ISV Connect Program: new opportunities for Business Applications partners

In a few days we’ll be together—virtually—at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit to share the latest innovations and tools with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform community. I’ll also be leading a session on the Business Applications ISV Connect program and how we’re seeing partners build great solutions in our ecosystem. There’s still time to register, if you haven’t already, at Microsoft Business Applications Summit, and join my session at 9:15 AM Pacific Time on May 6.

There’s a lot of momentum to report. We’ve had more than 1,000 ISVs sign up for ISV Connect so far, and they’ve published more than 1,000 certified and enrolled apps in Microsoft AppSource. That number is growing steadily at 28 percent per quarter. And these apps are coming from all kinds of partners, some completely new to Microsoft’s Business Applications ecosystem, as well as many of our long-standing partners like Seismic, Annata, and Flintfox.

We designed ISV Connect to help partners navigate and activate resources from Microsoft more quickly, so it’s good to see some of our newer partners accelerate their growth soon after joining. Solgari joined the premium tier early and, through some focused work with sales teams, generated 20 co-sell leads in one week. Since then, they tripled their deal pipeline and are expecting 150 percent monthly run-rate growth in the upcoming year. ITRAK 365 has also seen growth through expansion into new geographies, driven in combination from co-sell and their Microsoft AppSource presence, where they are averaging 12 new leads per month. We’ll talk more about both of these great partners in our ISV Connect session.

I’ve been very impressed by how quickly our partners have adapted and created solutions for the current COVID-19 pandemic. Mazik Global has launched six new products in eight weeks, and recently published their MazikCare COVID-19 Screening app, using a combination of Microsoft Power Apps, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Azure. This underscores how Power Apps enables unprecedented speed to market. We’re working closely with many partners to ensure their COVID-19 related apps are certified and published as quickly as possible. Thank you for all you are doing to help your customers deal with the impacts of the pandemic on their businesses and their own customers.

We continuously receive feedback from our ISV partners on the program, and we know there are lots of ways we still need to improve. Some of these can be “quick fixes,” while others have structural causes and will take longer to solve. As we scale up in both partners and available apps, we’re aligning with teams across Microsoft to drive connection and execution, especially in our field and co-sell motion. We’re continuing to streamline certification to reduce passes and testing time. And, to address COVID-19 impacts to your businesses, we are modifying our policy that requires update or recertification no later than six months from your last certification on AppSource. We continue to highly encourage partners to update as soon as possible to be compatible with the latest platform release.

We will be updating ISV Connect with some of the changes you’ve asked for at Inspire this July. One thing we’ve really tried to do is keep consistency in the underlying design—the way partners enroll and certify, the business model, the benefits, and the interaction with our teams. And we are addressing your feedback with ongoing platform improvements—check out our improved search results in Microsoft AppSource, including better search relevance, exact phrase search, inclusion of your keywords in search queries, and better performance while typing in the Search Box on the homepage. These improvements are going live starting now and over the next few weeks. We will keep improving the reporting, tools, benefits, and processes.

Here is the FY21 update to the ISV Connect addendum, which is effective for currently enrolled partners on July 1. You’ll see that the changes are minor and mostly related to how we adjust the program as it scales up. We’ll also be talking about some licensing-related improvements to ISV Cloud Embed in our summit session—changes driven directly by partner feedback. So keep the feedback coming, it is always welcome and helps us know where to focus.

I know that most of you who read my blog have already enrolled in ISV Connect, but if you haven’t yet—join ISV Connect. We want you on this journey with us!

See you in a few days,

Guggs