WASHINGTON, D.C. – It is Janet Kennedy’s job as Microsoft Canada President to reinforce how positive the company’s re-organization is to all stakeholders: customers, employees and channel partners.
In case you have been living under a rock; here are the Microsoft changes in a nutshell:
- Consolidation of Enterprise and SMS&P groups;
- The creation of the One Commercial Partner (OCP) group;
- Four core product areas: Modern Workplace, Business Applications, Apps & Infrastructure and Data & AI for small, medium and corporate customers.
- Creation of Specialist Team Units and Customer Service Units; and
- New sell and build go-to-market motions.
But beyond being positive Kennedy also wants to go deeper now that this new organization is in place.
She told CDN that partners and customers will be seeing more technical resources come their way under the Enterprise & Partner unit led by Chris Barry. Another added resource is the Customer Service Unit because this team is non-billable and will focus on fast tracking partners and customers.
“Most of the big partners have to make zero changes. They are just getting more resources especially on the built-with motion side. Now, they will get more help to sell their solutions,” Kennedy said.
Also with this new re-organization big data analytics will be utilized more than ever, Kennedy added.
Microsoft wants to become a data driven business under this new organizational structure. “We are going to use data more to understand all these new insights that we never did before. We want to see where the value is,” she said.
While the new organizational structure was officially announced at the now closed Inspire Conference, Kennedy and the team at Microsoft have been working to implement these changes since November of last year. As the show ended more than 800 Microsoft Canada employees now know exactly what their jobs will be and will also know which channel partners they will be assigned to.
“We are done and we are ready to go,” Kennedy said.
Now that the new structure is in place, Kennedy’s next focus is on some major Canadian investments such as nine new retail stores, a new Augment Reality/Virtual Reality Centre for Vancouver and a cross border ecosystem to be developed between Seattle, Wash., and Vancouver, B.C.
Kennedy was mum any new data centres coming to Canada. The subsidiary launched two data centres in 2016.
“It was a great decision to bring in the data centres. We needed them especially in the world we live in today. It was truly visionary and the interesting thing is most of the conversations going on today with cloud is focused on customers worried about security because they can’t handle all the patching. They like the fact that Microsoft is going to do it for them,” she said.
Security, Kennedy added, will be a renewed focus for her going forward now that the new structure is in place.