Digital Transformation Digest: Microsoft's Transformative Moves, Inforum Kicks Off, and More

Transformative times for Microsoft: There are plenty of changes ongoing at Microsoft these days. Last week, the company announced layoffs—reportedly up to several thousand—as part of a plan to reshape its sales force around cloud computing. Now news has emerged of top executives leaving Microsoft, including CIO Jim DuBois.

He held the post since 2013. DuBois' will be succeeded by Kurt DelBene, Microsoft's current head of corporate strategy, but in an interesting and telling move, DelBene won't take the CIO title. Rather, in his new role DelBene will become Microsoft's chief digital officer.

POV: As with DuBois, DelBene's duties are internal-facing. He'll be tasked with overhauling Microsoft's IT practices, which could be a considerable challenge. Meanwhile, the sales reorganization should be a hot topic at this week's Inspire conference, Microsoft's annual event for its large partner channel.

Inspiring growth: Keeping partners happy is a crucial job for Microsoft, since it derives 95 percent of its revenue from the channel. Some 17,000 partners are expected to attend Inspire in Washington, D.C. this week, but that's just a fraction of the total pool. Microsoft has 64,000 cloud partners, which is more than Amazon Web Services, Google and Salesforce combined, EVP Judson Althoff said in a blog post.

Digital transformation represents a potential $4.5 trillion market opportunity, Althoff wrote. It wants to work with partners to grab as much of that pie as possible.

To that end, Microsoft announced a number of new partner programs at Inspire, as well as what it terms a simplified partner relationship model.

First up, Microsoft is expanding its investment in the Azure co-sell program it announced last year. The program provides sales and marketing support for partners working with Azure, including incentives for internal Microsoft sales reps to co-sell Azure with partners. Microsoft is increasing its investment in the program to about $250 million, according to Althoff's blog.

Second, Microsoft is rolling out ISV Cloud Embed. Under the plan, partners can buy Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps and Flow for up to 50 percent off list, and then embed them in their own applications.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is reorganizing the way it works with partners around three scenarios: "build-with," "go-to-market" and "sell-with." This blog post goes in-depth on what the changes mean.

POV: There is yet more news coming out of Inspire, including the availability of Azure Stack, which brings the cloud platform inside customers' data centers; and a new product bundle called Microsoft 365. Constellation analysts will be following the conference closely this week.

Inforum 2017: Infor kicks off its Inforum user conference in New York this week, with digital transformation expected to be a key topic of discussion. In recent years, the business applications vendor has overhauled its flagship software from front to back, placing an emphasis on improved user experience as well as a drive into micro-verticals. Myself, as well as Constellation Research VP and principal analysts Doug Henschen and Holger Mueller will be in attendance. Look for our coverage on Twitter and Constellation's website.

Legacy Watch: ERP disaster recovery: Enterprise resource planning software has slowly but steadily begun moving to the cloud, and with it, ERP's longtime bogeymen—cost and time overruns, dissatisfied users, difficult upgrades and outright project failures—could become mostly a thing of the past.

But those days have yet to arrive. In the meantime, CIO has put together an extensive roundup of ERP disasters and controversies. It's well worth a read.