seven seats at the table. But this is all, these are all the things that have been changing. And of course, ai. I think that we are sitting here and I, I, I’ll share, and I’m stressing this, like this is, you need to be in this room because you’re gonna hear from leaders about what the next steps are. [00:12:35] Vince Menzione: ’cause I think we’re all paralyzed by AI and all the changes that are going on in our world and playbooks are no longer good because they’re outdated the week after they come out. So I need to, I need to follow this in real time. I think this is super important that you do, and it’s why we exist and it’s why this time is like no other. [00:12:53] Vince Menzione: I think, you know, we said maybe a generation, maybe it’s a lifetime in terms of the shifts that we’re seeing. So I, I kind of started here and I wanted to end here, uh, just because the light doesn’t go out. That’s what it’s all about. And this is it. This is it for me, right? This is my, my last run. I’m not gonna go work for a company after this. [00:13:16] Vince Menzione: I’m not gonna go into become a consultant. And I want this truly to be like special. And I want you to all feel like you’re part, you are part of it, and however much you wanna lean in and be part of it in the future, we want to grow this in the right way. I, I feel that we have an a unique opportunity. [00:13:34] Vince Menzione: Because we’re not a vendor, we’re not selling anything. I feel like we’re a platform. We’re that we’re that lighthouse and others can come in that are experts and I feel like more and more of ’em are showing up. And you know, the PDG guys did a great job today and others in the room and people that have been friends and supporting us for for years as on that sponsor slide. [00:13:56] Vince Menzione: And so we just want to continued this journey with each of you. Um, and so I want your feedback on what we’re doing. I want, I love your support. I love your passion. I love the fact that you’re still here in the room talking with, with or being here, listening to me today. Um, this is, that lighthouse is, you can see these pictures. [00:14:15] Vince Menzione: These are all family photos. Um, we go to that lighthouse, not because it’s a lighthouse, but uh, it happens to be like a landmark in our town. And, uh, it’s kind of cool. And actually the re Joe Namath has owns the restaurant across from the lighthouse, so we, we’ve got to see him a couple of times, which is kind of cool. [00:14:34] Vince Menzione: But I, I, I, I was posting this lighthouse when I started the podcast. And I was, yeah. ’cause that’s where I live and it’s my hometown. And I think about Dakota Rings and I think about other things. But, um, this is what matters. This is what matters is helping others. And we all are gonna need each other in this world because AI is gonna change our lives. [00:15:00] Vince Menzione: And dramatically it’s, I I think this is a once in a lifetime thing. But I think having people that you trust and being in the room with others where you can learn and grow and adapt, adaptability is so important. So, um, analog is the new digital as my, my good friend Gary V now says. And I think there’s this huge opportunity around what we do as ultimate partner to help everybody reach their pinnacle to everybody. [00:15:26] Vince Menzione: Be the ultimate partner. And I want to thank you for coming. I want your, thank you for your support, friendship, love. And, uh, you’re just an incredible group. Thank you. [00:15:41] Vince Menzione: Until

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/j0TuosYDQe4?si=7mzUwBe4PrQ-eB2E 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. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags AI 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 peopl

Description The Future of Tech is Here. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this presentation from Ultimate Partner Live, industry analyst Jay McBain breaks down the monumental macroeconomic shifts rewriting the tech sector in 2026. https://youtu.be/r0qTDyw97Gs As the industry rapidly approaches a $6.07 trillion valuation, driven by massive AI infrastructure investments from Sam Altman and the “Magnificent Seven,” traditional sales and channel models are fundamentally collapsing. McBain reveals how buyer demographics have transformed to an integration-first millennial base, why marketplace ecosystems now command over half of all partner-funded deals, and how a tiny elite of just 1,000 tech service providers control two-thirds of global tech revenue. Learn the exact mechanics behind how Microsoft out-partnered AWS to win 26 straight quarters of dominant growth and how your business can deploy an algorithmic early warning system to capture massive wallet share before competitors even step into the boardroom. Key Takeaways Over half of the Fortune 500 companies vanish every 20 years because their leadership fails to anticipate macroeconomic technological cycles. The true opportunity in the $6.5 trillion AI boom lies not in single vendor products, but in the hardware, software, services, and telecom ecosystem surrounding them. Indirect tech sales are undergoing a structural shift toward direct cloud hyperscaler models driven heavily by Nvidia’s core infrastructure client base. Modern business deals are won or lost months before the point of sale based on the average of 6.3 partners surrounding a customer’s environment. Over 51% of tech buyers are now millennials who prioritize software integration capabilities and digital marketplaces over traditional human sales interactions. Tech service economics are pivoting aggressively away from upfront margins toward point-based multi-partner funding across subscription cycles. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Nvidia AI buildout, $7 trillion AI opportunity, cloud ecosystem decade, Microsoft vs AWS growth, multi-partner cloud deals, digital marketplace migration, millennial B2B buyers, B2B tech subscription economics, tokenized micro consumption, tech services wallet share, hybrid cloud infrastructure, 28 customer moments, IT services industry growth, telecom spend breakdown, channel chief strategy, managed service providers MSP, global systems integrators GSI, software integration first, point-based vendor incentives, automated co-selling workflows Transcript JAY McBAIN AUDIO PODCAST [00:00:00] Jay McBain: So to go back to that story about the 53% of companies who are gonna fail, one of us is gonna be asked to write the book, but chapter one is always you Blame the CEO. [00:00:13] 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. With that, I am incredibly blessed to invite a friend of mine to the stage. I have a quick little side note, like I found an old LinkedIn post from this gentleman from like many years ago, like 20 years ago. [00:00:39] Vince Menzione: And I wasn’t really that nice to you on that LinkedIn post. Like, oh, like this is before Jay became the Jay, that we all know Jay to be j. But he was in the space and I was at Microsoft doing something and he reached out about something. It was kind of rude, Jay. I was like, oh my gosh. I can’t believe. But Jay has been a great friend. [00:00:54] Vince Menzione: When we started the podcast back up, uh, during COVID we started doing podcasts together. When we moved to the studio, Jay was the first person in the studio. He’s always got a spot, uh, at our events. He’s s Spot Art, and, and he’s a great friend and supporter of Ultimate Partner Jay McBain. For those of you who don’t know him, Jay, welcome. [00:01:13] Vince Menzione: Thank you, sir. [00:01:22] Jay McBain: 31 days ago, we landed Artemis two. The furthest humans have ever been away from the planet Earth 57 years ago. We landed on the moon in the 56 years. Between those two moments, the tech industry has been the fastest growing industry in the world. Every single year we moved from the space race to the technology race, and we’re just getting started. [00:01:46] Jay McBain: If you’re old enough, you’ll recognize the mainframe and mini era for 20 years. You’ll recognize a young disheveled Bill Gates showing up in Boca Raton, Florida for, uh, August the 12th, 1981 launch, where Bill thought that every one of us would’ve a PC in our home, and IBM thought they were gonna sell 10,000 of them to hobbyists. [00:02:12] Jay McBain: 1999, a small startup from an executive who just left Oracle in San Francisco named Mark Benioff. A couple of years later, Jeff Bezos went into a boardroom and said, listen, we’ve spent a lot of money building infrastructure to our busiest day, Christmas, black Friday. You’re telling me this stuff sits idle 10 or 20% for the rest of the year. [00:02:35] Jay McBain: Why don’t we rent that out to others? Got laughed outta that boardroom and then got made of fun of on magazine covers. Maybe you should just tend the store, let the adults talk about technology. In March of 2023, our neighbors, our friends, our family saw DeepFakes. They saw poetry, they saw music, and they came to us as tech people and said, did we just light up Skynet? [00:03:03] Jay McBain: Now every one of these 20 year eras, this is the Taylor Swift version of our industry. Every single one of these eras triggers the fastest growing product in history. Today it’s actually Chacha bt first to a billion users. It triggers a new, richest person in the world, bill Gates, to Jeff Bezos. Now, Elon Musk is the first to sign a trillion dollar pay package, and it’s not for car. [00:03:27] Jay McBain: It’s not for cars. It also triggers a most valuable company in the world change. And today that’s nvidia. These are monumental changes in our industry and they’re monumental changes in partnering every single time. And it also links to our customers. If you take a 20 year view of business, one era, and, and think about the AI era, you know, at the start of it here, if you’re to grab the Fortune 500 magazine from 20 years ago and start to flip through it, 53% of the companies in there no longer exist. [00:04:06] Jay McBain: Every 20 year cycle, we lose over half of the biggest companies in the world. These are the companies that have very deep pockets to buy their way outta problems. If you’re not in the Fortune 571% of tech companies don’t make it 10 years. These are the changes that cost industries. There are changes that cost really big companies and the decisions we make, the trends we’re in right now, in 2026 will be written about in the future. [00:04:39] Jay McBain: This new era, a lot of big numbers being thrown around. Vince’s best friend talk about a six and a half trillion dollar AI opportunity, but it’s not Microsoft’s tam. Microsoft is chasing about a trillion dollars of this. And the ecosystem, the hardware, the software, the services, the telecom is gonna make up the rest. [00:05:04] Jay McBain: It is an ecosystem. Every time these big numbers are thrown, the word ecosystem is always thrown around it. Not to be outdone, Sam Altman’s talking about a $7 trillion build out. The world economy this year, the world GDP will be 126. These are material numbers to world GDP, but even better, they’re both larger than our entire industry is today. [00:05:27] Jay McBain: So what took 56 years of the fastest growing industry this year will be $6.07 trillion. Big numbers, but it’s easier to think about it in terms of a dollar that our customers spend in that dollar. They’re gonna spend 25 cents on hardware. They’re gonna spend 25 cents on software. So for anyone that read the memo 15 years ago, that software’s gonna eat the world, there’s still a dollar a hardware to run every dollar of that software. [00:05:57] Jay McBain: And whether you’re thinking humanoid robots or whichever future you’re envisioning, there’s going to be a dollar of hardware to run every dollar of software for the next 20 years. There’s over 25 cents now in IT services, and in many cases, these services are growing faster than the product categories and just under 25 cents in telecom, that’s how it breaks out today. [00:06:19] Jay McBain: And this industry, which took 56 years to get to this point, is gonna double in size in the next three to five years. We already have two and a half trillion of that seven raised and being spent. Part of the reason Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world. Now our industry, uh, you talk about ultimate partnerships. [00:06:40] Jay McBain: Our industry traditionally, and world trade by the way, is 75% indirect. The dealerships, the agencies, the brokers, the resellers, the retailers, the franchisees, the gas stations, the grocery stores, the pharmacies, all 27 industries sell indirect. You gotta think back the last time you bought something direct. [00:07:01] Jay McBain: Well, I bought a Dell from that dude in the nineties. Cool. Well, Dell Technologies is now 60% indirect. Well, I bought insurance. Direct is 15 minutes. Could save me 15%. Well, Geico last year sold more insurance through agencies and brokers than they did direct. This is the world now. We used to be 75% indirect four years ago. [00:07:26] Jay McBain: Then it went to 73.2, then it went to 70.1 and it then it went to 66.7. By the way, marketplace is in these numbers indirect. It’s not marketplace causing this change. It’s one company, Nvidia. Nvidia has seven customers. The magnificent seven, uh, half of them are in the room right now that every morning we wake up to a hundred billion dollars press release about this $7 trillion buildout. [00:07:56] Jay McBain: What’s interesting is indirect sales in our industry is growing by revenue. It increases every year, just not at the pace that this AI build out is happening direct with seven companies. But the reason we’re all here, and I think the core reason that Vince is building this community is this, you know, Microsoft forever has measured and been very vocal. [00:08:21] Jay McBain: About 96% of their deals have partners in them. Kind of who cares, who collects the money. We care about the moments, the 28 moments before the customer makes a purchase. We care about every 30 days forever, because two thirds of our industry, over $4 trillion now is subscription consumption based. Winning a customer today is only winning the first 30 days. [00:08:46] Jay McBain: We care about this cycle. We care about who surrounds our customer. So six years ago, I stood on a big stage and said, you know, we went through a decade of sales. You know, in 1999, you thought you were born to be a salesperson. You’re managing your territory with your gut. Well, a few years later, you were introduced to the science of selling. [00:09:07] Jay McBain: You know, 10 years later you thought as a marketer, you sit around a cocktail party joking with your friends, 50% of my marketing dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which 50%. Really funny. In 2009 until every 58-year-old CMO got replaced by a 38-year-old growth hacker. Coming in with Marketo and Eloqua and Pardot and HubSpot, and 15,505 as of yesterday, MarTech and iTech tools, ninjas in marketing, they wouldn’t let a nickel go through without measuring. [00:09:43] Jay McBain: Now we understand 96% of deals and partners that surround it. No deal is gonna be won or lost in this era without partnering effectively. So we had to have this decade of the ecosystem. One of the ways we’re tracking is by outsiders. You know, Salesforce every year publishes the state of sales and they’ve got, you know, the number one CRM in the world. [00:10:05] Jay McBain: So they get to go talk to all the CROs, all the salespeople in the world. And as of this year, a couple months ago, 94% of every salesperson in every industry in the world uses partners every single day. You wanna see what this number was six years ago. Also, 89% of salespeople around the world don’t think they’re going to club this year without partners. [00:10:29] Jay McBain: So this is a big moment for us, halfway through the decade ecosystem, but we’re only halfway through. We’re starting to understand now at a more granular level. What partnering means. It’s not theory, it’s not flywheels. It’s not really cute. McKinsey slides that we keep showing to our board saying how important partnering is. [00:10:51] Jay McBain: We’re trying to get to the very specific level of the 6.3 partners on average that surround the deal and what they’re doing. How their business model works, and that’s average if I’m working on a public sector deal. I was at a Red Hat conference yesterday talking sovereignty. If I’m in an enterprise or a large public sector deal, it’s north of 10 partners in the deal. [00:11:15] Jay McBain: So we’re starting to understand what used to be this, this, you know, you’ve been the fastest growing industry for 56 straight years. Every single professional services person in every industry has come in to join the fund. Over 90% of accountants are tech services firms. Over 90% of marketing agencies are tech services agencies. [00:11:36] Jay McBain: All of this 250,000 software companies, a million emerging comp tech companies, the half a million VAR that have been in that traditional channel. The managed service providers, all of these 20 different partner types, millions of companies, tens of millions of people competing for 6.3 spots. Around the customer. [00:11:58] Jay McBain: That’s it. Luckily, there’s 141 million global customers to compete for. There’s, there’s some open slots that you can go find, and that’s the point. Our industry never had our own Fortune 500. We always talk to, you know, these partners and GSIs are doing this and SI are doing that. And we never really had a view of capability and capacity or what our own TAM was inside of that partnering. [00:12:25] Jay McBain: And so we set out and we would’ve loved, you know, chat GPT or Gemini or Claude or any of those tools to do this. But there’s one problem in partnering with AI is that it doesn’t know one partner from the next. There’s a big digital sameness problem in our industry that every single partner, whether it’s Larry in the White van or Accenture, with 786,000 employees all say they do all things to all people all the time. [00:12:53] Jay McBain: 98% of them, 99% of them are private companies that don’t share their p and l. You can’t go into Microsoft’s LinkedIn system and find out how many employees, ’cause it’s a block system, it AI can’t see into it. So it just sees, and it’s a great pattern matching. Google, SEO can’t figure out who’s who, nor today can the large language models. [00:13:14] Jay McBain: ’cause all the things they’re trying to match, the transformers are trying to match. It all looks the same. Every tweet, every ebook, every website, every digital history looks the same. So this took us thousands of people hours across two years to do, to dig into every p and l to dig into every dollar of what they’re doing. [00:13:33] Jay McBain: But what was interesting is only a thousand partners in our industry do two thirds of all tech services. When you get into enterprise, it goes up to 80 to 90%. The partners in the middle, in Blue do more tech services. The 30 of them than the 970 partners in white on the outside, the 970 partners in White do more tech services than the next million combined. [00:14:03] Jay McBain: This is our industry in a nutshell. Every time we talk to a a vendor, every time we talk to a partner, every time we talk to a distributor, we’re now talking names, faces, and places. You you wanna talk sovereignty. Yesterday in Atlanta, 90% of sovereign conversations in public sector in the globe is handled by these companies here. [00:14:26] Jay McBain: Forget about how much you do with these partners today. You wanna chase the next column, which is the wallet share. And I was a channel chief for 17 years. I get the weekly report and I see a million dollar partner, another million dollar partner, sorted top to bottom. You don’t know which partners which, which of those million dollar partners is doing 1.2 million in your category. [00:14:46] Jay McBain: They deserve a baseball cap and a front row seat at your event as an MVP. The next partner right next to them is doing 10 million in your category. They’re only doing a million with you. ’cause customers are pulling them into it. Nine times outta 10. They’re leading with your competitor. So I don’t want that list anymore. [00:15:03] Jay McBain: I want the new list, which is showing me those $9 million opportunities. And I as a board member, as A CEO, as a CFO, as a CRO, I wanna see this list. And then I want to talk people, processes, programs, technology. What are we gonna do to go get our fair share of that 9 million? Where’s our lowest hanging fruit? [00:15:24] Jay McBain: How do we double our pipeline? How do we double the size of our company in three years? It’s all right here. Let’s have very specific conversations and move away from flywheels and move around from force multipliers and and things like that in partnering. Let’s figure out how this partner community is surrounded. [00:15:45] Jay McBain: What do 10 million people who have to be smart in front of their customers every single day, what do they read? Where do they go and who do they follow? It’s the law of a few. This is the old Malcolm Gladwell of tipping point 10 million people in the broader channel. A hundred percent of our TAM comes down to only a thousand watering holes. [00:16:08] Jay McBain: 12% of that entire audience. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s over A million. People love podcasts. Number one way they learn the Joe Rogan effect. In our industry, there’s 121 podcasts. These are all public lists. You can go get on my LinkedIn newsletter on canals, oia. But there’s 121 podcasts that drive him forward. [00:16:28] Jay McBain: Really high up on that list, actually number one on the list is ultimate partner, Vince. That’s how I met. ’cause I asked people, 10 million people, you love this. You walk your dog, you drive to work, you listen to podcasts. I’m not the biggest podcast fan. It’s not number one on my list, but it’s number one on theirs. [00:16:44] Jay McBain: They say, you know, you gotta meet this guy, Vince. It’s unbelievable how great these podcasts are. They’re ultimate. [00:16:54] Jay McBain: Then I talked to Vince and said, but Vince, you know, 35% of your community, the 10 million people love to come to events like this one. The hallway conversations, the hotel lobby bar last night. This is what we love to do, especially post pandemic. It’s the number one way we learn. We learn from our peers, we learn from those around us, and, and the learn from the conversations we have here. [00:17:17] Jay McBain: We always remember these moments, you know, years and years later. There’s 352 choices. I’m going to five of them this week in five different cities. It’s a lot of coverage, but again, it’s a tighter li list of how people work. The magazine lists 106 of them associations like Conter. Now the GTIA peer groups, there’s 15 different spheres of influence, but only a thousand places. [00:17:43] Jay McBain: I could walk you through billionaire, after billionaire, after billionaire in this industry and show you how they did th

Master the Microsoft co-sell evolution today. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this deep-dive panel discussion, industry experts Erin Figer, Erika Irby, and Reis Barrie celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Microsoft Co-Sell program by dissecting its evolution from its 2016 inception to today’s data-driven, outcome-focused landscape. The group explores the critical shift from transactional sales to modern, frictionless co-sell motions, emphasizing the importance of signals, intentionality, and building credibility with Microsoft field teams. Whether you are navigating the complexities of the marketplace, struggling with reseller enablement, or looking to integrate AI into your sales process, this conversation offers actionable insights to align your organization’s go-to-market strategy with Microsoft’s evolving priorities and achieve results. https://youtu.be/KV1MGSoyWbQ Key Takeaways Effective co-selling has shifted from autonomous, fragmented motions to a highly collaborative, data-driven approach essential for modern cloud GTM strategies. Credibility is the currency of partnership; without trust from vendors and customers, technical go-to-market motions will fail to produce long-term outcomes. The “REO” (Reseller Enablement Offering) model is an operational unlock for ISVs to go global and sell local without the friction of multi-party private offers. Integrating AI into CRM systems is vital for identifying total addressable market (TAM) signals and maintaining sales velocity. “Don’t automate a bad process” remains the cardinal rule; technology should be used to refine existing, successful motions, not to propagate inefficient ones. The human element—community, in-person events, and empathy—is a necessary differentiator in an increasingly digital, automated B2B landscape. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Microsoft Azure, Co-sell evolution, Hyperscaler strategy, SMB partner investment, Cloud Marketplace, Veeam GTM, Partner Center alignment, Channel enablement, REO, Cloud consumption, ISV scaling, Go-to-market optimization, Partner-led growth, Azure consumption, Channel friction reduction, Outcome-driven sales, Microsoft ecosystem, Revenue acceleration, Partner alignment. Transcript Erin Figer Panel For Cut Out [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: So when we, so, uh, this all started ’cause I was trying to figure out what was next when I left Microsoft and I had this woman who was doing work, actually starting the co-selling process when we first started doing co-selling. And she was working with one of our partners and she was working with my team when I was at Microsoft. [00:00:17] And then I said, this lady knows a lot about this stuff. So I reached out, I left Microsoft, I said, I think we can help each other. Like, I think we’re gonna, I got these companies that I spoke at Microsoft’s conference. They’re like, can you come help us out? And we teamed up. And, uh, we’ve been friends and doing fun stuff ever since. [00:00:34] And she’s spoken at just about every event in some capacity or another, whether it was on stage or a workshop. Aaron Feiger. And then, uh, I, I found, I also, through Aaron, I met this other gentleman who had another company and he was doing amazing work with ISVs or SDCs, uh, Reese Barry from Carve. And then, uh, when I think we started up the event, I mean, Erica Irby came to one of our first events and spoke on stage. [00:00:58] I was like, yeah, this. The person knows what she’s doing. So I’ve asked the three of them to come up and kind of round out and end the day, but all three of ’em have a tremendous, uh, background in this whole process of co-selling go to market strategies. And I thought you, you can, I’m just giving it over to the three of you. [00:01:17] Erin Figer: I we don’t need [00:01:18] Vince Menzione: a, you don’t needer you don’t need a clicker and you, you know what you’re all gonna be talking about. But these are some really smart people about how to partner with Microsoft. So, yeah. No, thank you for having us. [00:01:27] Erin Figer: Um, hello. Hello. I think this is on. All right. So actually we’re gonna do an exercise. [00:01:32] Um, I want everyone to close their eyes. Close your eyes. Close your eyes. All right. I want you to think back to January of 2016. What were you doing? Where were you in your career? What company were you working for? What was going on in your Microsoft partnership in January of 2016? Okay, Erica, what was happening for you? [00:01:59] Erika Irby: So, uh, is this on? Sorry, I cannot tell. Um, I was at Veeam for the first time. We had just launched our first, uh, endpoint backup, uh, product in April of the previous year because nobody knew what cloud was yet, and people were scared. So we had to launch that product. And we had a relationship with Microsoft in a sense that about 20% of our business sat on Hyper V. [00:02:25] That equated to about, I think like around 90 ish million dollars, which at the time was incredible for us. But to Microsoft was, you know, like, who are you guys again? And, um, we begged and begged to have any type of communication with them. Events. Funding nothing. We did not know what Azure consumption was. [00:02:43] We didn’t have any of that information. And if somebody would’ve told me at that time that nine years later we would sign a five year contract with them and have multiple products dedicated to Microsoft, I would’ve been like, y’all are bananas. [00:02:58] Erin Figer: Reese, what were you doing in January of 2016? [00:03:00] Reis Barrie: Uh, let’s see, Jan, 2016, I was moving from Orlando, Florida to Seattle, Washington, uh, sight unseen with no place to stay. [00:03:10] Uh, to take a job at a place called Microsoft or Consulting Gig, a place called Microsoft. Um, kicking off some of the cool motions that we’re, uh, we’re gonna talk about today, I think. [00:03:20] Erin Figer: Does anybody know the significance of January, 2016 in the audience? Any takers? It was the launch of Cosell officially for Microsoft. [00:03:31] Congratulations. We’re celebrating 10 years of officially. Problematizing how you connect with the Microsoft sales organization in a programmatic at scale way. And try to build meaningful relationships. And I have been helping partners since the inception of Microsoft’s Cosell program. Um, I was on the partner side, Reese was on the inside. [00:03:59] You were at a partner. So we have all seen the evolution of Cosell across all three hyperscalers launching, you know, their co-sell initiatives. So I just wanted to take a moment to recognize. I didn’t know how many people realized that it’s been 10 years, it’s 10 year anniversary. I think it’s a big milestone. [00:04:15] Huge. So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, you know, when they launched it, I went, I was consulting for a startup outta Boston and we were trying to get Microsoft’s attention, competitor to fame, and I went to the business development guy and said, uh, do you, did you just see this program that Microsoft launched? I think we should include this in our branding strategy and we should use co-sell as a way to get our brand out to Microsoft and be able to tell our story of who we are and what we’re doing and that we’re in their accounts and they don’t even know it. [00:04:55] ’cause we’re the startup out of Boston who switched over from AWS to Microsoft. And we did, and I put every single opportunity in the system I could for the first six months, which was the last six months of their fiscal year. We go to partner of the, we go to, what was it called? Them WPCI think at the time. [00:05:13] Mm-hmm. Uh, in Vegas. And Nasuni won wins like all four wards worldwide. US Education, healthcare Partner of the year because I put 117 deals in the system and then it seeded Na Sunni’s Marketing for the next two years. ’cause Microsoft gave them tons of money and attention and we were off to the races. [00:05:35] Right. And then it was, can you repeat that? And we went and repeated it with Red Hat and Rubrik and Nintex and Quest and. I don’t know, lots more. But it was, it’s been fun journey co-selling. And it’s interesting to see now, um, how we continue 10 years later to evolve co-sell. And so Erica, what were some of the takeaways you had today listening to the conversation about how co-sell, how you’re modernizing and co-sell is changing inside your organization, especially now being a boomerang. [00:06:08] Erika Irby: Yeah, well we call it a Veeam ring ’cause everything a veer ring, everything has to start with with Veeam. Well, one thing I was gonna comment on, I think I’m sitting here thinking how wild is it that back in the day we actually had to define that co-sell was an action that, that, you know, partners and vendors needed to take or, and different vendors and alliances. [00:06:25] I mean, now we can’t even imagine going to market without, you know, that, that attach. But at the time, we were just very autonomous and everybody sold their own product and it, it took like this actual motion, um, to get us working together. But now look at us. I mean, this community is incredible. And we can also see this by, and even when AGU was mentioning earlier, all the bosses he had in his room, I mean. [00:06:47] How many people like know each other. I mean, this is like part of that, that ecosystem. But today, um, a couple of things I took away, and by the way, we want a lot of interactions, so we’re going to kind of throw it back out at you guys. But for me, um, outcomes came up repeatedly that was mentioned multiple times about outcomes. [00:07:04] Um, speed with intentionality. I think that was super critical. We have to go to market. There has to be a sense of urgency, but if we’re not intentional, it’s like, what are we doing? It’s just like a big mess. Um, and then credibility. And this is something I think is super important, regardless of, um, all of our emotions, all of our go to market, all of the, the things that we do, if we are not credible or not building trust with our vendors, our, our co-partners, our customers, we will never be successful. [00:07:35] Um, so those are the three main things that I took away from, from everybody talking today. And I, I thought, I mean, to me personally, I thought those were pretty powerful. [00:07:42] Yeah. [00:07:42] Erika Irby: So we’d love to hear. [00:07:43] Erin Figer: Yeah. And I know Reese, you have been doing a lot around outcomes and changing kind of the cosal, um, intention. [00:07:54] Reis Barrie: Yeah. The, uh, the, just thinking back to today, like that was like such a, it was really a, a big key theme of today. Like everyone talked about, whether it’s pivot of, of sales, partnership, um, even when you’re talking about AI and some of the, the, uh. POC discussions. So the live like type of stuff, everything was centered around that narrative. [00:08:17] And so, um, and it’s the same with, it’s the same with partnerships. It’s the same with your co-sell motion, same with your benefits utilization, um, and the way you’re utilizing partnerships. And so that’s, that’s a huge, huge component of, um, what I also took away from today. Um, and then somebody, I think it was Mark who said it that I’m gonna, I’m gonna steal this because the, the whole, um. [00:08:40] Near and dear to my heart of like, don’t, don’t scale automate ai, A-I-F-I-A bad process. Like as someone who deals with like, for the most part, bad processes, like day in and day out, um, and trying to refine them and improve them. Like, that’s one of the first things that we, uh, that we talk to partners about when it comes to their partnership and, and the processes they have in place. [00:09:03] So those are like two really big, just takeaways from [00:09:06] Erin Figer: Yeah. Nice. So we’re here to learn from each other, right? Like this is an ultimate partner community of learning from each other. So I’d really love to hear from the audience, like what are some of the things you’re doing in your cloud? Go to market approach and co-selling that you’re trying out. [00:09:23] Either you tried it, you failed fast, you learned from that, that you can share those lessons learned or like what’s working and how are you changing to be more outcome driven in your cloud go to market, uh, approach. Any takers in wanting to experience share? Great. Give that man a mic. [00:09:50] Audience Member: The SMB investments. Um, these, these new, I don’t know what they are. I partner accelerators, PBAs, uh, there’s kind of something going on in the SMB space where it just seems like they’re coming outta the woodwork to come help. On deals. I’ve never seen Microsoft really embrace the customer that they, the way they have in SMB in the cos sells. [00:10:10] I’m not sure if anybody else is seen that, but seems to be working. It’s two things. One, you at Data 60 [00:10:22] America. [00:10:54] I think, I think part of the rarity there is that. Typically you wouldn’t get a seller attached, right? They’re unmanaged that they’re kind of in the nobody cares category, but, [00:11:06] um. So Microsoft made a huge investment in the distribution space saying we’re gonna lean on distribution to help enable our 165,000 indirect resellers that we have as a business. And part of that enablement goes back to field sales alignment. So there’s these roles, ca roles called um, partner Solutions Sellers, PS. [00:11:30] And so they’re aligned by, um, solutions architecture, if you will, for Microsoft. So, or cloud solution area, whatever the new term, modern work, uh, or, uh, AI work, AI workforce, um, data and ai. And so they are there to help support your deal. So it’s, it’s a huge investment and one that I would just can say continue to advocate for it if you’re seeing success with it, because I mean, we’re heading into FY 27 planning for Microsoft. [00:11:58] So. Like there, there could be role changes. So I would say if it, if it’s helpful, like make sure you’re talking positively about it. [00:12:05] Reis Barrie: Yeah, yeah. Just to, to your point, like I, I’d say like, um, in the last six to 12 months, like that’s been a, a thing that’s like we’ve to go back and like, I mean we manage a portfolio of a couple dozen, dozen partners at this point, and so we’ve had to go back and rewrite some of our playbooks, reeducate some of. [00:12:26] Uh, some of the partnership folks that we use because, um, historically you kind of get into this like void of, you’re in partner center, you’re picking, you know, account alignment and it’s not managed. And so it’s like, okay, I expect to do nothing with this deal on the Microsoft side from a co-sell standpoint. [00:12:42] Um, but that’s kind of, that’s changed quite a bit, um, in the last six months where, um, it’s not like a, it’s hard to create, it’s hard to create processes and dependence around it ’cause it’s not like a guarantee that you’ll get, you get engagement, but. Uh, you see more eng engagement, more on more and more deals. [00:12:58] Um, and so we’ve had to go back and work with some of our partners to rewrite some of our, uh, deal sharing playbooks to account for, uh, things like that, which is, it’s super cool to see, frankly, um, to see engagement on these, like predominantly. [00:13:12] Erin Figer: So in that motion. So first off, for the folks that are on the other side of this black curtain by the food station, if you guys could please stop the conversation. [00:13:19] It’s really hard to pay attention to what’s going on in this room. Um. Thank you. Thank [00:13:25] Erika Irby: you for saying that. [00:13:26] Erin Figer: That was a great, that was a great, that’s a great point. And what I wanna talk about next is like in order to kind of continue to evolve the playbooks and they’re changing and people are changing, and priorities are changing, what are some of the signals that you guys are using internally in your organization, whether you’re building or buying, um, but would love to learn from all of you. [00:13:46] What kind of signals are you looking at to help you continue to like co-innovate, co-sell, co-market? Um, in your go-to market strategies? [00:13:58] Audience Member: Yeah, [00:13:58] Erin Figer: please. Um, [00:14:00] Audience Member: well, I’m, I’m, we’re building everything from scratch right now because we’re brand is integration. [00:14:39] Like having our, our engineer be able to interact with product [00:14:43] Erin Figer: engineer. [00:14:50] I’m gonna pick on trend ’cause I had just spent last week with them and Sanjay, I think like what you guys are building internally, um, using signals, building it into an AI agent. To help you understand your tam, you wanna share a little bit. [00:15:06] Audience Member: Happy to, and I’ll disclose. The first thing I did was hire Aaron Feiger to run my co-sell operations, uh, for the, for the second time. [00:15:12] It’s [00:15:13] Erin Figer: nice to be a GDI again [00:15:14] Audience Member: for the second, so well planted. Um, but honestly, like I can’t have an environment where I fail my sellers, like this process has to be frictionless in co-sell and marketplace operations. Or I lose trust in my own house, let alone in my channel and in my customer base. So. Uh, building that strong foundation is like job number one. [00:15:34] I’ve been, I spent a decade at Trend. I’m back, uh, five weeks on the job now. Um, but I’d say we’ve built a multi hundred million dollar cloud marketplace business thinking highly transactional. And what we’re trying to pivot to is a highly dated driven approach where we can look at any cloud in any region around the world, figure out roughly how many accounts they have. [00:15:57] Figure out what those customers are spending and things that we can protect from a cybersecurity standpoint, knowing that four or 5% of that total spend will be spent on cybersecurity, doing an overlap of where I have existing customers in that drawing a tam, overlapping that with my incumbent partners to get the Venn diagram of like, where’s my sweet spot to move this forward? [00:16:18] And then where’s my blast radius? So when I sit down with a guy leading France, or a person leading healthcare. I can have a really specific opportunity about how to leverage my cloud partnerships to accelerate deals and expand growth in a very surgical, data-driven, propensity driven way. And it like totally changes the conversation. [00:16:40] And the other thing we’ve done because you get a lot of pushback and when you’re working with Microsoft, uh, I was chatting with a few folks today, like if you’re in cybersecurity, it’s not easy. They got a 25 billion ish dollars cybersecurity business. So you gotta find your swim lanes. And the dialogue I have now internally with my sellers is a major League baseball analogy, which is, if you play major league baseball and if you hit the ball 30% of the time, you’re gonna go to this little thing called the Hall of Fame, right? [00:17:07] If you bat 300, if you’re in sales and Microsoft, or Amazon or whoever helps you, 30% of the time, you’re gonna go to this thing called President’s Club. That’s the difference between sitting at home in Ohio and sitting with your beach. You know, your, your toes in the sand. So it’s, we’re really trying to change. [00:17:25] Uh, one of the first things I ask my team is, what’s our brand promise to our sales leaders and our sales team? And if you don’t know that answer, you got a fricking problem. So you gotta get that. What’s your Brene Brown would call it? What’s your North Star? What are your values? Whatcha are you gonna deliver? [00:1

Mastering the shift from MSP to MIP. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this insightful episode, Oguo Atuanya, CVP of Vendor Experience at Pax8, joins us to discuss the pivotal evolution in the IT channel: the transition from Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to Managed Intelligence Providers (MIPs). We explore how the marketplace is moving beyond traditional infrastructure support toward a future defined by AI-driven orchestration, business consultancy, and scalable agent-tech organizations. Oguo details how Pax8 is leading this transformation by curating solutions that allow partners to move from transactional service models to life-cycle management that prioritizes measurable ROI for the Small and Medium Business (SMB) market. Key Takeaways Pax8 is redefining the role of the distributor by acting as an AI commerce platform for the SMB market. The shift from Managed Service Provider (MSP) to Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP) is critical for scaling in the modern tech era. Successful MSPs must evolve into business consultants who integrate AI-driven workflows rather than just selling infrastructure. Security and automation are foundational elements that every modern MIP must prioritize to ensure scalability for customers. The “MIP Playbook” provides the curriculum-driven enablement partners need to successfully pivot their business models. Building strong, end-to-end customer lifecycle management is the key to minimizing churn and maximizing long-term value. https://youtu.be/c8uCnMJd9bg If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Pax8, Managed Intelligence Providers, MIP, AI commerce platform, SMB technology, MSP evolution, AI-driven workflows, agent-first strategy, digital transformation, channel partner strategy, cloud solutions, customer lifecycle management, IT channel innovation, scalable automation, business consultancy, technology architecture, agent store, managed service providers. Transcript Oguo Atuanya Audio Episode [00:00:00] Oguo Atuanya: I, I mean, the ultimate goal is to get that MIP channel as intelligent or even more intelligent and agile than any enterprise IT department. [00:00:13] Vince Menzione: We just finished Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat here in beautiful Boca to a sold out crowd. Today I’m joined by Dexter Hardy, the founder of Integral for a compelling discussion, a guo. Welcome back, [00:00:29] Oguo Atuanya: Vince [00:00:29] Vince Menzione: to the welcome back to the podcast, my friend. So good to see you. [00:00:33] Oguo Atuanya: Good to see you, my friend. It’s been about, what, two years? [00:00:35] Vince Menzione: It has been two years, almost two years. Almost two years ago now. And uh, man, this [00:00:40] Oguo Atuanya: thing is just picking up steam. [00:00:41] Vince Menzione: It is. We’re having a blast. We were having so much fun. It was [00:00:44] Oguo Atuanya: awesome. [00:00:44] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:00:44] Oguo Atuanya: Really awesome. [00:00:45] Vince Menzione: And you were for context, for people watching and, and listening. Uh, we were here in Boca yesterday for the Ultimate Partner Executive Retreat. [00:00:52] Yep. It was this awesome event and great to have you involved in it. Uh, pat, thank you so much. So, uh, last time you were here [00:01:00] Oguo Atuanya: Yes. [00:01:01] Vince Menzione: Uh, you were representing Microsoft where you spent 22 years. [00:01:05] Oguo Atuanya: 22 [00:01:06] Vince Menzione: years. [00:01:06] Oguo Atuanya: Two years, right. Outta outta Junior Heart. [00:01:07] Vince Menzione: Amazing. And, uh, tell us, tell us about your journey so far. Uh, almost two years, a year and a half at Pax. [00:01:14] Eight. About a [00:01:15] Oguo Atuanya: year and a half. [00:01:15] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:01:16] Oguo Atuanya: a year and a half. [00:01:17] Vince Menzione: And tell, tell for our viewers and listeners, uh, your role at Pax eight. [00:01:21] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:01:22] Vince Menzione: Which is a preeminent company in this space. We used to use the term disty. I’ll let you describe them. Uh, officially [00:01:29] Oguo Atuanya: No, [00:01:30] Vince Menzione: because they don’t, you don’t use that term. [00:01:31] Oguo Atuanya: We’re not, we’re not a distributor. [00:01:33] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:01:33] Oguo Atuanya: Scott Cha would kill me. [00:01:35] Vince Menzione: That’s right. No, I know, I know. I remember the, uh, [00:01:38] Oguo Atuanya: the New [00:01:38] Vince Menzione: York, was it the New York Times article? Yes. Yes. [00:01:41] Oguo Atuanya: Was kind of a, [00:01:42] Vince Menzione: that was a launching point coming out. Yeah, yeah. [00:01:44] Oguo Atuanya: No, we, we, we see ourselves as, um, um, the pre, uh, permanent marketplace. For SMB. [00:01:52] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:01:53] Oguo Atuanya: Right. So you think about the SaaS and the cloud. [00:01:55] Yeah. You know, solutions that you need. In SMB, we work with vendors to bring it, um, you know, to the SMB market through, uh, MSPs. And we also, uh, see ourselves as the premier [00:02:08] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:02:08] Oguo Atuanya: Um, AI commerce platform for SMB. [00:02:13] Vince Menzione: Very interesting. [00:02:14] Oguo Atuanya: Right. And as we go through the discussion, uh, this afternoon, you’ll see why. [00:02:20] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:02:21] Oguo Atuanya: That differentiation is [00:02:23] Vince Menzione: key. I, I love, I love to dive in. I love to dive in. I will say this, I, I think you’ve gotten a lot of people very interested in the community. I mean, certainly your events are becoming bigger and bigger. You’re beyond conference. [00:02:36] Oguo Atuanya: Next one’s coming up in Salt Lake City [00:02:38] in [00:02:38] Vince Menzione: June. [00:02:38] I plan on being there, salt Lake City in June. [00:02:41] Oguo Atuanya: I must have you there. [00:02:42] Vince Menzione: I will be there and you will, and you will be at our event in May. [00:02:45] Oguo Atuanya: Absolutely. [00:02:46] Vince Menzione: Talking about beyond, but also talking about this community. Uh, I’ve also woken up over the last year or so as well and learned a lot about this SMB community and ms, what we call MSBs. [00:02:58] You’ve re you’ve re-categorized them, uh, but this community is palpable. The opportunity is huge. [00:03:04] Oguo Atuanya: It’s huge. [00:03:05] Vince Menzione: And, um, I would say that, uh, yeah, we can talk, we’ll talk, we’ll just talk through it. ’cause it is huge. Yeah. There’s a lot of things that need to be done. [00:03:12] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:03:13] Vince Menzione: And I think, I think PAX eight is, uh, at the forefront in driving a lot of this. [00:03:17] The hyperscalers, like Microsoft are, are paying attention now more in a big, in a bigger way than before [00:03:23] Oguo Atuanya: being great partners. [00:03:24] Vince Menzione: Been great, great partners. Yeah. We’ll talk about your role with Microsoft in that regard. [00:03:28] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:03:28] Vince Menzione: But talk, let’s talk about this evolution too. Let’s, uh, so for those who are listening, who are used to maybe us talking about a SaaS software company Yep. [00:03:36] Or an ISV or an SDC, uh, we’re talking about MSPs, managed service providers, which is the common term that people use. These are, these have been traditionally the companies, the smaller companies, they used to call em mom and pop shops back. The old VARs that became managed service, the past [00:03:53] Oguo Atuanya: provider in, in the past, they’re getting bigger. [00:03:54] Vince Menzione: And then Yes. One of the big [00:03:55] Oguo Atuanya: ones, y say [00:03:56] Vince Menzione: Nexus Tech. We had Yes. [00:03:57] Oguo Atuanya: Partners of ours. [00:03:58] Vince Menzione: Nexus Techs, new Charter. [00:04:01] Oguo Atuanya: Charter, Michelle [00:04:02] Vince Menzione: Evergreen, I could Ira Lyra. Yeah. They’re, they’re becoming bigger and bigger. Private equity is getting involved. What’s important, what’s important to note too is that the customer is driving this because customers are requiring more and it’s no longer about, and my my point of view is it’s no longer about loading up software and just letting it go. [00:04:22] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:04:23] Vince Menzione: You need to be hands-on all the time. [00:04:24] Oguo Atuanya: Abs. Absolutely. And, and [00:04:26] Vince Menzione: yeah, [00:04:26] Oguo Atuanya: kind of skating towards that park of, um. MIP? [00:04:31] Vince Menzione: Yes. Let’s talk about MIP [00:04:33] Oguo Atuanya: managed intelligence providers. [00:04:35] Vince Menzione: So last year, year Beyond conference, I believe you launched this like new in I, we’ll call the new nomenclature or the new name, or this new thing. [00:04:46] And evolved. And evolved, yeah. [00:04:48] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:04:49] Vince Menzione: So talk about the managed intelligence provider for us. [00:04:52] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. Wow. When it happened In Beyond Or at? Beyond, I should say. Um. We thought it’d catch on because it’s apt. I mean, it’s, it’s sort of indicative of what’s happening now and what will happen over the next 24 months, but, uh, the sort of migration towards this and the marketplace has been immense. [00:05:17] I mean, you, and you, you know, hit on what the difference is. Yes. Earlier on, um, today. What’s driving this shift is that most MSPs have been really good at being tools and technology infrastructure providers. [00:05:36] Vince Menzione: Yep. [00:05:36] Oguo Atuanya: Right. [00:05:37] Vince Menzione: They would hook up your network and your printer. In the old days, they fix your, fix your computers. [00:05:42] Yes. Or replace re-image, all those things. Right? Yes. That was the old days. And, [00:05:46] Oguo Atuanya: and, and also provide some very manual services delivery, which will now play. In this new era that we are actually, I shouldn’t say going into, it’s taking all, [00:06:00] Vince Menzione: we’re, we’re there, [00:06:00] Oguo Atuanya: we’re there right now. So, um, you know, they, they, I guess the transformation from MSP to MIP others partners that would actually become managed intelligence providers. [00:06:14] That means really, you know, integrating intelligence into workflow that matters for the SMBs. Right. So you [00:06:23] Vince Menzione: so double click on that for, [00:06:25] Oguo Atuanya: for [00:06:25] Vince Menzione: our [00:06:26] Oguo Atuanya: viewers. Yeah. So all really means is that you’re moving from being that, you know [00:06:29] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:30] Oguo Atuanya: Technology, infrastructure, tools, provider to, you know, becoming an, an orchestrator and a and a and a business consultant. [00:06:38] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:38] Oguo Atuanya: Right. For you. SMB. Right. So important. ’cause you have to now get into, uh, very secure, streamlined automated AI driven workflows to help them. [00:06:52] Vince Menzione: All driven in the cloud. Everything’s in the cloud now, as opposed to the old days. Right. On premise. [00:06:58] Oguo Atuanya: All gone. None. That’s happening. It’s all gone. All gone. Yeah. [00:07:00] So you, you’ve got this automated platform right now. You should as, um, an MIP, um, we actually gonna be in a position to design, um, agent tech organizations for your, uh, SMBs who wanna scale. ’cause as we talked about yesterday, yeah. SMBs have opportunities they wanna grow, but not have the wherewithal to go hire a hundred people. [00:07:27] Instead of doing that, you go hire a hundred agents. Yeah, but you’re gonna need that MIP to architect, the organization, launch it for you, manage it, get you, you know, automated, you know, workflows that you’d leverage to run your company, and then they have to manage and optimize the technology. Um, as necessary. [00:07:49] So, so, huge shift. [00:07:50] Vince Menzione: Huge shift. [00:07:51] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:07:52] Vince Menzione: And it was interesting for me being at the, where you talked about the write of Boom conference that you, were you, your organization was there? Yeah, I was there as well and I was in the room with some of the Microsoft folks and we had some of those larger partners we talked about [00:08:07] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:08:08] Vince Menzione: That were in the room as well. And just, uh, different perspectives too. Like I hadn’t heard it firsthand. It was interesting for Microsoft too, to get that feedback from. From some of them as well. Um, I think, I think the ones that are progressive are already on board with you. I’ve, I’ve already talked to some of those organizations, like, oh, we’re a hundred percent Pax eight, that’s it. [00:08:29] But then some of the others I think are still, there are still people out there that are stuck in the past. Would you agree? Like this community is in the, is in a transition right now to this new model? [00:08:38] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:08:39] Vince Menzione: Tell [00:08:39] Oguo Atuanya: us [00:08:39] Vince Menzione: about that. [00:08:40] Oguo Atuanya: There are, I mean, listen, I, I don’t, you know, wanna put a number. You know what we’re seeing. [00:08:48] But I’d say that about eventually, let’s say we’re gonna have about 30% of folks that really get it and move. [00:08:56] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:08:56] Oguo Atuanya: Right. The others we’re gonna have to, [00:08:59] Vince Menzione: there’ll be the laggards that’ll [00:09:00] Oguo Atuanya: take longer and let me just, you know, sort of rephrase that state. Most of them understand, you know, what the opportunity is with this whole Yeah. [00:09:14] Vince Menzione: You [00:09:15] Oguo Atuanya: know. They’re still struggling with being able to, you know, articulate this story, um, from a value prop perspective, right? You know, go in, talk to the SMBs, help the SMBs understand how, you know, they can be more productive, more efficient, and um, ultimately more profitable and scale, um, with an agent, you know, framework. [00:09:44] They still struggle. Yeah. And, and that’s kind of where we come in, where we helping these SMB or sorry, MSPs and to be ips. [00:09:54] Vince Menzione: So tell us, understand that. Tell us what you’re doing. I believe you, you stood up like academies and things like that, right? You’re doing some outreach, some enablement for the community? [00:10:02] Is that what it is? [00:10:03] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah, we we’re heavy, we’re heavy in, um, enablement. Um, because, you know, everyone realizes that. To be successful with this whole campaign. It’s not just about putting agents up in an agent store, real, SMB, you know, native, um, vertical aware agents that actually, you know, when you deploy it in an SMB business, right, they drive value right away, [00:10:37] Vince Menzione: right? [00:10:38] Oguo Atuanya: Right. So, but we also realize that it’s not just about, you know, landing the agents in the marketplace, but enablement is a huge factor. That’s why when you go back to things, you know, like academy, uh, the MIP playbook, uh, some of the, uh, inculcation integrations we we’re doing with, um, partners, really critical to have that enablement layer. [00:11:04] Vince Menzione: Interesting. [00:11:04] Oguo Atuanya: Along with providing the agents and the, in the agents store. [00:11:07] Vince Menzione: Who’s developing these agents in the agent store? Are they providers for the MSP community? Are they organizations like Take, take us through that model. [00:11:17] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. So they, they, they, because [00:11:18] Vince Menzione: you, you manage all the vendors. [00:11:20] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah, I do. Right? [00:11:21] Vince Menzione: I do. So tell us more about that. [00:11:22] Oguo Atuanya: I do. So it’s, it’s multifold, right? Um, one fold is you have prebuilt solutions that you know vendors. [00:11:30] Vince Menzione: Yep. [00:11:30] Oguo Atuanya: Built for, you know, SMBs and they’re directed towards SMBs. Then you also have a second category, uh, sorry, category of solutions that are more tools that MSBs use. [00:11:42] Right? But there’s also a third, um, prompt to this where we are orchestrating an integration of, um, um, IP between [00:11:54] Vince Menzione: interesting the [00:11:55] Oguo Atuanya: vendor department, uh, into providing, you know, solutions. That we can land in the, in the agent store. [00:12:03] Vince Menzione: That’s fascinating. So, yeah. So you have, so you have a standalone product or a standalone solution or agent. [00:12:10] You have the orchestration and then you have the customer tools and the tool. And the tools. [00:12:14] Oguo Atuanya: Yes. [00:12:15] Vince Menzione: Yes. That’s fascinating. [00:12:17] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. It’s um, it’s sort of a three flying approach that, um, the market needs, right? Yeah. And that, that’s key. By the way, Vince, when you know, um. You’re developing these agents and these solutions. [00:12:30] Yeah. Because they’re not, they’re not just tools anymore, right. Essentially it could be somebody’s, uh, FTE. [00:12:38] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:12:38] Oguo Atuanya: Right. So they have to address a specific outcome. They have to be, you know, uh, valuable. You have to show the ROI and for these SMBs. Don’t have a lot of wiggle room. [00:12:53] Vince Menzione: So you, that they’re smaller companies, right? [00:12:55] Yeah. So anything you do is gonna be super impactful. Yeah. It’s not something they can absorb necessarily, or, you know, lose time and money. [00:13:03] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:13:03] Vince Menzione: Uh, you’ve gotta be very sensitive to that in this, in this market, this size market. And even the MSPs are, even though there are some that are much larger, there’s still a lot of smaller MSPs out there. [00:13:14] Oguo Atuanya: And, and coming to the MIP playbook, um, what partners don’t need anymore. Um, it’s hype. [00:13:23] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:13:24] Oguo Atuanya: They need an almost curriculum driven approach, right. To landing this initiative and infrastructure and also managing it long term. Yeah. So that’s what the MIP playbook does. [00:13:39] Vince Menzione: So you were an executive at Microsoft. [00:13:41] You managed the channel partner. I, I would call the resellers and the disti. In fact, for the America’s business, I believe was your role. [00:13:49] Oguo Atuanya: I I did manage the large resellers. At [00:13:51] Vince Menzione: large resellers. So at one point, and you also had the Disti at one time? [00:13:54] Oguo Atuanya: At one point I had the Disti, the telco, the domain providers. [00:13:58] Vince Menzione: Yes. The large resellers. I remember when we first met, yes. I think that was when, [00:14:00] Oguo Atuanya: yes. [00:14:00] Vince Menzione: Yes. And so when you came, PAX eight is a very strong Microsoft partner. You were, again, I mentioned you were the launch partner or one of the launch partners for the marketplace. [00:14:09] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. [00:14:09] Vince Menzione: But talk about the role and the relationship with Microsoft and the value that PAX eight provides for this market, uh, kind of layering between, uh, the Microsoft components and, and the SMB market. [00:14:24] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. Does that [00:14:24] Vince Menzione: make sense? [00:14:25] Oguo Atuanya: Yeah. So, so Microsoft has always been. Um, keen on the SMB segment, um, you know, Jose Gomez and Company in the Americas, and folks like, um, Alison West Hughes from a core perspective that, yeah, they’re very serious about this SMB segment. And, um, I’d say the key difference with Microsoft is Microsoft realized early. [00:14:56] Probably based on the fact that Microsoft’s always been a very strong

Unlocking the Power of Frontier Partnerships Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this compelling discussion from the Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat, Microsoft GM Katharine Kennedy joins Vince Menzione to break down the operating models of “Frontier Firms.” Katharine shares her incredible journey of scaling the ServiceNow partnership from zero to $1 billion in TCV and reveals her current mission: building Adobe into the next great frontier firm for Microsoft. The conversation dives deep into the necessity of AI-led innovation, the critical importance of placing trust at the center of every technological stack, and why traditional quarterly business reviews are being replaced by real-time, constant connectivity. Whether you are an ISV, SDC, or channel partner, this session provides a roadmap for navigating the tectonic shifts in the AI ecosystem through organizational alignment and shared vision. Key Takeaways Frontier firms integrate AI up and down the UI, agent, and data layers while evolving their internal operating systems. Successful partnerships require a shared vision at the highest level that melds two mission statements into a single belief system. The traditional QBR is becoming outdated, replaced by real-time, constant communication across engineering and product teams. Trust must be the primary pillar of AI development, supported by core principles like fairness, reliability, and accountability. Leading with co-innovation and customer-centric data solutions is more effective than leading strictly with revenue goals. Strategic use of the Microsoft Marketplace remains a “hidden gem” for achieving scale and high-velocity growth. https://youtu.be/OU22MIfs-1A If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Frontier Firms, SDC, Microsoft GM, Adobe Partnership, ServiceNow, AI Operating Model, Responsible AI, Co-innovation, Partner Value Chain, Organizational Alignment, Microsoft Marketplace, TCV, Data Sovereignty, AI Agents, Adobe Firefly, Azure, Ecosystem Growth, Digital Transformation, AI Governance, Strategic Partnerships, Tech Leadership. Transcript: Katharine Kennedy Vince Menzione: [00:00:00] Honestly, it’s people. Yes, with agents. Um, and I know we hear that and it’s very like, oh, what does it mean? Are we really using it? I cannot tell you how many agents I use in a day. We just finished Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat here in beautiful Boca to a sold out crowd. Come join me now for a compelling discussion on the impacts of the tectonic shifts we’re all seeing. We, we’ve talked about MSP, we’ve talked about channel. We’ve talked about marketplace. We haven’t really dug deep into the SDC conversation, and I still, that doesn’t roll off my tongue. I still say ISV in my own mind, but the software development corporations, um, we’ve had several executives from that, from that world. Sandy Gupta has been. Um, many time guests, uh, at, at, at our events and we really wanted to double click. And I was so fortunate to meet Katherine Kennedy several months ago and learned about what [00:01:00] she’s doing and what the work that she’s driving. So I wanna invite her on stage ’cause we’re gonna have a very intimate conversation by Yeah, we call these so great to have you here. And, uh, you’re a GM at Microsoft, which is a big deal, by the way. A lot of people don’t know that. Thank you. And you’re running, uh, two of, I’d say two of the most significant partners within the Microsoft ecosystem. I would say obviously two. Now. Just one. Okay. We’re doubling down on focus. So nice to meet everybody. I, I wish there was a fire ’cause it did. What you Well come on. This goes off heat by the way. We get back off a little bit. This goes off our, so all good. So tell us, give us your, yeah. Give us your background and your role. Katharine Kennedy: Sure. So Catherine Kennedy. Nice to meet you all. Um, I’m a GM at Microsoft previously overseeing both the ServiceNow and the Adobe practice. Um, spent the last four years building ServiceNow too. What now our previous guests got to refer to as our REO, you know, exciting, uh, big growth [00:02:00] partnership. Um, so we took that from, for them from $0 in terms of shared revenue to a billion dollars in TCV. Um, and they have one of the largest Macs now with Microsoft. And we did that over the course of three years. So we’ll talk a little bit about. Um, the mindset, uh, and the operating models and things that we implemented with ServiceNow. Um, and then at the time, um, they asked me to take on Adobe as well. And when we saw the opportunity at Adobe, we said, wow, we really need to focus here. And so I have the privilege of being able to focus on Adobe this year. And, um. What I’m most excited about is the ecosystem and the ecosystem opportunity with Adobe as we build them into the next frontier firm or Microsoft. Vince Menzione: And of course we use the term spark, the ecosystem, so yes. Um, so let’s, let’s dive in [00:03:00] here. Use the term mindset. I was thinking about mindset. Market shift, frontier Firm, how do those things align together? Microsoft has been talking, I mean, Judson up on stage and Ignite talking about frontier firms. Nina’s talked about frontier firms. This is a shift in how organizations operate. Yes. In for some, yes. Uh, for others. I was thinking, what are you seeing across the SDC community specifically where you’ve managed before, where you’re managing now, but with ServiceNow and Adobe as an examples? What defines a company that’s truly making this leap? Katharine Kennedy: So as we’re looking at these frontier firms, uh, especially in the S-D-C-I-C spaces, we’re looking at, um, how do they implement AI up and down their stack, but then across the operating system, um, and. I refer to it in our business as the partnership value chain. ’cause we look at our SDCs and ISVs as partners. Um, and so the partner operating model between Microsoft and in this [00:04:00] case, Adobe or ServiceNow, has to be solely in lockstep and moving at warp speed. It’s as, as we’ve been talking about all day, it’s just moving so fast and so the tighter. We’re connected. The Cohesity across the company, um, is absolutely critical, but it’s AI up and down, AI across, um, and what I mean by that is, uh. That’s from the UI layer to the agent layer down to the data layer. So unlocking all of the layers of the stack. And then across the operating model, how are we empowering each executive to buy in on that North star or that strategy that we have jointly? And then how do we drive that operationally to execute at the field level? And that’s. Probably the biggest undertaking, um, I’ve ever done because it’s really you, your team becomes, uh, [00:05:00] these we’re like ants running between two giant companies. I mean, it’s just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And um, that’s really the art and the science of it is that honestly it’s people. Yes. Um, and I know we hear that and it’s very like, oh, what does it mean? Are we really using it? I cannot tell you how many agents I use in a day. It’s truly remarkable. Vince Menzione: You mentioned North Star, so I wanted to Yeah. Can I double click on it? Katharine Kennedy: Please do. Yes. Happy to. Vince Menzione: Yeah. I think about mission and purpose and all that tying into North Star. Are, are you implying that an organization needs to get its North Star, right? First and then how, how, and what, what are most of these organizations you’re seeing today, not the ones you manage, but other organizations in the SDC portfolio? Like where are they in terms of the continuum? How are, how are they moving along and what’s your guidance to them? Katharine Kennedy: It’s a good question. So I’ll start by saying my observation, my opinion is [00:06:00] as I’m looking across the companies that are successful and the ones who are yet to be successful, um, the key differentiator is that there is a shared vision at the highest level of the company that drives all the way down to the field. And what I mean by that is we’re taking two mission statements and we’re melding them together. Then we’re creating a belief system and it becomes a cultural shift across two companies versus, Hey, we’re gonna have all of these siloed, tactical, yeah. Operating units and they’re gonna do their own thing and maybe they’ll be successful over here. Maybe they’re doing something different over here, but we’re really. I think I heard Nina say this also, we’re pulling that red thread through the company. Yes. Um, which is critical. And I’ve seen so many companies just show up for the revenue. And yes, that’s an absolute outcome and it’s a [00:07:00] tremendous outcome if you do it right, but you have to do it right. You have to pull that red thread and you have to have every single part of the. Partner value chain buying into this strategy and this North Star, and if they don’t, if one piece of that chain is not bought in, you fail. Yeah. Vince Menzione: Organizational alignment is what you’re saying and what, what I’m hearing is in order, in terms of getting the AI Strat, the North Star aligned. Yes. You’ve gotta get the, I call the C-Suite aligned. Yes. You need to get all the functions of the organization aligned to the thread that you talked about. Yes. And then what does that look like? What does that North Star look like? What is it, what is the ideal example of what the North Star would look like? I’m, I’m a frontier firm. I brought in on ai, music agent ai. I’m doing all the things that we’ve talked about earlier. Katharine Kennedy: Yes. Um, so I think it, so operationally, um, it’s moving the operational rhythm from what used to be [00:08:00] qbr. Frankly, I think that’s outdated. Yes, it is. It is real time, constant communication. And yes, there will be checkpoints and they could be weekly, they could be monthly, they could be quarterly, but this is just real time constant communication because the pace of business, the pace of innovation is going so fast. We have to have that direct line of communication product to product team. We have to have that direct line of communication, engineering to engineering, because with everything going in on. Everything going on in the macroeconomic climate today, especially given concerns around sovereignty. Um, I run a global business, so we have customers saying, Hey, I don’t wanna host my data in a place where I don’t align with the values. That’s a real situation. That was actually a topic at Davos, as you mentioned, um, Nina. And so, um, we’re rapidly addressing these concerns with our customers and meeting our customers where they are. [00:09:00] Um, but it’s that real time constant connectivity. Um, and we’re frankly. We’re seeing it across the board. Um, but the operating model has to change. We have to look at more advanced, modern models, uh, for these partnership businesses to sustain in this next wave of transformation. Frankly, Vince Menzione: you know, it’s, so, you talked about values? Yes. This is, this leads into another conversation, right? When we talk about ai, we talk about, we talk about AI and the use, use cases. We skip over things like values and trust and governance. Katharine Kennedy: Oh, good segue. This is, this is my passion, please. Oh, I get so worked up about this. Good. So I, I had the privilege of, um, sitting, uh, with our SLC community a couple weeks ago, and, uh, they introduced, oh, here’s our amazing new, uh, pitch. We were just [00:10:00] speaking about it in the back actually. And, and it is, it’s amazing. And, uh, they said, do you have any feedback? And I was like, oh. And I waited and I saw everybody, every, you know, oh, we need to change this or tweak that. And I, and I waited. And then at the last moment I stood up. I was like, okay, I gotta say it. I was like, you say intelligence and trust. I, this is a small tweak, but trust has to be first, foremost, first, last, center, everything. Trust has to be everything. And, um, and I truly mean that. And I think, you know. Of all the companies I’ve worked for and I’ve worked for quite a few, um, Microsoft is the company that I believe in the most that can do the most good in society and in the global. Macroeconomic economy, a anything right in the world, in your communities. Um, and so one of the things that really struck me, and I keep coming back to with Microsoft and the, the topic of trust is how Microsoft, [00:11:00] um, was first to the table in this, in this, um, moment of ai. You know, introduction a few years ago to say, Hey, we need a set of core values and ethics and principles that we’re all gonna, we’re all gonna marshal around and I haven’t heard it as much recently, and now it’s coming back. And, uh, you know, the, the six core principles that Microsoft used is, I’m just gonna tell you right now, our fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusivity, um, transparency and accountability. And it’s not. Just six principles that you see on a poster in the offices. These are embedded, again, back to the operating model across every single aspect of our business. So within our product, within our engineering, even just in our collaboration tools, you could be sending a teams message and you’ll get a notification, Hey, this is not aligned to the Microsoft. Core [00:12:00] values of ai. And so there are gates and governance and guardrails built into every layer of our technology stack and then across the company in our operating rhythms. And that is what gets me so excited and gets me up at, at out of bed in the morning. Um. I actually got a call from Sila. No one wants a call from Sila. Does anybody know Sila? Uh, yeah. Yes. Okay. That’s our legal, that’s our legal team. Legal affairs. Sila. Yeah. No one wants that call. Uh, I actually, I got so excited. I was like, are you calling about responsible ai? ’cause I was one of the first, um, I was one of the first to raise my hand to say. We will sign up. Was it Brad Smith calling you? Oh gosh. Oh, that would be a dream. I think he’s so, I’m, I love him. I think he’s so cool. Um, I love that you actually, sorry, side, I’m gonna take you on a side tour. Next slide. Um, my favorite thing to do is pull up the news and you’re seeing something from the Prime Minister in, you know, Germany and Brad [00:13:00] Smith’s in the foreground Yes. Of every photo. You’re just like, wow, we’re influencing at such a global. Um, base that I could just, it’s hard to wrap your head around sometimes, but, so anyways, going back, I’m gonna take us back to trust. Um, please. Vince Menzione: Well, I just think we need to apply it back to ai, right? Because it is so important. It is. It is. These agents are out there and if they’re not governed and if you don’t Yeah, yeah. Katharine Kennedy: I’m so, so, yeah, thank you. Keeping me on track. So, so why I am excited about it is, is because, um. As we’re going out into our communities, um, we’re here in the southeast and one of the biggest issues that comes up over and over again is, how do I trust that AI is not gonna learn off my data? How am I gonna trust that it’s telling me the right information? And so on and so forth. And that’s when I get to this great conversation about trust and our responsible AI pact and, um. This is, this is truly what I mean, that it can be a force [00:14:00] multiplier, but it can be a force for good. And if you don’t have those guardrails and that governance and those principles aligned across the companies. You fall down, right? You fall down with the customers, you fall down with the organizations you’re serving. And so going back to our North Star two, we align there, we align with the values and the ethics, and then we can start to really build a business together. And that’s how we were able to do it so fast. And so, um, at such scale, at such global scale, um, with. ServiceNow, but now we’re going to take a mature partner in Adobe and we’re gonna take them to the frontier in a way you haven’t seen before. So. Just a little commercial. Adobe is gonna be announcing their Adobe marketing agent. I love it as GA next month. So they are a frontier firm for us. Yes, very exciting round of applause for Adobe there. For Adobe. Yeah. And more to come. So we’ll be [00:15:00] having, uh, their firefly, uh, video models coming out on Azure and available through Marketplace as well, um, coming soon. So lots of exciting things happening. Vince Menzione: Sounds exciting. So let’s talk about those partner big wins that you’re saying. Give us some examples of those. Katharine Kennedy: Now are you talking about from a Microsoft and Adobe co-innovation perspective? Yes, from the co-innovation perspective. Okay. Yeah. Um, so from a co-innovation perspective, this is. This is a labor of love. Um, I approach it in a very disciplined manner. The way that we look at, um, these frontier firms is we’re leading with co-innovation versus leading with revenue. And it’s a, it’s, it’s a paradigm shift that takes everyone to buy in back to my earlier point, but also, um, the hardest part is. Teaching companies, um, to do things differently. Uh, so we start with [00:16:00] engineering and product. And actually before we get there, we start with customer and we sit with our customers. We understand what our customers are asking for. We’re understanding the value that they need unlocked, and typically it’s at the data data layer. And so what we’re doing is we’re seeing, okay, what are the data things? What are the data silos that need to be unlocked? And so we start to kind of build up from there, taking the customer perspective. Then we sit with engineering and product and we say, okay, what do we have on the truck today? How can we elevate this to an AI led AI first motion that meets our customers where they are in their AI journey? And delivers value and business outcomes day one versus, hey, we have to go through this laborous process. One of the other things we’re seeing is forward deployed engineers. Um, so thinking about, Hey, how do we sit with our customers and start architecting. What they need to address their business challenges today, um, because AI [00:17:00] can solve a lot of this, right? And so it’s a really interesting model shift that we’re seeing across the board within Microsoft, within our largest ISVs, and within our customer and our, um, ecosystem community with our GSIs, our sis, as well as our channel. Vince Menzione: So I know we were. You’ve had a lot. We, we had Jason up here talking about marketplace. Yes. And Jason Grey, Ja. Oh no, Jason. R Jason. R Jason. Yeah. We’ve had Jason Grey. He’s had Jason Grey. Yes. Well, we, um, you’re, you ServiceNow got called out in that last set session. I know. I was thinking about marketplace and co-selling. Yes. And then ecosystem. So I wanna like tie those three things together if that’s possible with you. Like what are you seeing from a best practice perspective. Obviously ServiceNow has been a top a top partner. We’re starting to see a lot of, well, channel D, channel [00:18:00] resellers, and the like. What are you seeing from a best practice perspective and is there yes. Central opportunities there? Katharine Kennedy: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. Three things. Um, one is AI led innovation. First and foremost, you gotta have the solution. You gotta have it. If you don’t have the solution, you don’t have something to sell. Second is a, um, AI led go to market hero motion. And what I mean by that, so in the, I’ll use ServiceNow as a, as a. Example ServiceNow. We created a, the first, uh, copilot p

Find the room that changes everything. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ I’ve been thinking about purpose a lot lately. Not your job title. Not your company’s mission statement. Not your OKRs. Your reason for being. In this solo episode, I challenge the traditional concept of Ikigai — the Japanese framework for finding meaning — and reveal the critical piece that’s been missing from the standard four-circle model all along. I draw from 40 years in this industry, from carrying a bag in the field to leading a $4.6 billion partner business at Microsoft, to a serious accident that stopped me cold and forced me to ask the hardest questions of my life. What came out of that experience changed how I see purpose entirely. My conclusion: purpose is not a solo exercise. You don’t find it in a diagram. You find it in the room — the right room, with the right people, at the right moment. In this episode, I introduce the Fifth Circle — the question every partner leader and ecosystem builder needs to add to their Ikigai: Who am I finding it with? https://youtu.be/_z_QRObCXSc Key Takeaways Ikigai represents your “reason for being” across four circles: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for — but that’s not the whole picture. The traditional model is almost always framed as a solo exercise. For those of us building partnerships for a living, that framing is incomplete. Proximity is a strategic asset — especially now, in the Decade of the Ecosystem. My accident was the catalyst that clarified everything: my purpose wasn’t in the content I created. It was in the community I served. The best partner leaders don’t treat hyperscalers as vendors or partners as channels — they treat them as co-creators and extensions of their own mission. Nobody does the extraordinary alone. The Fifth Circle asks: Who are you finding it with? If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Ikigai, reason for being, ecosystem builder, partner leader, hyperscaler executive, Microsoft partner business, proximity strategy, decade of the ecosystem, Ultimate Partner, relational leadership, AI marketplace, co-sell, community building, professional breakthrough, career reinvention, mission statement, vision statement, Okinawa centenarians, purpose-driven leadership, networking vs. relationship, boot cast, Bellevue Washington, Ultimate Partner Live, strategic assets, co-creator mindset. Transcript: UP Solocast March 27 [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Manzione, your host, and today we have a special treat. I’m going to spend some time with you just one-on-one having a conversation that really I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. What is your reason for being not your job title, not your company’s mission statement, not your OKRs? [00:00:30] Vince Menzione: Your reason for being, you see, there’s a Japanese concept that many of us follow or talk about. In fact, I have posted about this before. Ikigai. It means roughly reason for being or reason to wake up in the morning, and it’s represented over four overlapping circles. And I’ve talked about my icky guy extensively because I feel like I just found it over the last few years. [00:00:56] Vince Menzione: An Iki guy is what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. We’re all four of these. Me? That’s your purpose. That’s your icky guy. So I first encountered this years ago. In fact, I was in search for my mission for so long. I spent time with Dr. Michael Vet. In the room trying to understand like where I took my career, where I took all the things that I was good at doing, leading partnerships and the things that I enjoyed doing and all the things that I could help the world doing. [00:01:33] Vince Menzione: But something always felt incomplete about that. In all those conversations and building out my mission statement and my vision statement and some, some other capacities, and it took me, you know, 40 years in this industry, 290 podcast conversations. Dozens of events that I’ve either been on stage or the 10 and 11 that we’ve hosted ourselves and a career that took me from selling in the field, carrying a bag to leading a $4.6 billion partner business at Microsoft. [00:02:06] Vince Menzione: It took me all of that to understand what was missing, and that’s what today’s episode is all about. Let me give you the full, icky guy picture before I tell you what I think is missing. The concept comes from the Okinawa Japan region. Famous for having one of the highest concentrations of centenarians in the world. [00:02:26] Vince Menzione: Researchers have studied these people for a long time to understand why they’ve lived so long, and it comes down to purpose. What was their icky guy? The framework became popular in the west, largely because it gave people a practical tool. Four questions, four circles. Find the overlap. And it works as far as it goes, but I’ve seen executives use it in offsites. [00:02:51] Vince Menzione: Coaches use it for clients. Leaders use it to navigate career transitions, and people talk about it on LinkedIn and on social all the time. The challenge is how it’s framed. It’s almost always framed in a solo exercise. You alone answering these four questions isolated from the people around you, you alone finding that intersection. [00:03:14] Vince Menzione: You alone discovering your purpose. And for many things in life, that’s the right frame. Introspection matters. Self-knowledge matters. But for those of us who are building partnerships for a living, for partner leaders, ecosystem builders, hyperscaler, executives, ISV, founders, MSP operators, and people that build communities like Ultimate Partner, I wanna offer you a different frame. [00:03:41] Vince Menzione: Here’s what I’ve learned, and I don’t say this lightly because it took a long time to articulate it clearly to me, and maybe it was my accident that made this really resonate. You don’t find your purpose alone. You find it in the room, the right room with the right people at the right moment. I can trace almost every significant turn in my career, every breakthrough, every reinvention. [00:04:10] Vince Menzione: Every moment of clarity back to a room, a conversation at a partner conference, a dinner where someone said something that shifted my perspective, a coach that led me to the right conclusions. An event where I met someone who saw what I was building before I fully saw it myself. This isn’t luck, this is proximity. [00:04:35] Vince Menzione: And in the decade of the ecosystem. And during these times of tectonic shifts, which is what I believe we’re living through right now, proximity is a strategic asset. Think about the best results you’ve driven in partnerships. Were they the result of a product strategy as a solo strategy exercise, or were they the product of being in the right relationship at the right time with the right, trusted? [00:05:02] Vince Menzione: I know what your answer is because I’ve heard it 290 plus times. The guests on this podcast, the Tony Voyance, the Greg Serafin, the Jay McBain, the Dr. Michael DVAs, the Nina Hardings in the room, every one of them, when I ask about their greatest moments, they talk about people, they talk about the team, the partnership, the relationships that made it possible. [00:05:28] Vince Menzione: That is the fifth circle, not just what you love. What you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, but who you find it with. I wanna get personal for a second. Just over a year ago, on March 31st of last year, as you all know, I was in a very serious accident. I won’t go into great details about this, but it was the kind of moment that stopped me. [00:05:55] Vince Menzione: It forced me to look up from the world and ask the hard questions. What am I doing? Why does this matter? Who am I doing it for? I spent a month basically in bed trying to work through getting ready for our event that year in Redmond. And during that time, I had nothing to do but think. And what I kept coming back to again and again, wasn’t the content I’ve created on the podcast. [00:06:24] Vince Menzione: It wasn’t the leaders coming on stage. Oh, of course those were important components of it. It was the people, the community in the room, and when I had to get up on stage again, when I needed to go out to Redmond, it was those people that were calling me back. The leaders I’d sat across from for these five plus years. [00:06:45] Vince Menzione: The conversations that have changed my thinking, the relationships that have made ultimate partners, something real, that was my icky guy. And I hadn’t built it alone. I had built it in the room with the most remarkable collection of partner leaders I could ever imagined when I came back, blue Cast and all, I knew more clearly than ever why I do this, and the answer wasn’t in a four circle diagram. [00:07:14] Vince Menzione: It was in the face of the people that showed up in that room, and I could see them now in front of me to this day. So what does this mean for you as a partner leader, as an ecosystem builder? Someone navigating the tectonic shifts of AI marketplace co-sell and more. It means your Ikigai exercise needs a fifth question, not just what do I love? [00:07:39] Vince Menzione: What am I good at? What does the world need? What can I be paid for, but also who am I finding it with? Let me make this concrete. The best partner leaders I know don’t just have strong strategies. They have strong ecosystems of people, mentors, collaborators, cos sellers, hyperscalers champions, and community members who amplify what they’re building. [00:08:09] Vince Menzione: I see it in my friends that are building their communities like Christine Bonard at the Witt Network. I see it in those rooms. It’s not transactional. They’re relational. They don’t treat the hyperscaler as a vendor. They treat them as a co-creator. They don’t treat their partners as a channel. They treat them as an extension of their own mission. [00:08:32] Vince Menzione: They don’t show up at events to collect business cards. They show up to find their people. That last one. Finding your people is where Ikigai gets activated in the ecosystem world. Proximity to the right people, ideas, opportunities, changes, everything. That’s not a tagline. That’s the operating principle behind everything. [00:08:57] Vince Menzione: Ultimate Partner has built the podcast, the events up live in Bellevue, this May and our community. All of it is about creating the room. Because when you find the right room, when you’re in it, contributing to it, building in it, your purpose doesn’t stay abstract, it becomes real. It becomes results. It becomes the extraordinary. [00:09:28] Vince Menzione: I wanna leave you with this somewhere in your career, maybe it’s already happened, maybe it’s ahead of you. There will be a room where something shifts, a conversation that reframes how you see your work, a relationship that accelerates everything. A community that makes you more than you would’ve been without it. [00:09:51] Vince Menzione: That room doesn’t happen by accident. You have to pursue it. You have to invest in it. You have to show up even when it’s hard, even when you’re wearing a boot cast. Even when the timing isn’t perfect because nobody does the extraordinary alone, that’s what the Ultimate Partner framework is built on. [00:10:15] Vince Menzione: That’s what the book that I’m writing is built on, and that’s what I believe with every conversation I’ve been privileged to have on this podcast and in the rooms at Ultimate Partner events. Find your room, build on it. And be the kind of partner, someone else’s breakthrough. Depends on. Thanks for being here. [00:10:39] Vince Menzione: Thanks for being part of the Ultimate Partner podcast about being part of our mission, being part of our community, showing up in our room. Until next time, we’ll see you in person, hopefully at our next event. Ultimate Partner Live is coming soon, May 11th through the 13th in beautiful Bellevue, Washington. [00:11:02] Vince Menzione: I hope to see you there. [

Master the $500B Cloud Marketplace Engine Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this compelling discussion, Vince Menzione sits down with Dexter Hardy, founder of Ntegral and the visionary behind Spark, to deconstruct the massive transformation happening within the cloud ecosystem. Dexter shares his journey of evolving from a traditional systems integrator to a marketplace powerhouse with over 300 solutions and customers in 100 countries, revealing the “Marketplace Operating System” that drives global sales without a massive headcount. They dive deep into the Spark GTM methodology, discussing how companies can bridge the gap between building a solution and actually driving “Get It Now” transactions while navigating the $500 billion committed cloud-spend landscape. From the nuances of multi-party private offers to the critical role of AI in becoming a “frontier firm,” this episode provides a high-level masterclass for any partner looking to turn the marketplace into their most effective revenue stream. https://youtu.be/VLkkuHPpYuk?si=x03Odt2UsCjhtVf4 Key Takeaways The cloud marketplace represents a potential $500 billion in committed spend that partners cannot access without MAC-eligible, transactable solutions. Marketplace as a Service (MaaS) helps traditional SIs pivot to becoming SDCs or ISVs by providing a strategic roadmap for IP conversion. Successful marketplace strategy requires a “Marketplace Operating System” that aligns digital sales with your internal operations and business goals. The “Get It Now” economy allows for 24-hour global sales and lead generation without the need for traditional manual email or phone chains. Becoming a “Frontier Firm” means combining human experience with AI to do things faster, better, and more efficiently than the competition. Co-selling is evolving beyond just the hyperscalers to include rich, multi-party private offers involving resellers and distributors. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: Integral, Spark, Marketplace as a Service, MaaS, Marketplace Operating System, Marketplace Strategy, Transactable Offers, Get It Now button, SI to ISV pivot, SDC, Microsoft Marketplace, AWS Marketplace, Google Cloud Marketplace, IP Co-sell, MAC eligible, Multi-party private offers, REO, Reseller enabled offers, Cloud Committed Spend, Frontier Firm, AI agents, Spark GTM methodology, Marketplace Optimization, Digital Sales Flywheel. Transcript: Dexter Hardy Audio Episode [00:00:00] Dexter Hardy: AI in the hands of someone who has no idea what they’re doing is just a, it’s a faster way to failure, right? Yeah. ’cause they have, they [00:00:06] Vince Menzione: still don’t understand the concepts. [00:00:11] Vince Menzione: We just finished Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat here in beautiful Boca to a sold out crowd. Today I’m joined by Dexter Hardy, the founder of Integral for a compelling discussion. Dexter, welcome back to the podcast. Great to be here, Vince. It’s [00:00:29] Dexter Hardy: always a pleasure. [00:00:30] Vince Menzione: It is so good to have you back in Boca. [00:00:33] Vince Menzione: Uh, we just wrapped up our ultimate partner executive winter retreat. We call it the Winter Retreat now. [00:00:39] Dexter Hardy: Yep. [00:00:39] Vince Menzione: It’s still February when this airs. It’ll probably be March or April. [00:00:43] Dexter Hardy: Okay. [00:00:43] Vince Menzione: But, um, yeah, the weather in the north has been, they’ve had a tough winter. [00:00:49] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. It’s been brutal [00:00:50] Vince Menzione: for, it’s been brutal. Even, even Atlanta where you are. [00:00:53] Vince Menzione: Had a little bit of winter this year as well. [00:00:54] Dexter Hardy: I was happy to get on the flight. Yeah. It was like 29 degrees the day out, so, [00:00:59] Vince Menzione: so, um, this is your second time Yeah. On Ultimate Partner. And we’ve been friends for, we’re just talking about this. You’ve been to every single one of our Ultimate Partner events. [00:01:10] Vince Menzione: Nine events, [00:01:12] Dexter Hardy: yep. [00:01:12] Vince Menzione: Three times here in Boca and then in other cities like Dallas and Las Colinas. Seattle, Seattle and Reston. Oh my goodness. And we’re back in Seattle again in May. So, uh, we’ve been, we’ve been busy. We’ve been busy. Both of us have [00:01:27] Dexter Hardy: Scott Myer [00:01:28] Vince Menzione: up and we’ve been, and we were introduced. We’ve been friends and worked together. [00:01:31] Vince Menzione: And so I would love to get caught up on you and Integral. [00:01:35] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. [00:01:36] Vince Menzione: Um, the first time we sat down, we talked about Integral as a marketplace. Uh, customer base or, or, or vendor supporting the marketplace. [00:01:45] Dexter Hardy: Yep. [00:01:46] Vince Menzione: And you were, you’ve been, uh, showcased at Microsoft with the Marketplace organization. You’ve done some astounding things in terms of driving business without like a big sales force, you know, and driving marketplace sales, uh, to very high levels. [00:02:02] Dexter Hardy: Yep. [00:02:03] Vince Menzione: And, uh, and now you, I’ll call it a little bit of a twist and turn, but now. You’ve taken all the great learnings, and I’m probably sharing some of your thunder here, but you’ve taken all the great learnings that you’ve had in marketplace and your business [00:02:16] Dexter Hardy: mm-hmm. [00:02:16] Vince Menzione: And now you’re like looking at all these other companies, they’re probably trying to do the same thing and finding ways to help them. [00:02:21] Vince Menzione: So let’s, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about where you’re going. [00:02:25] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. So, so thanks for that. And it’s always a pleasure to be, you know, in the room with you, especially on the podcast, uh, seeing it grow over the years. And, um, to kind of double click on. How did we get to where we are with, uh, spark Bi Integral? [00:02:40] Dexter Hardy: Um, it’s our marketplace as a service offering. Um, we [00:02:46] Vince Menzione: marketplace as a service. You get that? I just wanna make sure people are listening and watching. Get that. That’s a, that’s a new acronym for me. [00:02:53] Dexter Hardy: That’s a new one. But, but what we, how do we get there? So to your point, yes, we. We’re a, um, marketplace first organization looking at the digital sales leaned in heavily on marketplace. [00:03:08] Dexter Hardy: Um, and what we were doing internally was we created our marketplace operating system. Like literally, how do we run our business? How do we digitize, how do we get those, uh, how do we turn the marketplace into our 24 hour sales guy? Yeah. Taking all those lessons learned how you deal with the hyperscale or how do you understand, you know, the, the signals that’s happening in the market. [00:03:33] Dexter Hardy: Uh, coupling that with, because we’ve been a member of this wonderful organization and getting into the partner community ecosystem, we get asked a million times, I bet. What do you do? How do you do it? That’s help us understand marketplace and so what we. What we saw there was an opportunity to both lean into the challenges that other partners are facing. [00:04:00] Dexter Hardy: If you’re an SI that’s trying to pivot [00:04:02] Vince Menzione: yep, [00:04:03] Dexter Hardy: and be in the marketplace, you’re already established company, how do you create Transactable offers? How do we take the the marketplace opportunity and leverage AI and put our agents in the marketplace? Our aha moment was this is, this is an en enablement opportunity that we can get into and basically be the first ones in because we leaned into it, we understand it. [00:04:35] Dexter Hardy: What makes us different from the other companies is we actually use that methodology every day. [00:04:43] Vince Menzione: For those who maybe didn’t listen to the last podcast we did together, I know this story, but I want others to know the context of it. Tell us about your transformation to a marketplace firm. [00:04:54] Dexter Hardy: Okay, for sure. [00:04:56] Vince Menzione: Maybe the shorter version. [00:04:57] Dexter Hardy: The shorter version, [00:04:57] Vince Menzione: but I, I do know that there was some, you were in business for a long time before this became the business strategy. [00:05:03] Dexter Hardy: Yeah, so the shortened version business founded 2002, Microsoft partner for many years. Yep. 2020. Si. Si as an si. 2020 COVID. [00:05:16] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:05:16] Dexter Hardy: Consulting 2.0. [00:05:17] Dexter Hardy: How do you do what you do at scale for others? Taking your ip, converting it. We did that at 2020. Embraced the marketplace. We created our solutions, deploy them to the marketplace. The rest is history. We leaned in how [00:05:32] Vince Menzione: many solutions in the [00:05:33] Dexter Hardy: marketplace, over 300 solutions. I wanna [00:05:35] Vince Menzione: make sure people [00:05:35] Dexter Hardy: got that. [00:05:35] Dexter Hardy: Over a hundred, 300 [00:05:36] Vince Menzione: solutions. [00:05:37] Dexter Hardy: Over 300 solutions. Yeah. Uh, we have. Customers in over a hundred countries. I mean, and [00:05:42] Vince Menzione: yeah. [00:05:43] Dexter Hardy: You know, continuing to build and expand our customer base on a daily basis. And so, [00:05:48] Vince Menzione: and they’re, and they’re buying when you, while you sleep. I mean, we, we’ve known each other pretty well for a number of years. [00:05:54] Vince Menzione: And [00:05:54] Dexter Hardy: yeah, [00:05:54] Vince Menzione: you have customers like, um, I’ll throw out a number, like 25,000 customers, probably, maybe beyond that. And these customers are buying your solutions. All hours of the day and night, [00:06:06] Dexter Hardy: right? Yeah. I I love the get it now button in the marketplace. Literally all they have to do to work with us or transact with us is click on, get It Now, and that’s the transactable offer that everyone, there’s this mystique around. [00:06:19] Dexter Hardy: People are like, well, we don’t have any leads. We can, you know, our, we have an offer in the marketplace and nobody’s clicking on it. And I’m like, Hmm, [00:06:27] Vince Menzione: yeah, [00:06:27] Dexter Hardy: we can help you with that. Right? And so, um, you know, that’s how we. Our, our story with that, our background with that was it’s our 24 hour sales guy. We drive our campaigns, we align with the solution plays. [00:06:41] Dexter Hardy: We’re getting those clicks with, to your point, without this huge army of people. Yeah. And so now we’re saying from a marketplace strategic advisory, a lot of people were saying it earlier, like, you know, marketplace isn’t this adjacent thing to business. How do you strategically think about it as. Um, part of your business all up. [00:07:03] Dexter Hardy: How do you add that as a revenue stream, uh, for your organization? And yeah, there may be some changes that you need to make, you know, how do you incorporate the channel? How do you add in all of the things that you’re currently doing, but create that as a flywheel for this. Get it now economy. [00:07:22] Vince Menzione: So all the, I’m, I’m thinking out loud, like there’s probably a lot of people watching you up on stage at these events talking about how you evolved your company and grew it. [00:07:31] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. [00:07:32] Vince Menzione: Going, that’s me. [00:07:33] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. [00:07:33] Vince Menzione: That’s me. The old, the old version of you absolutely is them. [00:07:37] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. [00:07:38] Vince Menzione: And they all, they all want help. [00:07:39] Dexter Hardy: They all, [00:07:40] Vince Menzione: everybody wants help in marketplace. [00:07:41] Dexter Hardy: Right. And [00:07:43] Vince Menzione: yeah. [00:07:43] Dexter Hardy: And, and to that end. Because I was them. I understand how their mind, it’s a mindset shift, right? You’re saying, okay, we have these traditional sales, we’re a systems integrator, we have all this ip, these, there are all these things that we can do. [00:07:57] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:07:58] Dexter Hardy: I don’t, how do we convert this to transact ability? How do we get our sales teams enabled to sell it? And I was, and my, my feedback and my response to that is, well, one, we have a service for that. It’s our marketplace advisor services. I’m sorry for the plug, but not sorry. [00:08:16] Vince Menzione: No, we’re, no, we’re gonna plug today as well. [00:08:18] Vince Menzione: Much as you want. [00:08:19] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. [00:08:20] Vince Menzione: And then I think about this too, because a lot of these sis are developing, we’re just, uh, talking with Agua about MSPs, developing agents for their customers and then making ’em repeatable. [00:08:30] Dexter Hardy: Yep. [00:08:31] Vince Menzione: And so you have other sis that are creating AI tools and agents. Microsoft is created and the, and so has AWS and Google, they’ve created space in their marketplaces for agent AI tools. [00:08:44] Dexter Hardy: Yep. [00:08:45] Vince Menzione: And so now you’ve got all these companies that were traditional sis that are now becoming what we would call ISVs or, or SDCs. And they need help in getting these solutions to the marketplace. [00:08:57] Dexter Hardy: Absolutely. [00:08:58] Vince Menzione: So, so talk about what you’re doing with Spark. [00:09:00] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. So our concept with Spark is. When you look at enablement, so you’ll have platforms that are enablers and a lot of people will say, well, what makes Spark different? [00:09:12] Dexter Hardy: Why? Why you versus Tackle Or Sugar? [00:09:15] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:09:15] Dexter Hardy: Any of the other work span. Work span or any, they’re all friendlys to us because we’re meeting you where you are. Right. In order for you to use their platform, you gotta already have the solution together. [00:09:29] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:09:30] Dexter Hardy: Right. They can help you deploy. There’s Deploy. They are a deployment firm or [00:09:35] Vince Menzione: Right. [00:09:36] Dexter Hardy: Um, platforms We’re saying [00:09:38] Vince Menzione: they’re middleware in many respects. Correct. Between the, they’re, [00:09:41] Dexter Hardy: they’re integrated into the marketplace. They’re highly embedded into the systems behind it, and we’re saying what happens before that? I have no idea what solution to build. I have no idea how we’re gonna take advantage of Marketplace. [00:09:58] Dexter Hardy: How is Marketplace gonna change? Again, we had these conversations at dinner. Um, [00:10:04] Vince Menzione: yeah, [00:10:04] Dexter Hardy: all of the big players are saying, we have channel, we have our sales teams, we have all these things already. How does marketplace play into that for us? And so that Marketplace strategic advisory goes into it and says, here’s how. [00:10:19] Dexter Hardy: Right. We have a. Our Spark GTM methodology goes into how do those things play together? What are your KPIs or what are your business goals as an organization all up? And then we marry this, basically a Venn diagram of how we marry marketplace with your current objectives. Okay. To not just be this, uh, ubiquitous thing that’s kind of sitting over on the side, like, let’s just put it in marketplace because we need to, and nobody knows it’s there and nobody knows it’s there. [00:10:49] Dexter Hardy: It’s part of. Everything all up. Your messaging, your sales organization, your, um, documentation that you have for your organization. So now everyone understands, not just you as the, let’s say you’re an SI that you were, but you, the si with your agents and how that plays into your bigger value proposition. [00:11:10] Dexter Hardy: So take [00:11:10] Vince Menzione: us through the, go to the methodology you described the Spark methodology. [00:11:15] Dexter Hardy: Yep. So, um, a lot of people, when they think about. The methodology, you’ll say we’re a, we’re an si. I’m just going to use an example. You’re an si. How, how do I get somebody to click on my, my opportunity? How do I get somebody to understand what we have as a value proposition? [00:11:39] Dexter Hardy: And I’d say to people, well, there’s this, it’s part of the methodology. There’s product viability. Can you build something? Versus should you build something. Right. [00:11:50] Vince Menzione: Interesting. [00:11:51] Dexter Hardy: If you are, if you are out there today and you’re saying, I mean, everybody’s seeing Claude, the agents, you can, you can ask AI to build you pretty much anything. [00:12:00] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. [00:12:00] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:12:01] Dexter Hardy: Now the question scary and that, that’s a, that, that introduces a new problem. But it’s, can you do it or should you do it? [00:12:08] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:12:09] Dexter Hardy: And and what I’ll tell people is part of our advisory, so the steps are. What is your North Star right now and what is the software that would enable you to get on that AI rocket ship to propel you even further with where you are? [00:12:27] Dexter Hardy: Those are the solutions that we would try to [00:12:29] Vince Menzione: Okay. [00:12:30] Dexter Hardy: That out, pull out of, uh, as part of that marketplace. Um, advisory Second, what partner or partner organizations are you a member of? Is it Microsoft? Is it the AWS? Is it, you know, Google Cloud? Google Cloud, what have you, and let’s say Microsoft. What are solution plays? [00:12:51] Dexter Hardy: What is Microsoft focused on? How does what you’re doing as an organization align with that go to market? Mm-hmm. Because now you have that jet power of what they’re, um, promoting along with your organization. [00:13:06] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:13:07] Dexter Hardy: And then the final piece is, well, now that you’ve done that, how do I get it into market? [00:13:12] Dexter Hardy: How do I, uh, get people to click on it? And that’s where some of the secret sauce that I won’t divulge on this, [00:13:19] Vince Menzione: uh, [00:13:20] Dexter Hardy: but there is some secret sauce to getting the ICPs to lean in, getting the [00:13:25] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:13:25] Dexter Hardy: You know, you’re listing to light up inside of that. And so that’s. You know, that’s at a high level. That’s kind of how the marketplace, [00:13:32] Vince Menzione: I think what you’re alluding to, and I, I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but I do think you’ve done a very good job on what I would call maybe digital marketing, maybe. [00:13:41] Vince Menzione: Would that be the right terminology? Yeah. To make your solutions discoverable, to make people understand that they’re out there and to lean in and be able to purchase them. [00:13:51] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. [00:13:52] Vince Menzione: Which I think I would say that’s probably part of the secret sauce, probably of Spark. That is what you’re saying because a lot of organizations struggle here. [00:13:59] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. [00:14:00] Vince Menzione: They put something in the marketplace and nothing ever happens with it. Even even big companies do that. They don’t know how to do it. [00:14:06] Dexter Hardy: So, so yeah. Without divulging the secret sauce, I had a gentleman ask me yesterday, um, during the conference, so how is this different from SEO? I said, good question. [00:14:20] Dexter Hardy: Yeah. Is is SEOS? Is, is SEO involved? Sure, but that’s not the final answer. Because you could do SEO, that doesn’t mean anybody. That just gets you, doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t mean anything. And so. That’s why I keep going back to this methodology of r

Winning the AI Trust Race Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this compelling discussion from the Ultimate Partner Winter Retreat, Vince Menzione sits down with Marc Monday of ServiceNow and marketing expert Ashleigh Vogstad to deconstruct the “tectonic shifts” currently hitting the tech industry. As the market moves from AI excitement into a period of “POC fatigue,” the conversation pivots to the essential groundwork required for success: clean data, governed workflows, and the transition from an attention economy to a trust-based machine economy. They explore how Gen Z’s massive spending power is reshaping marketplaces and why simply automating a 27-step bad process with AI is a recipe for failure. Whether you are a partner manager or an entrepreneur, this episode provides a roadmap for staying human in a machine-to-machine world. Key Takeaways The market is experiencing “POC fatigue,” making it critical to transition from experimental AI to real-world value driven by central databases and knowledge graphs. ServiceNow is shifting focus toward “Control Tower” solutions to govern and orchestrate how various AI agents interact with mission-critical data. We are moving from a human-centric “attention economy” to a “trust economy” where machines make high-stakes decisions on behalf of users. Automating an existing 27-step approval process without rethinking the workflow first results in an “automated bad process” rather than a solution. By 2030, 75% of B2B buyers will be Gen Z, a demographic that favors authentic voices and direct-to-fan platforms like Substack over traditional channels. Hyperscaler partnerships are becoming essential “third-party validation” layers that allow AI agents to verify a company’s win rates and credibility. If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags ServiceNow, Marc Monday, Ashleigh Vogstad, Ultimate Partner, AI Fatigue, Agentic AI, Control Tower, Trust Economy, Knowledge Graph, Workflow Engine, Gen Z B2B, Marketplace, Hyperscalers, Machine-to-Machine, Data Governance, POC Fatigue, Substack, LinkedIn, Digital Transformation, Co-Selling, Partner Programs, ERP Intelligence, Uncanny Valley, Marketing Lag, Shared Business Planning. Transcript Ashleigh and Marc Monday Audio Episode [00:00:00] Ashleigh Vogstad: But the reality is, if you’re not using AI in a very meaningful way in your sales and marketing functions of your businesses, I mean you’re just way behind. [00:00:13] Vince Menzione: We just finished Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat here in beautiful Boca to a sold out crowd. Come join me now for a compelling discussion on the impacts of the tectonic shifts we’re all seeing. Maybe just a second about roles and responsibilities. Most of you know Ash from previous, uh, things you’ve been doing with us. [00:00:34] Vince Menzione: But, but maybe for you, Martin, this is your first time. [00:00:36] Marc Monday: Where should I [00:00:37] Vince Menzione: look there? Alternate partner. Their lives [00:00:38] Marc Monday: there? [00:00:39] Vince Menzione: Uh, yeah, over here is good. Either one. [00:00:41] Marc Monday: Look over there. Which would you prefer? [00:00:43] Vince Menzione: Um, this is good. [00:00:44] Marc Monday: Great. It’s, [00:00:45] Vince Menzione: and, but right now I’m just asking you for everybody, tell everybody who you are in your role. [00:00:49] Vince Menzione: ’cause you just shifted roles at ServiceNow. It’s [00:00:51] Marc Monday: true. It’s true. Hello everyone. My name is Mark one day and I lead the America’s partner business, uh, partner sales business at ServiceNow today. And effective Monday I’ll lead the global partner team. Uh, Jen Odes, who’s been on the podcast. Yes. She’s been and I are switching roles. [00:01:07] Marc Monday: Jen’s gonna go run the patch and I’m gonna run the programs, uh, effective next week. [00:01:11] Vince Menzione: That’s fantastic. [00:01:12] Marc Monday: And I live in Seattle. [00:01:15] Vince Menzione: You live in Seattle. Yeah. And you made the trip out here. I really appreciate that. It’s a long journey. And Vancouver or Whistler? So both of you came from the, from the West coast. [00:01:23] Marc Monday: This may be the first snowboarding panel in history of ultimate partner. [00:01:29] Ashleigh Vogstad: I liked the question earlier. Somebody asked, did anyone leave the snow to be here? It was literally a blizzard. I did not know if I would make it driving at 4:00 AM to the airport in a total whiteout. [00:01:41] Marc Monday: You’re getting zero sympathy from me Live in Whistler. [00:01:44] Vince Menzione: So, so Service now has been, uh, I would say on the forefront of this AI thing. I mean, like you were early in and control towers, that I always get the, the nomenclature wrong, but I do feel like we are seeing some, a level of fatigue right now. And I keep seeing, I mean, it feels like every, we’re getting whiplashed at least the last few weeks. [00:02:03] Vince Menzione: Are you seeing that? And what are the two or three biggest blockers you’re seeing now in the market? [00:02:10] Marc Monday: I think there’s, there’s a lot of excitement obviously in the marketplace, but there is a bit of AI fatigue. There’s a POC fatigue, I think that’s going on. I think the reality is we have to make AI real, and the reality is it starts with good data, uh, a, a central, uh, a database, and really making sure that that’s extensible through a knowledge graph. [00:02:31] Marc Monday: And then that provides us the ability to identify that workflow. Then importantly, um, making it real and, and as fast as possible. And I think that’s really important for the customer. One of the value props of ServiceNow, of course, is that we’ll meet the customer where they are with whatever their estate has, [00:02:47] Vince Menzione: right? [00:02:47] Marc Monday: So any hyperscaler, any workload, any core dataset, um, any LLM and, um, our history is as a workflow engine, and so we can bring that level of knowledge to their business. And then importantly, we bring together the governance and orchestration from a control tower perspective. [00:03:08] Vince Menzione: Nice. Ash had perspective on this, on the kind of the whiplash we’ve been feeling. [00:03:13] Vince Menzione: From From the marketing agency side? [00:03:15] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yeah. I mean, what comes to mind is the Miriam Webster dictionary said that LOP is the 2025 Word of the Year lop and Satchin Nadella actually came out with some press immediately following on that, saying that essentially that LOP is an exactly a useful construct to be having a conversation around the future of media. [00:03:37] Ashleigh Vogstad: But I think what this is pointing to is just we’re all navigating. Exactly how much AI is good ai, and maybe we will get into a little bit later, but what is the difference between selling to a human being and selling to a machine? Um, and really when we’re getting into this age agent landscape, it’s much more about that machine to machine conversation. [00:04:01] Ashleigh Vogstad: It’s not necessarily. Human eyeballs on recommendation links that is paid for by advertising. It’s more of a trust economy actually, where machines wanna be able to make decisions on our behalf with high trust so that you continue to enable that machine to make those decisions for you. [00:04:22] Vince Menzione: We talked about the data. [00:04:23] Vince Menzione: I thought we’d double click a little bit on that. In fact, that point it would normally have been here, but because of the snow wasn’t able to, they focus in on this governance and this data element. I was thinking maybe we could talk a little bit about that, because it doesn’t seem like AI will work properly if we don’t have the data to stay governed and clean, right? [00:04:42] Marc Monday: I think this is the amazing opportunity for the partners out there. They do this already. This is one of those assessments that’s so quick and not easy, but clear to deliver a value prop as a partner. Let’s get you ready for ai. Let’s make sure that we’re ensuring that your data’s in a extensible in a way across, uh, some sort of knowledge graph that can be accessed across a number of different, um, use cases. [00:05:09] Marc Monday: And oftentimes that’s multiple data sets. And so how do you get those columns and rows organized in a way that’s extensible for an agent, that we’re basically asking to do something that is an unique opportunity for partners right now. And I, I think that we maybe missed that step. So I see what I see happening right now is we’ve gotta come back to that as a starting point for the partners. [00:05:31] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about agent ai or you also have orchestration AI as well. I wanna talk about their, your new service platform specifically, but maybe if you could double click with this on that. [00:05:42] Marc Monday: Well, I think that, you know, everyone is kind of trying to figure out how do we get there and who’s gonna orchestrate and govern what AI agent is calling on, what data set at what time, and what sequence. [00:05:54] Marc Monday: You may have a mission critical application that needs to have immediate access, and you may have other agents that have casual access. How do you control that in a meaningful way is gonna be become increasingly important. So we have the idea of this product that we call control tower. The control tower gives you the ability to manage that orchestration as well as the governance. [00:06:14] Vince Menzione: Any perspective on this? [00:06:17] Ashleigh Vogstad: I think I’ll share the perspective. As an entrepreneur, I know many people here represent. Companies that are our clients and are, are massive in scale and, and hyperscalers. But I think there are some people in the room who are running their own organizations. I think when I came out, Vince asked, you know, Ash growth mindset, how are you actually living this? [00:06:36] Ashleigh Vogstad: And we’re going through a journey in my business right now around what are all of the data sources that we have and how can we get that into an enterprise resource planning type system so that we can then overlay more intelligence. And that’s kind of where we’re at in the, it’s funny ’cause when you look at those maturity curves, they try and fit you in a box. [00:06:57] Ashleigh Vogstad: Nobody here likes being in a box. Um, and we’re in a corner. Yeah. In some ways it’s like we’re in that agentic box. I built an agent last week, funny enough for Microsoft actually, um, an executive comms agent, but in one hand we’re on that end and on the other, our data’s a mess and we really can’t apply a lot of intelligence to the majority of the data sources within our organization. [00:07:20] Ashleigh Vogstad: So we’re getting that all together right now. [00:07:22] Vince Menzione: When you came out, we talked a little bit, you were, you were mentioning having an advertising agency, marketing agency. The changes that are going on right now. Right? The attention economy and the trust economy. And I thought maybe you could double click with us on that. [00:07:35] Vince Menzione: ’cause that’s, uh, very interesting to see this shift. [00:07:39] Ashleigh Vogstad: It’s a huge shift. So, uh, 1964 Canadian philosopher, Marshall McCluen, he comes out and he says The medium is the message. [00:07:49] Audience Question: Yeah. [00:07:49] Ashleigh Vogstad: And so you wanna think about how is agenta a different medium and what are the biases that this medium inherently has? So in my media world, you know, you get these storytelling tools rolling out at Speed Chat, GBT, soa, and in the beginning they’re really at that low end of the curve. [00:08:08] Ashleigh Vogstad: You know, they can produce a shitty first draft, uh, but the content that they’re creating is really low emotional resonance. If you take kind of a neuroscientist perspective on this, and I’m definitely not a neuroscientist, but the part of your brain that’s responsible for that pattern recognition, your cortical sal circuit, that’s what’s kicking in. [00:08:29] Ashleigh Vogstad: And when you’re looking at, say, an advertisement, you’re starting to think, you know, is what I’m looking at actually commensurate with what I expect to see? And when it’s not, you can trigger that what psychologists call your uncanny valley. Now some will argue that on County Valley is really diminishing these days because AI generated media is getting better and better. [00:08:52] Ashleigh Vogstad: And I do think that it’s something you want to lean in, but you also wanna think intelligently around how you’re using this new medium and exactly what its, what its biases are. [00:09:03] Vince Menzione: Is that the gut syndrome? Like when you feel something in your gut? Is that what you described? [00:09:07] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the classic example is Coca-Cola. [00:09:10] Ashleigh Vogstad: So 2024 Coca-Cola rolled out their very nostalgic for many of us holiday campaign, and they decided to use tools like Luma Dream Machine to make this whole Santa Claus North Pole, but AI generated universe. And it had that classic stuff around, you know, six fingered people and it gave you this. Kind of creepy post-apocalyptic vibe and the campaign completely tanked in market. [00:09:37] Ashleigh Vogstad: Or more recently, last year, mango rolled out a new fashion line Mango’s a huge global fashion retailer. They rolled out a new fashion line, and in their advertisements they had AI generated models and AI generated clothing. Like to sell a real line. So, you know, you, you have to really be thinking about, again, when we come to an attention economy based on human beings or a machine economy based on trust, many of these companies are still selling to us human beings. [00:10:09] Ashleigh Vogstad: And I, I think they can forget that at times. [00:10:12] Vince Menzione: So what’s your guidance to customers today and to this audience and viewers watching us today from a go-to market motion? In this world of ai, like what? What are you telling? What? How are you counseling these organizations? [00:10:25] Ashleigh Vogstad: You need to have an authentic voice. [00:10:27] Ashleigh Vogstad: We, we’ve heard this a million times, so I’ll try and put a bit of a, a different spin on it at platforms direct to fan platforms, things like Substack. Substack grew 48% last month. I mean, we are seeing this skyrocket, and that’s a new channel where you can have an authentic voice. Many people in this room, myself included, we live on LinkedIn as the business to business platform. [00:10:50] Ashleigh Vogstad: Consider expanding out into, into a new channel, um, would be one of my recommendations. Interesting. [00:10:57] Vince Menzione: Any, anything else from, uh, what you developed or what you use and ai and what do you, what, what tools do you recommend they use and what. [00:11:06] Ashleigh Vogstad: There. [00:11:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:11:06] Ashleigh Vogstad: What are we seeing with our, so I can give this example of this executive comms agent that we built. [00:11:12] Ashleigh Vogstad: Or even part, yeah, we’re building agents all the time, so what we try to do is think about what is our customer seeking to solve. We heard a lot today about outcomes, and then we challenge an AI first lens, which is how can we build something with AI to make this easier, better, faster, more creative? We’ll even do things, we’re a marketing agency, so we’ll even do things like beat the bot, pitch competitions. [00:11:37] Ashleigh Vogstad: So this is where you’re inviting your agent into the room and you’re asking it to put the pitch together, say for ServiceNow and Microsoft, and what can it come up with? And then we put it in a room of human beings and see who can out pitch. Bot, um, and come up with a more novel, creative idea. But the reality is, if you’re not using AI in a very meaningful way in your sales and marketing functions of your businesses, I mean, you’re just way behind. [00:12:07] Ashleigh Vogstad: And I see it a bit more advanced in all honesty and sales because I think some of your large. Organizations push the AI down to the sellers. Mm-hmm. Um, so they’re somewhat forced to use it, but in marketing, I’m still seeing a real lack, which is funny since generative AI came out in 2022 and everybody thought the marketing function was the one to really be disrupted and displaced. [00:12:30] Ashleigh Vogstad: I do think your marketing teams need to be leaning in more. [00:12:35] Vince Menzione: We were talking about trust earlier. I wanna weave this into the conversation. Right. How do, how do you. How do you think through trust and applying trust in the area I world, I’ll ask you both this question under service. Now think about it. How do you think about it or transcend? [00:12:54] Marc Monday: Maybe I’ll take a step back. I, I think just to kind of go back to the previous question, I think we’re in this age of massive complexity. Incredible complexity. Nina said it earlier, the customers kind of want us to tell them what to do. What are the steps? We’re at this dichotomy of this level of complexity that’s almost unimaginable and we have to make it simple. [00:13:18] Marc Monday: I think that’s the first one. And then that, that is put up against this notion of we have to go incredibly fast ’cause the market’s moving faster than we can even understand it. [00:13:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:13:29] Marc Monday: And then we have to add on this veneer, and this is where the partner community becomes so important of how do we scale? [00:13:35] Marc Monday: So how do you take simplicity, speed, and scale and bring it to market? It starts with the data, of course it starts with the workflow, but I might just take a giant step back and say one of the things that another partner opportunity you might run to really consider is automating a bad process, even with AI is still a bad process. [00:13:58] Marc Monday: So again, a partner opportunity is, let’s zoom back out and say if your approval. Takes 13 steps in 27 days, building an AI process around that. Without rethinking it might not be the right solution. So I think part of it is also like rather than just dictating all of the steps, part of it, to the point of telling the customer the steps is getting them to participate in that conversation. [00:14:29] Marc Monday: Why do you have 27 approval layers? Well. It’s the most dangerous thing in the language. It’s because we’ve always done it that way. Well, what if we did it differently? Yeah. And so I think that’s an area where the trust is a two-way street and you can’t just the part, the customer shouldn’t just outsource all of their decision making to you. [00:14:50] Marc Monday: At the same time, you have to bring them into that discussion of what are you trying to accomplish and what is your, um, risk appetite relative to that. [00:15:02] Ashleigh Vogstad: Yeah, that, that’s great, mark. I mean, trust is a really important conversation. I think about the Amazon versus Perplexity lawsuit right now that some are headlining the end of commerce. [00:15:14] Ashleigh Vogstad: Um, and so really this precedent setting case, what this is about is perplexity. Essentially is disintermediating the Amazon platform. So you know it’s making purchase decisions on your behalf, so, so this idea of trust in the agent world is something I think about a lot. And how do you optimize trust for this agentic world? [00:15:36] Ashleigh Vogstad: The professor I was mentioning, Eric Zow, who has this attention economy and the