Top 25 defining moments for the channel in the last decade - Part one
From the end of 'booth babes' the launch of Microsoft Azure ans the passing away of a tech visionary, CPI runs through the 25 defining moments for the channel in the last 10 years
It was the decade that brought us awful music such as "Friday" by Rebecca Black and "Gangnam Style" by Psy and the decade of the iPad, selfies, dabbing, flossing, meme culture and strange new phenomena such as "planking" and the "Harlem Shake".
As we enter a new decade, Channel Partner Insight runs through the most defining moments for the channel of the last 10 years - in chronological order.
February 2010: Microsoft launches Azure
The cloud race intensified at the dawn of the decade when Microsoft first made Azure - then called Windows Azure - available to the general market on 1 February 2010.
Microsoft was four years behind Amazon, which launched its cloud computing platform AWS in 2006. In the year that Azure was first launched, the market estimated that AWS was already generating revenues of more than $1.5bn.
And although AWS is still by far the leader, with a 47.8 per cent share of the market in 2018, Microsoft's Azure offering is growing at a rate of knots. Azure revenue grew by 63 per cent in its last financial quarter compared with AWS' 35 per cent.
Microsoft Azure's impact on the channel over the last 10 years has been immeasurable. The vendor giant's shift away from traditional licencing to cloud-based products has sent shockwaves throughout the channel.
Traditional Microsoft licencing partners have struggled to maintain margins as a result. New certifications, such as the Azure Expert MSP badge, have looked to differentiate partners that are successfully investing in Microsoft's new direction.
Some Microsoft partners have warned that smaller partners unable to make the shift will go out of business while traditional licencing partners add scale in order to regain margins. Arguably, the advent of Azure effectively led to one of the biggest mergers of all time in the software channel, when SoftwareONE's acquired fellow licencing partner Comparex.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into enlarging its datacentre footprint across Europe in an attempt to reassure customers that their data will remain in-country. One senior industry figure, Crayon's CEO Rune Syversen, even suggested that Microsoft's datacentre expansion will spell the end of local single-country cloud providers.
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