Introducing the Mixed Reality Partner Program

At Inspire 2017, we launched the Mixed Reality Partner Program. This is an extension of our Agency Readiness Program that will now be open to systems integrators (aka solution providers). It is a performance-based program that offers partners incentives as they complete each phase of the program, with the goal to help them successfully drive POCs and deployments. This new program expands the ecosystem of partners with the skills needed to build world-class mixed reality solutions.

The top three are:

• The most successful customer engagements involve a digital agency and a highly skilled solution provider or systems integrator. In hindsight, this seems obvious. Agencies tend to have strong creative design expertise and experience with 3D content and rendering engines, while SIs have the strong deployment expertise, including the ability to integrate solutions with backend IT infrastructure like security and MDM. When you bring these skills sets together in a highly planned and collaborative way, you can help customers more easily transition from POC and pilot to deployment.
• Even highly skilled agencies, SIs, and solution providers benefit from working directly with our mixed reality engineering team. It’s not always necessary, but we wanted to make this option available to partners since they have expressed the value of working directly with the product designers and creators. So, an allocation of engineering support hours (20) are provided as an incentive to partners to assist with POCs, pilots, and deployments. Partners may also purchase additional hours, if wanted, from the same expert engineering team.
• Mixed reality is here and it is part of intelligent solutions today. In working with partners and customers, it’s become clear that mixed reality use cases span almost every industry. Once seen as a futuristic technology, mixed reality is now a technology with a business case, and it is being adopted by market leading firms worldwide. In fact, mixed reality is transforming industries, and helping enterprise customers improve business productivity, communications, and customer engagement.

For three main reasons:

• The new program is now open to SIs and solution providers (not only agencies) that can drive enterprise integration and deployment.
• We’re going beyond technical readiness and providing more depth in terms of program offerings. While technical readiness will remain the cornerstone of the program, partners will also get sales and marketing readiness, go-to-market support, and engineering assistance, along with a slew of other benefits.
• Our focus is on mixed reality solutions (as opposed to HoloLens) that include HMDs by our hardware partners. In other words, the new program is focused on building partner competencies around Windows Mixed Reality as a platform, not around a single device.

Solution integrators have deep familiarity with the Microsoft technology landscape, have strong relationships with commercial customers and are experienced at building and deploying custom solutions that align with the business and IT goals of their customers.

No, the Mixed Reality Partner Program is an integrated business program, which includes technical readiness, sales and marketing readiness, go-to-market support, and engineering assistance. While partners in the program participate in business planning, get connected with local Microsoft sellers and marketers, partners are expected to drive their own sales and marketing initiatives, demand generation, and account sales strategies.

There are a limited number of partners that we will accept into the program in 2018. Not all qualified entries will be accepted. In 2018, we anticipate accepting fewer than 500 partners globally.

Partners will be notified whether they are accepted or rejected usually within 30-60 days.

Find detailed information about the program on Windows Dev Center. Prospective partners can email [email protected] with specific questions.