Enabling Microsoft's Australian channel

Where do you see the hosted model having most successs?

In the small to medium business areas - even companies with up to 1000 staff have small IT departments and getting that specialised infrastructure knowledge is very difficult for them. For larger enterprises there is an opportunity but it depends on their relationships with outsourcers and systems integrators.

If I go away from the online space, one of the big opportunities we see is in public sector, particularly agencies of SMB size. We have engagements with local councils, private schools, aged care providers but want to use our channel better in that space and take things up a notch. With the Rudd Government's education revolution, and the work being done in health, there's a good opportunity for automation and the efficiencies it brings.

What other areas of opportunities do you see in the SMB market?

As the online services stuff rolls out over the next 12-18 months we'll start to see this effecting the SMB market. The other thing I see impacting in SMB is the mobile workforce and mobile solution set. Today people still tend to use a mobile phone for calls and emails, but there's potentially a bigger opportunity to integrate that with their business applications and approval process. That's hard for a smaller company to do. If partners can come up with scenarios around that solution set there could be some business there.

What are the top initiatives you are working on now?

I always have five things I'm working on right now. Number one is building public sector business and ensuring that we're relevant to that market. The next is building on and creating a tight-knit community with our key distributors. The third thing is partner capacity - with the new technologies we're bringing out we need more sales people, solutions and skills. Then there is the small business space - we have a massive channel here so we need to make sure we keep engaging with small businesses and ensure this stays vibrant and healthy. Last is our emerging technologies or category products. Customers historically ask for all of our main brands - SQL, Exchange, Windows - but we also have smaller products like security and management products, Performance Point, Dynamics and the CRM products. We need to build the right channel and customer base for those technologies.