Microsoft's Inspire 2018 conference kicked off in Las Vegas, giving the world a peek at what the company has planned for its partners.

Microsoft Inspire, (formerly the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, and previously abbreviated WPC), is a conference held annually by Microsoft Corporation for its partner community. At Inspire, partners are taught about Microsoft’s roadmap for the upcoming year, network and build connections, share best practices, experience the latest product innovations, and learn new skills and techniques. There are also keynote addresses from Microsoft executives, featured speakers, business-track specific offerings, and hundreds of sessions.

Below are a few excerpts from the three-day convention -

Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer - Microsoft

“Growing up I always dreamt of this day. Walking up on stage on a Wednesday morning, right after 18,000 people have had a singalong -- and do a tech speech. I am going to live that dream.

Look, today is a momentous milestone for us, bringing together these two communities, Inspire and Ready, because that's how our customers see us, as one. And to be able to kick off our fiscal year is something that I think is going to really mark a real difference in how we as this tech community are going to serve our customers going forward.

There's no community like this. And I was thinking about it, the scale, and what I am told 17 million people are employed by people in this room across the ecosystem. I mean, that's a tremendous scale.

We have had an amazing year. The success that this ecosystem has had is just enormous. And I first want to start by saying a big thank you, really a sincere, heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you, your organizations, your teams back home, because without that none of this would be possible. So thank you so very much.

But what binds us together, though, is not our success, it's the success that our customers achieve, because that's what makes us as a community, as a tech ecosystem, unique, different. And to me, as we look forward, the opportunities for us to serve our customers in this new era of the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge is far greater. I have sort of lived through the client-server, the web, mobile, cloud, but what we are going to see going forward is going to be even more profound.

And the reason for that is perhaps best captured in this quote by Mark Weiser who used to work at Xerox PARC in the late-'80s. And he said something which I think really captures what's happening in 2018 - "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they're indistinguishable from it."

That's what is happening with technology. That's what is happening with computing. Computing is becoming part of our world, of our life.

If you look at it, there's computing in every home, in every office, every stadium, every factory, every industry - whether it's oil and gas, whether it's retail, or whether it's agriculture or financial services and everything, whether it's that self-driving car, it's that connected refrigerator, any engine, all of it has computing. It's just part of the fabric of life, the fabric of our society.

And you see it in the numbers, too. By the way, we are lucky to be in the tech industry. As a percentage of world GDP, tech spend today is at around 5 percent. It is expected to double by 2030. Now the real question is what about the other 95 percent, that other 90 percent, because all of the COGS of the world, all of the operating expense of the world is going to be powered by digital technology. Our job is not just to celebrate our own growth, because it's going to happen, it's secular, but really to stay grounded on how we are helping the rest of the economy get the dividend because of digital technology. That's what this ecosystem's job number one, two and three is.

That also means that we have a tremendous responsibility with all this opportunity, we have to do our very best work when it comes to privacy, because as technology and digital technology becomes pervasive in our lives, we have to approach everything with the fundamental assumption that privacy is a human right.

And GDPR as a regulation is something that we have poured a lot of energy into, but it's not just a one-time thing; it's an ongoing commitment to ensure that everything we do is going to have that sense of compliance that GDPR and other regulations around the world are going to demand of us as an ecosystem.

When it comes to cyber security, we again have to do our very best work, not just in the technology side, but the operational security side. But we have got to go way beyond that. We also have to come together as an industry, show real maturity in terms of the things that we come together on.

The Tech Accord is a fantastic example of that, because the world in our time needs a new Geneva Convention. We need to make sure that the most vulnerable populations are protected from these new weapons. And when it comes to AI, we have to have a set of principles that guide the development of AI. We want to make sure that anything that we do doesn't amplify bias, doesn't hijack our attention, doesn't sway opinion. These are things where we need to not only build the tools, the technologies, but it's also a set of design principles, a set of ethical principles that we as builders of technology need to have.

Now, it’s that opportunity and responsibility that grounds us in our mission, our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As I have always said, these are not just a set of words on a slide for us. This is the core guiding North Star. Everything that we do, every product we build, every technology we incubate, how we show up with our customers all has to be driven by a deep sense of everyday understanding of this mission.

I always say this to any student who is joining Microsoft or looking to join Microsoft. I say to them, look, if you want to be cool go look for someplace else. But if you want to join a company that is committed to making others cool, join Microsoft.

Now, of course, as we move to the intelligent cloud, intelligent era we will express how we do things very differently. You heard a lot about these six solution areas. What is common across all of these solution areas is this profound shift to a new way of doing things, the intelligent cloud, the intelligent edge and ultimately, though, we've got to measure ourselves not by technology for technology's sake, but how are we empowering people? How are we helping organizations with their digital transformational outcome? That's what this is all about.

So I want to unpack today a little more about what is this paradigm shift, how should we think about it. As I said it's probably bigger than anything that's come before. There are three things that are happening simultaneously, at the experience where we are moving to this people-centered experience. That means we are going to, in some sense, decouple the experience from the device.

We are also going to decouple the input output. That is it is going to be multi-sense multi-device. You may start on one device with one sense. In fact, the output could have another sense on another device. But it's going to be part of the same application. We are going to infuse everything with AI. It is going to have perception capability, language capability and autonomy that's going to be built into the applications going forward.

And to power all of this the one thing that is needed is a ubiquitous distributed computing fabric. And so I want to get into a little bit of each of these and see even how customers are already using it. How you all are taking advantage of this amazing opportunity to build solutions in the real world. So let's start at the bottom with ubiquitous computing.

Now, I was there in the very early days of Azure. And when I see where we are in 2018 it just boggles my mind. The scale of Azure with its 54 data center regions, as you know for each region we have multiple data centers. The amount of interconnect cable we have across Azure Data Centers is enough to go to the moon and back three times over. It’s crazy.”

Partner Inspiration

Microsoft merged its Windows and Azure teams in March and since then, the combination has been creating synergies for Microsoft, which is also benefiting the channel. The Redmond, Wash.-based IT giant hasn't been shy during this year's Inspire partner conference about its focus on co-selling alongside its channel community. Jason Zander, executive vice president - Azure and Ron Markezich, corporate vice president of Office 365 Marketing, took to the stage to share specific updates from Azure and Microsoft 365.

Zander and Markezich talked new products and business momentum, and what partners should focus on during the upcoming fiscal year -

Jason Zander, executive vice president - Azure

“If we look at our stated earnings out there, we had 100 percent year-over-year Azure consumed revenue growth. We had 122 percent year-over-year Azure Premium Services growth. Which really tells me that the cloud wave is in full swing. And we're working hard to keep that momentum going.

What I really want to tell you is, "Thank you." On behalf of the entire team, thank you. We are a partner-led company, and we really work with you constantly, and we really need your help. We will do everything from pre-sales all the way through to at 2:00 a.m., one of our customers has got an issue and they want some help from us. That is the job that we wind up doing, and really the momentum that we have seen, the business results we've seen is a testament to the hard work and partnership that you have put in place.

Now, we also want to invest in your success, and Azure is a consumption business. And so, we are tightly aligned with you.

Now, when you look across the broader ecosystem to see how the business is doing, we see that for every $1 of Azure consumption that we get, it drives $5 of partner business.

Now, our field is aligned on that consumption and that growth, and I want to take a look at a few examples of us working with partners and how that has actually led to great business.

I want to start off with SAP. SAP, of course, is a market leader in the enterprise applications software. If you look at the workload of SAP running on top of Azure and in the cloud, we have over 1,000 deals in the pipeline, and that includes 300 new customer wins just this year. That's 635 percent year-over-year growth.

Now, when you look at those, 64 percent of those were led with partners. And, again, here's another awesome way in which this helps us drive business. For every $1 of SAP earned on Azure, partners get 2X on infrastructure services, and 7X on transformation services.

So, really, we believe that this demonstrates the unique and differentiated investment that we have made for these workloads, and we think they are paying off. And I will tell you that even with all of that awesome growth, there are still 50,000 SAP ERP systems out there today. And so, we are also doubling the number of black belts that we have in the field to help us with that growth. And so, if you're working in this business, we want to be there, we want to support you.

The next example I want to give is Rackspace. Rackspace serves over half of the Fortune 100 as a trusted service provider.

Today, Rackspace is the top MSP adding new customers onto the platform. They have experienced a 425 percent year-over-year growth with CSP. Now, CSP allows us flexibility. You can set the price, the terms, and the direct billing relationship with the customer. You can provision, own, and manage subscriptions. You can be a first point of contact for customer support, and that really means there's nothing in between you and your customer.

Now, we are investing continuously in CSP, and I can tell you from an engineering or product perspective, we're adding more services, and we're adding additional features in there to help you. So, if you're not using CSP yet, I highly recommend that you get on top of that program and start getting that adoption that comes with it.

The final example I want to give is Red Hat. Red Hat is a leading provider of open-source and enterprise IT solutions, supporting more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500. Microsoft and Red Hat have announced an industry first, and this is the first OpenShift managed service for public cloud.

And this is cool because we are basically doing this jointly. We are jointly engineering, we are going to operate it, it's between Red Hat and Microsoft. Because it's a fully managed service, we are going to keep the clusters automatically up to date, supported within an SLA. We have a single unified billing experience, as well as an integrated support experience.

The excitement level has been really awesome here. We have got over 100 enterprises already lined up and ready for the private preview to get going.”

Ron Markezich, corporate vice president - Office 365 Marketing

“The workplace is such a ripe opportunity to grow your business because it is evolving so rapidly. Business leaders are looking to shape culture and empower their employees. Employees have a new set of expectations for technology at work, and IT is supporting this digital transformation while also looking to stay ahead of their compliance and security obligations.

What we can do together is help our customers with Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 brings together Windows 10, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Office 365 into one fully integrated suite. And also with your services, Microsoft 365 will provide a complete, intelligent, secure solution to empower employees.

What we are seeing is Microsoft 365 can unlock creativity to bring out the ingenuity of everyone. It's built for teamwork to ensure teams can work seamlessly together around the world, across cultures, across languages.

And Microsoft 365 is integrated for simplicity, to provide a complete management environment for our customers.

Microsoft 365 has intelligent security, to provide the highest level of security and compliance for our customers. But most importantly, we' have seen high-scale growth in Microsoft 365, and the base that it's on continues to get higher scale.

But we have also seen Microsoft 365 catch fire over the last year, growing at triple-digit seats percentage-wise over the last 12 months, thanks to the work that you're doing. And what we are most thrilled about are the customer transformations that are happening every day with Microsoft 365.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Cummins uses Microsoft 365 to connect their global workforce that speaks over 19 languages, so they can work seamlessly together. They store their manufacturing plans in Microsoft 365, protect those with EMS, and use it to innovate more quickly and accelerate time to market.

Qantas Airlines uses Microsoft 365 to stitch together all of the teams that it takes to purchase an airplane. There are dozens of teams that have to work together for that single airplane purchase.

They also use Microsoft 365 to crowdsource customer issues as they're traveling to improve the traveler experience. None of this would be possible without all of you, and I really would love to thank you for your work, your partnership, and the solutions that you are building around Microsoft 365 to help our customers.

We surveyed many of you to understand how your business has changed with Microsoft 365. And what we have found are those partners that have created Microsoft 365 practices have higher revenues, higher margins, and better customer satisfaction. We always called that "the hat trick" when I was running the services business.

What we also found from talking to all of you as well as our customers, a number of areas of opportunity to help to grow your businesses and serve our customers.

I want to highlight four of those areas, starting with the Modern Desktop.

The Modern Desktop is critical in this new world because employees have new expectations for work. They need to work anywhere, any time. They need to be always connected. They need to always have the latest capabilities on their devices. And those devices and those capabilities need to be better than what they use on social media and chat and their consumer world.

And to do that, we need to move them to the Modern Desktop. In fact, if you look, 81 percent of business leaders over the next two years are going to increase their investment in the Modern Workplace. That's significant because in years past, they have always looked to how they decrease investments, and this represents a significant change in their environment.

The workplace is now strategic. It's critical to stay competitive. I bet you hear that from all of your customers, how critical it is for talent and to stay competitive by having the best tools and capabilities in the workplace and to make that a Modern Workplace.

The Modern Desktop is such a foundation for that because everything starts there in terms of the capabilities and the experience that customers have. The Modern Desktop delivers the best experience for an end user. It brings Windows 10 and Office 365 Pro Plus together to be cloud connected. It's the most secure and productive environment an end user can have. In fact, over the next couple of years, we're going to see a large move in devices with end of support of Windows 7 and Office 2010 coming up. And as we see those devices get upgraded, it's our opportunity to make sure they're modern devices that they're cloud-connected on Windows 10 and Office 365 Pro Plus, and they stay modern.”

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