Migrate and modernize with Azure to power innovation across the entire digital estate

Jul 19 2022

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Cloud adoption increased significantly during COVID-19 and continues for many companies. However, an enormous migration and modernization opportunity remains as organizations continue their digital transformation. In fact, 72 percent of organizations reported their industry’s pace of digital transformation accelerated because of COVID-19, according to a survey sponsored by Microsoft in The Economist¹. And we don’t expect that to slow down anytime soon.

We are hearing key themes from our customers that reinforce this, including:

Cloud has become the catalyst for innovation. Customers are moving beyond operational efficiency to create new products and offerings, leveraging the unique capabilities of cloud to differentiate themselves.
Customers are not just looking for technology, they’re looking for a trusted partner. They need an expert to help them navigate these tough issues as they move toward hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge environments, facing new complexities and opportunities.
Security, data privacy, and compliance are top of mind for customers in every industry as cyberattacks continue to rise².

These areas are opportunities for us to strengthen our partnerships and help our mutual customers realize their greatest potential. This is why we are focusing on three key areas of growth for Azure at Microsoft Inspire:

Innovation with new cloud-native experiences.
Modernization of app and data estates.
Migration and modernization of infrastructure and mission-critical workloads.

This week, we are announcing new Microsoft Azure capabilities to help partners increase return on investments, grow leads, and shorten sales cycles. This includes updates to our Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) and announcing the ISV Success Program.

Read on for more details on our latest developments and each of the opportunity areas to see how we can deliver the greatest value to our customers. Our Azure keynote session is also a great resource to learn more.

Key investments to help partners achieve success

Azure Migration and Modernization Program

We now have more than 500 partners enrolled in the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) across apps, data, and infrastructure. AMMP is our hero program to help simplify and accelerate migration and modernization, with the right mix of incentives, best practice guidance, tools, and expert help. AMMP has powered deeper go-to-market connections with partners—and our goal is to ensure every migration and modernization opportunity has a partner attached to it. Partners are at the center of how we execute with customers.

We’re making substantive investments and updates to AMMP to help drive scale and velocity of migrations:

Up to 2.5 times larger incentives for Windows Server and SQL Server migrations.
Empowerment for Microsoft sales organizations to locally allocate incentives for their areas, providing more opportunity for partners to engage and feed into local plans.
Updated best practice guidance with the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and Azure Well Architected Framework (WAF).
New modernization capabilities in Azure Migrate, including the option for ISVs to integrate their own IP.

Now more than ever, we need partners’ help to scale our customers’ migration and modernization journeys. Sign up or nominate customers for the AMMP.

ISV Success Program

As the cloud becomes the fabric of every business, across every industry, customers need more complete solutions to support their growth and innovation. This creates tremendous opportunity as the demand for software as a service (SaaS) and “anything as a service solutions continue to increase. To help unlock opportunities for software providers we are excited to announce new benefits with the ISV Success Program to help ISVs innovate rapidly, build well architected applications, publish them to our commercial marketplace, and grow their sales. Currently in preview, and broadly available in fall 2022, the program is intended to be the pathway to ISV success in the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program.

Software providers can take advantage of this new program to build across the Microsoft Cloud and get access to cloud sandboxes, developer tooling, technical and business resources, and a dedicated community.

Innovate with new cloud-native experiences

Organizations across industries are looking to deliver highly personalized experiences to their end customers. Cloud-native applications can help meet these needs. For example, Microsoft Azure has helped retailers like Walgreens gain immediate access to rich transactional data and insights, enabling faster decisions and better customer experiences. According to IDC³, 750 million new logical applications will be built by 2025. This is why so many ISVs and enterprises are turning to Azure for their cloud-native applications. Partners can help customers build cloud apps using scalable containerized architectures combined with globally scalable databases infused with intelligence through AI.

Modernize application and data estates

Modernization of applications and data represents a huge partner opportunity where one project will lead to the next. In fact, 59 percent of organizations see modernizing apps to the cloud as a top initiative⁴. According to Microsoft estimates, the opportunity for data exceeds $42 billion today, and will grow to $85 billion by fiscal year 2025. Our goal is to help partners close deals to modernize the application and data estates even faster. We’ve made this even more seamless with our newly released Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. This end-to-end ecosystem integrates databases, analytics, and governance across the customer estate—enabling organizations to adapt in real-time, add layers of intelligence to their applications, unlock fast and predictive insights, and govern their data—wherever it resides.

No matter where our customers are in their modernization journey, Azure offers flexibility between control over managing infrastructure and the level of productivity desired. Partner advisory services and technical expertise is extremely valuable in this estate-level opportunity.

Migrate and modernize infrastructure and mission-critical workloads

Our customers often face time-sensitive decisions with datacenter contract renewals or software end-of-support. As a result, many customers are looking to shift large parts of their IT spend to the cloud with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) seeing the biggest increase. 

This year also brings timely migration opportunities for Windows Server and SQL Server. It’s a great time for partners to advise customers using SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 about End of Support (EOS) timelines and help them take action to stay secure. It’s also an opportunity to talk with customers about their cloud migration and modernization plans. We offer the best value at every stage of cloud migration. To share just two examples, it’s up to 80 percent less expensive to run Windows Server VMs and Azure SQL Managed Instance on Azure than it is with our main competitor.  And it’s not just about costs—we offer unique capabilities like Azure Automanage to simplify VM management and the broadest SQL Server compatibility to ease the move.

Read more about the top workloads with the largest migration opportunity as a key growth and revenue driver this coming year with announcement details, including:

Azure Confidential Computing capabilities, now generally available, allow partners to transition to Azure workloads that handle sensitive data with additional levels of protection.
Azure Center for SAP solutions, now in preview, is an end-to-end solution to deploy and manage SAP workloads on Azure, enabling customers and partners to create and run an SAP system as a unified workload, and providing a more seamless foundation for innovation on the Microsoft Cloud.
A new Azure Arc Boost Program, in partnership with Intel, will drive the deployment of Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI in customer hybrid environments through our Systems Integrator partner ecosystem.
Our most recent release of Azure Stack HCI, in preview, delivers more customer value and partner opportunity with new features by providing increased value on investment, shortened time to value, and improved support experience for Azure Stack HCI.

Get started at Microsoft Inspire

With so much opportunity ahead, where should you get started? Be sure to tune into the keynote and the Azure sessions linked below to hear from partners about how they’re already growing their business through Microsoft Cloud and Azure. Partners can bring tailored industry expertise and solutions to complement the innovation that Azure delivers. Together with our amazing partner community, we are creating opportunities with the most trusted cloud to empower customers to transform today, tomorrow, and build for the future.

Azure sessions

Sources:

¹The transformation imperative: Digital drivers in the covid-19 pandemic, The Economist