Welcome!
Welcome to the November edition of the Azure Partner Newsletter, a roundup of exciting product announcements, feature updates, and new assets available for our partner community, sent to subscribers every other month.
To stay up to date between publications, explore Azure Partner Zone and the Partner Tech Community for the most recent events, resources, news, customer stories, learning material, and more!
To subscribe to the newsletter, head here.
November Spotlight: Do More With Less on Azure
Doing more with less on Azure is an opportunity to maximize value when migrating on-premises workloads to Azure by: saving on infrastructure and energy costs after migration; optimizing existing cloud investment to reduce costs and; reinvesting in activities that accelerate growth in your business. Simply moving to the cloud reduces IT expenditures, but your customers will achieve maximum business value with cost optimization guidance, tools, and offers from Microsoft Azure. In line with global uncertainty concerns Do More with Less offers real savings for customers such as Cemex, ASOS, FedEx and Forza Horizon 5 with:
- Up to 80% savings when running Windows Server & SQL Server VMs on Azure with Azure Hybrid Benefit discount
- 92% reduced energy usage and 98% reduced carbon emissions
- 391% 3-year ROI when migrating to Azure
Call to action:
- Bookmark Do More With Less campaign page on Partner Zone to access the latest partner resources
- Take advantage of solution assessments and nominate your customers to the Azure Migration & Modernization Program Partner-Led
Resources
- Learn more about the ‘Do More With Less’ campaign: pitch deck, skilling collection
- Learn more about the Azure Savings Plan: pitch deck, learning module
- Coming soon! ‘Do More With Less’ campaign-in-a-box for Services and ISV partners
Upcoming Events
Get a virtual front row seat to our first Marketplace Summit, a live broadcast from Microsoft Studios featuring a dynamic agenda of speakers and demonstrations based on insights from ISVs like you. We’ll share updates on our ISV Success Program and offer valuable tools and resources. This two-way dialogue will give you direct access to our leaders and engineering teams, helping you develop concrete strategies to reach new customers, simplify sales, and supercharge growth.
Discover new product innovations, essential insights, and latest trends shaping supply chains—today and tomorrow. Join Panos Panay, Chris Capossela, and Charles Lamanna at this free digital event and be among the first to see new offerings for creating resilient supply chains. Includes Azure IoT a live Q&A with Microsoft experts.
Azure Sales Bootcamp is a multi-day sales and GTM training led by Microsoft specialists and provides advanced knowledge for both partnering with and selling Microsoft Azure solutions. You can learn about growth opportunities on our Azure Infrastructure, App Innovation, and Data and AI Solution Plays. You’ll also learn how to leverage partner resources, tools, and incentives available to help accelerate time to value and grow your business.
Microsoft is introducing the public preview of the ISV Success Program, a new benefits program for independent software vendors (ISVs). Join this session to hear insights on the path to success using the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem.
On November 29, the virtual Sales Skill-Up Series for Partners: Co-selling Webinar will deliver insights into topics such as what co-selling is and isn’t, types of co-sell engagements, why sell with Microsoft, best practices, and next steps of the co-selling process.
Learn to navigate key moments in the buyer journey process and how to approach your key decision-makers within certain industries at the Sales Skill-Up Series for Partners: Industry Selling with PSAP Webinar on December 13. This brand-new Microsoft webinar series event is open to anyone interested in learning about sales tools and covers the most common sales topics and questions.
Explore ways to modernize on-premises, hybrid, and cloud workloads at the Windows Server Summit on December 6. Join Roanne Sones, Bernardo Caldas, and other Microsoft experts as they share new ways to improve security, resiliency, and efficiency with Windows Server 2022. Includes demos, sessions, and a live Q&A with Microsoft experts.
Azure Migration & Modernization Program
At Ignite this year we announced that Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP), now helps customers plan for and deploy cloud security services like Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel as they migrate to Azure. Additionally, AMMP now supports Azure Arc for on-premises workloads that aren’t ready to move yet.
Azure Migrate has a comprehensive migration and modernization assessment for SQL Server. This new capability helps customers easily discover and assess their entire SQL estate at-scale, help identify ideal migration and modernization targets for Azure SQL, with cost optimization guidance built in. Soon we will be coming out with modernization for Java Tomcat to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure App Service, and a business case analysis feature for comprehensive, easy-to-use view of how Azure can bring the most value to customers' businesses.
AMMP Partner-led is a new path in AMMP that is bringing exciting capabilities to Partners allowing them to nominate customer engagements directly. This release enables both Microsoft and our Azure partners to scale and meet the increasing demand for migration and modernization projects. In addition to the direct nomination capability, this release also provides: (i) fast approval times via standardized offers and (ii) a self-serve dashboard so partners can track approval status and get paid upon engagement completion. Explore more at https://aka.ms/ammppartners.
Call to Action:
- Nominate customers via AMMP Partner-led
- Learn more about Azure Migrate
- Download the new IDC Business value of migrating and modernizing to Azure whitepaper
Azure Immersion Workshops
New! The Azure Immersion Workshops (AIW) program launched a new track: AIW for SAP on Microsoft Cloud. Refreshes, updated content for AIW session decks and hands-on-labs is rolling out in Q2 for all workload tracks – bringing our total catalog to 11 AIW tracks. These half-day partner-delivered sessions and hands-on-labs receive high marks of 93% customer attendee satisfaction. So far in FY23, partners have delivered 330+ workshops to 4600+ customer attendees worldwide.
Call to Action: Find AIW track catalog and partner resources on aka.ms/aiwpartners.
Azure SQL customers Do more with less: they get unparalleled value with up to 93% savings and up to 5x faster performance than AWS. Customers also get unmatched security and can innovate with workloads anywhere, including hybrid with Azure Arc.
What’s new:
- AMMP Partner-led for Azure Expert MSP and Azure Specialized partners (currently called Advanced Specialization) to nominate customers
- Azure Arc-enabled Data Services is now officially supported by AMMP
- CSP accelerator for Data & AI incentive is available for partners
Resources:
Azure Hybrid Benefit for pay-as-you-go Linux virtual machines or virtual machine scale sets reduces the cost of running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) virtual machines in the cloud. AHB for Linux allows customers to retain the benefits of Red Hat and SUSE integrations with Azure, namely automated patching and updates, as well as co-located support.
Microsoft's internal Linux distro, Mariner, is available to Azure Kubernetes Service customers as a container host. This was announced at Ignite as being in Preview.
Resources:
Azure Arc is now fully supported in the Azure Migration and Modernization program (AMMP) to help customers innovate with Azure on their own terms, even in on-premises, edge and multicloud locations. All flavors of Arc are supported (Arc-enabled servers, Kubernetes, and data services).
At Microsoft Ignite, we announced the expansion of the Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI as well as additional deployment options for AKS on Windows IoT and Windows devices, enabled by Arc. Read more about these announcements in this blog.
Resources:
Windows Server customers can maximize their current investments to reduce cost, time, and complexity with differentiated capabilities and programs from Azure.
What’s new:
- General availability of Azure Automanage which simplifies IT management with automated operations for servers in Azure or hybrid environments enabled by Azure Arc.
- Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Stack HCI allows Windows Server Software Assurance customers to bring the value of Azure to where they are today.
- AMMP Partner-led for Azure Expert MSP and Azure Specialized partners (currently called Advanced Specialization) to nominate customers.
Explore ways to modernize on-premises, hybrid, and cloud workloads at the Windows Server Summit on December 6. Join Roanne Sones, Bernardo Caldas, and other Microsoft experts as they share new ways to improve security, resiliency, and efficiency with Windows Server 2022. Includes demos, sessions, and a live Q&A.
Call to Action: Register now for the Windows Server Summit
Azure OSS databases enable more value from managed relational to distributed NoSQL. Only Azure offers limitless scale, intelligent security and compliance built-in.
Ignite announcements:
- NEW! Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL is now generally available, powered by open-source PostgreSQL and Citus. Learn more here.
- Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server now supports worry free IO management with Autoscale IO in preview. Learn more here.
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server supports data encryption at rest with customer-managed keys in preview. Learn more here.
- Assessment for Oracle database migration to Azure SQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL in Preview as an extension of Azure Data Studio.
Resources:
- NEW! Azure Database for PostgreSQL paper shows 62% lower TCO
- NEW! Database Migration Assistant for Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB
- NEW! MongoDB to Azure Cosmos DB Best Practices
We continue to engage with SAP user groups to drive awareness of RISE with SAP on Azure. Check out SAPInsider webinars in this quarter:
SAP on the Microsoft Cloud has added a new track in the Microsoft Azure Immersion Workshop program to help customers learn how Microsoft can help them modernize SAP on the cloud. Content is live at aka.ms/aiwpartners . Partners are encouraged to reach out to [email protected] for more details on hosting your own workshop.
The new module Plan to Deploy the Microsoft Sentinel Solution for SAP is now live on MS Learn. The module covers the roles of the team members who will work together to design, deploy and implement the Microsoft Sentinel solution for SAP.
Resources:
- New customer stories: Campari Group, University of Toronto, Munich RE
All Azure Virtual Desktop partners with the Advanced Specialization can now submit customer nominations to Partner-led AMMP directly in Partner Center through this faster self-service program. IMPORTANT: Citrix Cloud on Azure and VMware Horizon Cloud on Azure engagements are included in this new program as long as the partner has the Advanced Specialization.
Learn about the 17 new or updated features for Azure Virtual Desktop announced at Microsoft Ignite, get trained with new technical skilling sessions, and more.
OnDemand sessions
- New ways to optimize flexibility, improve security, and reduce costs with Azure Virtual Desktop
- Experience Windows in the cloud with Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365
- Five ways Citrix improves hybrid work with Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365
Technical skilling sessions
- Optimizing cost with Azure Virtual Desktop
- Azure Virtual Desktop security, reliability, and resilience
Blogs
Customer story
Check out all the Azure Virtual Desktop content from Microsoft Ignite!
Resources
- NEW! Grant Thornton UK LLP saves hundreds of hours with Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365
- NEW! Enterprise-scale support for Azure Virtual Desktop - Cloud Adoption Framework | Microsoft Learn
- NEW! Understanding Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 for hybrid work | Microsoft Technical Takeoff
- Generate demand with Azure Virtual Desktop Campaign in a Box
- Partner Marketing Center (PMC) – 15 assets including industry aligned options
- Digital Marketing Content OnDemand (DMC) – 12-week scripted campaign
- Join the Azure Virtual Desktop partner forum!
- NEW! Azure Virtual Desktop Landing Zone Accelerator - Reference Architecture | Reference Implementation to accelerate deployments
- NEW! Partner-led AMMP
At Microsoft Ignite 2022, the App Innovation team (in partnership with the Power Platform team) delivered a theme keynote session that highlighted how to accelerate innovation with the world’s most complete cloud developer platform, delivered by Charles Lamanna and Donovan Brown.
Call to Action: Review our App Innovation content of focus/break-out sessions, ask the expert sessions, expert meetups, on-demand session, and more.
Last month, we launched a concerted campaign for Java developers with the objective of delivering better outcomes for our Java customers and highlighting our commitment to the broader community.
Call to Action: Review keynote and sessions of Oracle’s flagship conference for Java devs - JavaOne and Europe’s largest independent Java developer conference - Devoxx Belgium 2022.
Resources:
- The Data and AI team released a new eBook – Cloud Scale Data for Spring developers, which guides developers on how to build cloud-native Java apps in Azure using Spring Boot and Azure Cosmos DB.
Resources:
Microsoft Ignite sessions for Low-Code are now available on-demand:
- Accelerate innovation with the world's most complete cloud developer platform
- Power Pages: Low-Code Web Development
- Streamline low code governance in your organization
- Drive Low-code Innovation with Pro-code Enterprise Development + Manage your permissions with Entitlements
- Land low code as a critical tool for skilling today’s workforce
- Ask the Experts: Skill your workforce with low code and enable agility with fusion teams
- Ask the Experts: Streamline low code governance in your organization
New low-code and fusion development stories:
- Digital immigration support that puts people first – New Zealand News Centre
- Utilizing Azure AI and Power Apps, Tokyo Metro develops an anomaly detection solution for railway track equipment
- PwC builds multitenant enterprise decision support site with Power Pages
- Oslo Agency for Health: weathering the pandemic storm with low-code technology
Azure API Management partnership with Postman was announced at Ignite. This partnership simplifies API testing and monitoring using the Postman platform for Azure API developers and making the Azure platform readily available to deploy APIs for Postman developers.
App Service customers can now do more with less, thanks to the Azure Savings Plan and new pricing. The discount offer for Azure App Service is now extended to cover new .NET workloads moving to Azure.
Call to Action:
- SpringOne is back in person in San Francisco December 6-8. Invite customers to attend so they can connect with Microsoft and get the latest Azure Spring Apps updates.
- Invite customers to upcoming Azure Spring Apps Enterprise Experience Day in New York City (11/17) so they can learn how to run their Spring apps at massive scale. Customers that can’t attend in-person can join the upcoming Azure Springs Apps webinar (11/10).
Resources:
- Microsoft Ignite sessions for Azure PaaS are now available on-demand: How modernizing enterprise applications gives you a competitive advantage | Making cloud native easier: Architecting the next-gen Azure PaaS | Microsoft Ignite Into Focus: Innovating with Power Apps and Azure | Bringing MongoDB Atlas and Microsoft Azure App Service together | Ask the Experts: How modernizing enterprise applications gives you a competitive advantage.
- Watch and share the on-demand keynote from Oracle JavaOne featuring Julia Liuson (requires free registration).
- Customers can get started for less with Azure Spring Apps with the new monthly free grant of 50 vCPU and 100 GB memory hours.
We’ve been busy this fall with Serverless September initiatives like 30 Days of Serverless, Zero To Hero blog series, Serverless Hacks, Cloud Skills Challenge, Ask The Experts and Community Buzz focused on Azure Container Apps and Azure Functions.
Call to Action:
• Catch the latest cloud-native advancements on Azure at https://aka.ms/cloud-native
Resources:
• Learn how Porsche Holding, Oslo Agency for Health, and CumulusPro use Azure Functions.
• Learn how Duck Creek Insurance, DKV, O2 and Omnicare/CVS Health use Azure Kubernetes Service.
• Share this month in SWA with customers for a structured front end development experience with Azure Static Web Apps.
We are pleased to announce the private preview of GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps which brings GitHub's industry-leading, developer-focused security tooling to Azure DevOps. Advanced Security for Azure DevOps provides a native application security solution within the developer workflow, enabling organizations to easily identify and fix exposed secrets and vulnerable open-source dependencies across the software lifecycle. Advanced Security for Azure DevOps also includes GitHub Advanced Security’s powerful and accurate CodeQL code scanner to identify any code vulnerabilities or errors in your own code.
Resources:
- Additional Azure DevOps roadmap information can be found here: Azure DevOps Roadmap
Microsoft announces strengthening of its partnership with Databricks
We announced a strengthening of our partnership with Databricks to evolve our Analytics platform to an Open and Governed Data Lakehouse foundation. This foundation will enable our customers to unify their most demanding Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence investments on a single data foundation for analytics viz. an open and governed data lakehouse. The foundation will also enable customers to responsibly democratize their analytics data products to accelerate digital transformation applications across their organizations.
Learn more: Rohan Kumar’s announcement blog, Scott Guthrie & Ali Ghodsi interview.
Coming soon! Microsoft Azure Enablement Workshops (AEWs). Present your Azure knowledge and expertise to your customers with our Azure Enablement Workshops (AEWs). You will be able to sign up for our ready-made collections of discipline specific resources and tools, including a hands-on lab experience. Soon, you can start hosting your own day-long customer working sessions to drive demand for your solution offerings!
Participating partners must be Advanced Specialized, be SSPA compliant and have a current Azure Customer Enablement Solution Offer. If you don't have a Azure Customer Enablement Solution Offer, yet please follow these instructions to create one.
At the end of October, Microsoft will release its Security assessment based on CAF’s Secure Methodology. It will cover all aspects of Security with the cloud adoption customer journey and will support the Security Workshops in AMMP.
Resources:
Microsoft announced technical sustainability guidance within the Azure Well-Architected Framework. Now customers can not only determine their emissions footprint via Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability but also how to optimize their workloads for greener IT.
Call to Action: Check out the WAF for Sustainability docs.
Resources:
Call to Action: Review the post Ignite Learn Collections landing page and the new Azure Skills Navigator guides for Network Engineer, BCDR, and Java at Azure Ramp Guides.
Resources:
- CLX launch with expanded Infra tracks Cloud Events Portal
- Introducing the new Windows Server Hybrid 30 Days to Learn It https://aka.ms/WSHybrid30DL
- New Learn modules:
- Sign up for the VMware Explore Cloud Skills Challenges for Azure Arc, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Azure VMware Solution
- Sign up for the Game of Learners Clinics for Data! It’s a 5-week skilling initiative, which aims to help you learn and gain technical skills on how to work with data in the cloud.
- Sign up for Data and AI Cloud Skills Challenges for Azure AI Fundamentals, Azure Cosmos DB Developer, Azure Data Scientist and more.
- Discover new skills to navigate market uncertainty and accelerate growth
Azure savings plan for compute reached general availability on October 18th, 2022. During the Ignite “Optimize your investment on Azure and maximize business value” session, attendees got to see firsthand how the plan works and where to find it in their Azure portal. Customers now have a new flexible pricing offer to choose from along with our existing offers like Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure reservations.
Call to Action: Please leverage the resources below to learn more about Azure savings plan for compute.
Resources:
The IoT team has just published the latest annual 2022 IoT Signals report. This year, 500 manufacturing decision makers were surveyed in the report, where they reveal their insights, strategies, and challenges towards digital transformation. The report highlights how IoT continues to transform manufacturing by helping enable factories to become more agile, productive, and sustainable.
Recent news updates:
- Ensure zone resilient outbound connectivity with NAT gateway.
- Announcing DNS Private Resolver general availability.
- Visualize and monitor Azure & Hybrid networks with Azure Network Watcher.
- Azure Virtual WAN simplifies networking needs.
- Generally available: Resizing of peered virtual networks.
- SONiC in the Real World.
- Azure Basic Load Balancer will be retired on 30 September 2025—upgrade to Standard Load Balancer.
- Preview of Policy Analytics for Azure Firewall.
- Azure Firewall Basic and Azure DDoS IP Protection – 2 new cost-effective SKUs designed to meet the needs of SMB.
At Ignite in October, we shared the latest innovations in Azure Network Security to help customers strengthen their security and increase agility. Watch the on-demand session to learn more about what’s new in Azure network security.
Microsoft will have a large presence at the Supercomputing event, so please make sure to stop by booth #2433 and click here to keep up to date on our presence. We also now have a HPCwire microsite hosting 12 thought leadership in the financial services industry, and we’ll continue to increase that number this year with an expansion into other industries. Our new Azure HPC + AI Tech Community blog is now also live, giving readers a single place on Tech Community for all content related to high performance computing and AI infrastructure.
Resources:
- Upcoming event: Guy Bursell will be speaking at the Big Compute 22 virtual event November 9th!
- Customer Advocacy: UD Trucks drives migration, innovation with Azure high-performance computing powered by AMD
- Blogs: Azure scales 530b parameter gpt3 model with NVIDIA nemo megatron
- Articles: Staying at the Cutting Edge of Automotive Design Technology with Azure Cloud Platform and AMD
Azure is the best place for VMware workloads, and this month we took that story on the road with the VMUG Microsoft Roadshow in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York City.
At Microsoft Ignite, VMware joined us in Seattle and presented Azure VMware Solution Update session where we announced the preview of two new Azure VMware Solution enhancements: Customer Managed Keys and Stretched Clusters for Azure VMware Solution.
We published two new Azure VMware Solution customer stories this month: Sanofi, a pharmaceutical company in France, and a story from LIXIL, a professional services company in Japan.
Resources:
- Read the AVS Ignite Blog and see the details of the latest AVS enhancements
- Watch the VMware session at Ignite: Azure VMware Solution Update
- Share the latest customer case studies with your customers
- Leverage The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure VMware Solution including Enterprise Scale Landing Zone.
