In the rapidly evolving world of SaaS and hyperscalers, partner roles are shifting from transactional, horizontal #partnerships to 🧰 value-add, industry-specific collaborations. But how this reflects on partner strategies?
To give you a sense of how big this change is:
📈 43% of Microsoft's partner revenue now comes from industry-specific solutions (source MSFT), with the rest from horizontal solutions. As the market for horizontal solutions becomes saturated, the focus is shifting towards more industry-specific applications.
In response, vendors like Microsoft are both building and partnering to create solutions.
Microsoft created so-called Industry Clouds for: Retail, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Nonprofit, and Sovereignty
💬 Every industry is different and we built the Industry Clouds across the breadth of the Microsoft Cloud to solve unique industry challenges.
We're investing in industry expertise across every facet of our organization - how we build the products, how we interact with our customers, sales alignment, sales readiness, from co-sell to delivery to support.
💡 And the best part - partners are the key to unlocking the full value of the Industry Clouds. You can build on these platforms with your unique applications to deliver more complete solutions for customers… In the end it's all about solving business needs for our customers and having a platform that empowers our ecosystem to do that.”
What does this shift mean for partners?
👀 Modern cloud/SaaS are 📍 3X more likely to work with those partners that bring industry-specific skills.
In a SaaS model, where companies can sell directly to clients, they shift from working with transactional, “order taking” partners to partners with more advanced capabilities.
Modern cloud/SaaS vendors are now 3X more likely to collaborate with partners who bring industry-specific skills and advanced capabilities such as analytics, IoT, and AI.
If you're a channel partner, it's essential to build advanced capabilities, industry specialization and work closely with cloud/ISVs to across the full product lifecycle, improving renewal rates and customer LTV.
❓ How is your organization adapting to this shift?
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