Microsoft Azure (Azure) presents partners with various benefits and opportunities to grow and scale their businesses. Forrester investigated three questions related to Azure and partners: 1) What are the revenue and gross margin economic opportunities, 2) what are the factors that are driving growth and making partners successful in terms of what they bring to market and how they go to market, and 3) what are best practices and calls to action partners should follow to continue in their Azure-partner journeys? This study expands upon last year’s study in a way that parallels Azure’s expansion in capabilities and market reach as well as the diverse new business models, technologies, and services that partners are bringing to market.1 A major driver was increased customer demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions. Partners are helping in all stages of these journeys by providing both technologies and services. They are also expanding how they go to market through direct and indirect channels, including Azure Marketplace.
As part of the analysis, Forrester interviewed 16 Azure partners with established Azure practices. They were evenly split between service-led partners and technology-led partners. They also represented a wide range of sizes from several million euros in revenues to multibillion-dollar global players. Some partners provide services and technologies across up to six public cloud providers, and partners consistently shared that customer demand for Azure-specific solutions had expanded greatly in the last year. Interviewees’ organizations were at different stages of Azure-partner maturity in terms of how long they have been a partner as well as the depth and breadth of their offerings and relationship with Microsoft. Forrester discusses how these differences affect a partner’s opportunities in this study.
