Microsoft Malaysia inks a deal with Maxis and six others

At Microsoft Malaysia’s Channel Partner Conference (CPC), held today the company announced seven new partners as part of the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.This is part of the company’s continued commitment to taking customers to the cloud. These partners are Maxis, Shinjiru Technology, SoftwareOne, VADS, Crayon Software Experts Malaysia, Ingram Micro Malaysia and Rhipe Malaysia.These CSP partners will be able to directly manage the entire Microsoft Cloud customer lifecycle, utilising dedicated in-product tools to directly provision, manage and support their customer subscriptions.Speaking at the conference, César Cernuda, president, Microsoft Asia-Pacific said the trend is highly positive with business leaders recognising the need to transform and lead digitally powered organizations that are adaptive to change.Today’s partner announcement is in line with Microsoft’s commitment to makes business productivity easier and more secure with updates across its enterprise solutions. First introduced at last year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington D.C., United States – CSP allows Microsoft partners to retain full control over customers when selling the Microsoft’s cloud-based offerings.Cloud remains a lucrative market for partners According to IDC, 86% of business customers buy their IT solutions through channel partners – 80% do so for cloud products and services specifically. With IT spending going through a period of transition – 55% was spent on cloud and managed services versus traditional IT (45%) – it is well in line with IDC’s prediction that 70% of CIOs will shift to a “cloud first” strategy by 2016. It has never been more vital for businesses to find a trusted advisor to provide them with the right advice around both technology and specific business processes or vertical industries.Microsoft claims to have the largest partner ecosystem in the industry, investing over US$2 billion annually in channel operation – also the largest amount in the industry. In Malaysia alone, the company maintains over 5,000 partners nationwide, the largest in Malaysia’s IT industry.