Coming next week: WPC 2010 in Washington D.C.

Next week is the holiday-breaker for Microsoft partners as Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, colloquially known as WPC, kicks off. WPC is not much of a technical launch conference, but it does provide an interesting perspective into various things. I’ll be staying here in Finland, watching the news wave from afar.

A short recap of the last year is available in my blog post from July 2009. The main themes were Azure pricing and Office 2010. But what are we really looking forward to for WPC 2010?

First and foremost, there is the cloud

2010 has been the year when Microsoft announced the “We’re all in” mantra for cloud computing. No doubt, this will be the key theme for the whole WPC, as Microsoft tries to convince its partners, critics and the press of its plans for the cloud era. There’s a lot of ground to cover, too.

The main question is: How do partners take part in the cloud ecosystem, where customers start paying directly to Microsoft? On a theoretical level, this really isn’t a problem. Microsoft’s cloud offering without professional assistance will satisfy only the most tech-savvy customers and perhaps those with very simple and flexible requirements. But a lot of the actual business mechanics are still… well, clouded. Hopefully we’ll be a lot wiser a week from now.

Plus partner program and everything else

Another key theme should be the heavily refreshed partner program, now known as Microsoft Partner Network (MPN). Although the key new things were already announced last year and a lot has already been implemented, I think there’s still more to come.

And of course, a plenty of hype around the commercial success of Windows 7, SharePoint, Azure and whatnot. And surprisingly, I look forward to all that :-) Despite being a bit excessive even on the border of religious fervor, it does provide a good mindset for envisioning the future and thinking about your competence goals for the next few years.

And yeah, I’ll post the keynote highlights this year here in this blog, too. If you want a live part of the action, the keynotes will be streamed on digitalwpc.com on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week.

July 7, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
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