Microsoft Canada channel director gets ready

One can argue that Lora Gernon is the most important executive at Microsoft Canada (NASDAQ: MSFT); maybe even more important than the subsidiary president Phil Sorgen.

Gernon is the partner lead for Microsoft Canada and is responsible for the overall Canadian partner ecosystem. Since Microsoft Canada has zero direct sales, partners are vital to the success of the organization.

Virtually all partner groups report to her even though she only deals with system integrators and ISVs, along with marketing. That’s a total of 1,400 managed partners and more than 25,000 overall partners.

Gernon also developed the Partner Leadership Team at Microsoft Canada about five years ago. This group became so successful that it was adopted as a worldwide best practice and now every subsidiary in Microsoft has a Partner Leadership Team.

CDN recently had a chance to talk to Gernon about last month’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, where the company’s Software Plus Services strategy was outlined, and about how she is encouraging partners to be ready for software plus services.

CDN: What is going to be Microsoft Canada’s Software Plus Services strategy, and will there be any channel recruitment goals with it?

Lora Gernon: We’re heading into this and it’s all about choice; choice for the customer and for the partner. We are going to continue to develop that strategy at Microsoft Canada. There is a lot of excitement with a variety of partners. With Dynamics partners, with system integrators, and with ISVs. We’re even seeing a lot of interest from resellers and smaller SIs. It looks like all the partner groups are very interested in it.

Channel readiness is the goal for us. As partners continue to get the information and start to engage, our focus will be to make sure they have the training that will enable partners to take this to market.

CDN: Will you be doing anything differently or new in bringing some of the messages from the Worldwide Partner Conference to Canada?

L.G.: Every year Microsoft lays out the strategy for the upcoming year and we take that worldwide strategy and adapt it to the Canadian market place. We also align it to the feedback from customers and channel partners. That’s how we approach it each year. The plans are done and those strategies have come out during the Worldwide Partner Conference. The team in Canada planned it out in May and June and we kicked it off on July 1.

CDN: A senior engineer on the Windows 7 team said the company learned its lesson on Vista and will not pre-announce or hype features, and will be more careful with Windows 7, which will get its first sneak peak this fall. How will you approach that in terms of marketing Windows 7 to the channel in Canada?

L.G.: I don’t market products; not really my realm. What I will do is ready our channel in a timely way for any new product and ensure that partners are being trained as well as our own employees are. It’s important that partners are aware of products that become available and have a clear road map. Partners can decide at what rate they’ll engage on those new product releases.

CDN: From the channel partners you have spoken too recently, are they getting confused with all these pricing and licensing changes on virtualization?

L.G.: From the feedback I’ve received, we’re making it easier to be able to work with licensing. As well, we’re going to train partners on licensing on level 100 and 200 readiness to make sure that partners get the kind of training they want. Those who want 300 or 400 level knowledge, we give them that in-depth training too.

CDN: What efforts have you made for streamlining licensing for partners in Canada?

L.G.: We launched some tools that help partners who are new to us. Select Plus is a significant development for Microsoft, and it will be available to customers starting in October 2008. At the highest level, Select Plus is a new Volume Licensing program designed for companies with multiple business units that have decentralized purchasing, but would like the advantages of centralized purchasing – advantages such as visibility into all the organization’s volume licenses, as well as discounts based on the true purchasing volume.

CDN: What is Microsoft doing to expose young women to IT in Canada, and how do you encourage your channel partners on this?

L.G.: I am excited about this. I’m an executive sponsor for partners in women in IT and it’s one thing I really help with. Microsoft does a lot of amazing things with diversity and its digigirls program. As a company, we do a good job of diversity and I want to take help take those programs to the partners and help make it easier for them to build a diversity plan. Some companies are big and some are small and they vary on diversity planning; I want to take ours and help them build out the diversity plan. The mandate is to attract women for IT and in our channel. We have built-out this plan and now it’s time to execute on it in the next 12 months. We’ve made some progress, but it’s a long term mandate. I’m confident we will make more progress in the next 12 months than in our history.

Historically, we haven’t put this kind of focus to it to the degree we have now.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Paolo Del Nibletto
Paolo Del Nibletto
Former editor of Computer Dealer News, covering Canada's IT channel community.

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