Microsoft has long been pushing to an entirely subscription based model for all of their products and solutions. Office365 was a first start at that concept. Now with Microsoft 365 it's clear that model is going to be the standard and perpetual options are going to eventually disappear all together.
A major announcement and ultimate disrupter @ Inspire is the concept of taking the Azure platform (built on Hyper-V) with all of it's automation and allowing people to deploy it into their own data centers and on-prem. Microsoft says the "cloud war" is over and that HYBRID cloud wins. This is being called Azure Stack. This is definitely a disruptive concept to the other major cloud vendors like AWS and Google Compute. For what it's worth, OpenStack would now be the competitor to Azure Stack which is something folks like Rackspace have been deploying and managing anywhere already. It will be interesting to see how this model works moving forward.
Microsoft admitted that their internal sales teams and the partner channel conflicted often. They have now restructured their org to align with the partner network so everyone is working on projects and deals together. It also has moved their teams into verticals like Government, Education, Healthcare, etc so that specific targeting can be done more easily. The goal is to make the entire prospecting and sales process easier and empower partners to grow.
A key theme that was hammered pretty heavily @ Inspire was get into the more strategic parts of helping your customers move forward digitally and past the nuts and bolts of keeping the network running. While you need a good solid foundation to build on top of that part needs to just be "understood" rather than the focus of what you are trying to deliver.
Our CEO, George Bardissi, ran into Joel from ChannelPro and was able to record a quite Q & A. Check that out here.
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