Worldwide Partner Conference news: Continued growth of Office 365

First of all, I want to thank our partners for the energy and momentum you are driving with Office 365. FY13 Q3 was our strongest quarter ever with net seat additions up five times over the prior year. And as you likely heard by now, we have more than 150,000+ partners enrolled to sell Office 365 and other Microsoft cloud services. Since February when we announced GA of Office 365, I've been traveling and meeting with partners from around the world, hearing first-hand about the great business results partners and customers are seeing with Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Midsize Business Premium, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online as they embrace devices and services, opening up new scenarios in collaboration, sharing and communication.
This week at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), we're announcing several updates that demonstrate the continued growth of Office 365 and new opportunities for partners.

Expanding Office 365 SKUs through the open program

With Office 365, partners are already realizing the opportunity through the Office 365 Open program announced at WPC last year. In response to partner feedback, it provided an opportunity to own the billing relationship with their end customers - to capture top-line revenue and upfront margin. Now, we are announcing the expansion of the Open program to include Office 365 ProPlus, Exchange Online, Enterprise, Government, Academic offering and more.
These new SKUs will complement the Office 365 Midsize Business offering that was launched in the Open program in March 2013 and provide increased flexibility and choice for both customers and partners in their move to the cloud.  We are also investing more than $100 million in partner enablement, above and beyond margins and channel incentives.
The move to the cloud represents a new era of partner opportunity. Leading customers to the cloud is just the beginning and partner will continue owning that relationship to help customers get the most out of Office 365 with their service offerings. And we will continue delivering on our intent for partners to lead and own the customer relationship.

Yammer and enterprise social

And with Yammer now part of the Office family, we've seen tremendous momentum in enterprise social and interest from customers and partners about how they can start benefiting from new tools and features. The Yammer partner enablement program for FY14 will focus around enabling Microsoft's partners to sell, deliver and integrate Yammer.  It will also provide education and best practice guides to help partners achieve customer network success and deliver the value enterprise social brings across an organization, based around the Yammer methodology called the Social Journey.

Power BI for Office 365

Yesterday, we announced Power BI for Office 365, a self-service business intelligence (BI) solution that combines data analysis and visualization capabilities for deeper business insights in Excel, with the power to collaborate and scale in a trusted cloud environment through Office 365. With Power BI for Office 365, users can See more ...

Office app downloads and new stores

Building on the success we've seen with the US Office Store, we are introducing 22 new markets with localized Office and SharePoint Store fronts as well as French, German, Spanish and Japanese language apps.  

We've already seen strong momentum for the apps in the Office and SharePoint Store, with nearly 1 million downloads. With the Office and SharePoint Store, developers have the ability to reach... Read the rest of this post ----> 

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