How Microsoft thinks about partners and the cloud

Working with partners has always been a big part of the way #Microsoft gets its products to people, right back to the start of the company: #Altair Basic was a product for another company, and MS-DOS started out as a partnership with #IBM. When Microsoft began building #Azure and #Office365, it might have thought that it would switch to selling those directly - and some people, especially consumers and individual developers, do buy direct from Microsoft. But a lot of businesses still want to work with a partner who can give them some extra help or add more features. With Ignite around the corner, expect a slew of announcements of partner services that integrate with Office 365 - especially #Skype for Business - and Azure. And quite a few of those partners also look like the competition, because who better to help Microsoft integrate Office 365 and Salesforce than, well, Salesforce? This clearly causes tension sometimes. Okta is a cloud identity management service that covers Office 365, offers single sign on for a wide range of other cloud services and multi-factor authentication, as well as MDM and now API management integration (via Mulesoft and Apigee). That's obviously in competition with Azure Active Directory, and Okta is now Google's preferred identity partner for enterprise customers. And Box, again, is clearly competition for SharePoint and OneDrive; Box CEO Aaron Levie has eased off on the cracks about SharePoint but even having Microsoft's Peggy Johnson on stage at the Boxworks conference didn't stop him using the Olympic photo of Usain Bolt flying past the other runners to suggest that Box was beating both OneDrive and #Dropbox. (Even-handedly, he also asked #Google 's Diane Greene if Google Plus was one of the billion-user Google services she was touting as suitable for enterprise, reducing most of the audience to laughter.)
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-microsoft-thinks-about-partners-and-the-cloud/