Marlow's Microsoft has head in the clouds

Pip Marlow will lead Microsoft Australia while an especially challenging period for the software vendor and its sales partners, as it shifts from its reliance on software licence renewals to the ‘as-a-service’ model of cloud computing.

Marlow has broad experience across channel sales, government sales and small business solutions while her 15 years with the company - a period in which the vendor branched out from the desktop into enterprise computing at one end of the market, and smartphones and consumer gaming consoles at the other.

For partners, Marlow said there was a potential for services revenue to be derived from helping clients migrate from on-premise to cloud deployments.

Marlow said there was on the whole a potential for partners to earn "ongoing services revenue" from these clients – however these opportunities are limited to providing additional support or from developing custom applications that extend the Microsoft platform.

Asked for examples of the "channel partner technology" she had seen in the face of these challenges, Marlow cited MYOB’s move to use Azure as the platform to deliver its accounting software to small and medium businesses, and cited how financial services organisations have used Azure to handle peak workloads.

Further, Microsoft is "evolving" its relationships with local telcos just as Telstra and Optus to meet the needs of its ‘three screens strategy’ in accordance with which the vendor intends to deliver the same user experience across the PC, smartphone and interactive television platforms.

The launch of Windows Phone 7 "leap-frogged" where Microsoft had been in the smartphone market, Marlow said, winning over users that wished to balance their corporate communications needs with their personal interactions on social networks.

Office 365 is the then generation of Microsoft’s software-as-a-service play and a replacement of BPOS.