We helped Brennan IT exceed its 12-month revenue target by 42% in just 8 months.

It’s now been a week since Satya Nadella’s opening Inspire 2017 keynote. It offered the blueprint for Microsoft’s success in the era of Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge, and was steeped in strong product demos and Partner success stories. When you see and hear Satya live on stage it’s no wonder that Microsoft is undergoing such an amazing commercial transformation.

One of the key announcements for Partners at Inspire 2017 has been the launch of the ‘Build-with, Go-To-Market and Sell-with’ strategy. In this new world product-centric and cross-industry marketing efforts will become increasingly irrelevant, as Microsoft instead focuses heavily on industry-specific expertise to power Partner success.

As I'm constantly trying to explain to my wife in Australia, Microsoft Inspire is no mere junket. Sure, there may some "networking" involved, but it’s too far to go and there's too much to learn to not dive into the world-class sessions on offer.

Recently, I read a post on an app that facilitates collaborative brainstorm sessions for remote teams. It takes the principles of an in-person Ideo workshop and turns it into something accessible for employees anywhere to contribute. It’s an amazing piece of technology with the buy-in of clients like IBM and Disney.

With compelling reasons to embrace cloud like cost savings and ability or organisations of all sizes to scale efficiently, what could be holding organisations back from cloud adoption? The most recent available ABS research puts adoption of paid cloud computing services by Australian organisations at just 19%. While the trend in cloud adoption would indicate that this number would have grown since this data was collected, it's a far cry from what we'd expect given Australia's reputation for being ahead of the US and some European countries in embracing cloud technology. 

You may have heard that as many as 86% of Australian businesses have been using cloud for a year or more. The ABS puts the figure much lower – as low as just 37% for businesses larger than 200 people. Just when we thought we had done our job and sold as much cloud as we could in a highly sophisticated market like Australia, it turns out there are more cloud sales to be had.