Collaboration that Scales: Building Trust and Innovation in the Microsoft Ecosystem with Suresh Ramani
Welcome to IAMCP Profiles and Partnership, the podcast that showcases how Microsoft partners and IAMCP members boost their business by collaborating with other members and partners. I'm your co host, Anthony Carrano, and in each episode, I'll be talking to some of the most innovative and successful partners in the Microsoft ecosystem. Today's episode features a conversation with Suresh Ramani, CEO of Techgyan, a multiple time Microsoft Partner of the Year award winner, community leader, and a driving force behind collaboration and growth in the Microsoft Partner ecosystem. Whether you're a tech entrepreneur, a business leader, or just passionate about building impactful partnerships, you won't want to miss the insights and practical lessons Sheresh shares. Before we dive in, let me ask you, are your business partnerships truly strategic or are they just transactional?
Anthony Carrano:What would it take to move your collaborations from reactive deals to proactive long term success? And as AI and automation reshape the landscape, how are you helping your clients and teams not just adapt new technology, but actually use it to solve real business challenges? Think about how you approach partnership, innovation and communication in your organization. This episode would challenge your mindset and offer actionable ideas to elevate your impact. Let's get started.
Anthony Carrano:Welcome back to the podcast Suresh. We're glad to have you.
Suresh Ramani:Absolutely same here. I'm as excited as you are.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. We're looking forward to a great time together. Well, for those who don't know you, and I don't know many in the IAMCP community who wouldn't, tell us a little bit about yourself and your company.
Suresh Ramani:So we started off in 2001 from the operational perspective and for the first few years till about 2008 we were doing everything system integrator which means you do hardware, do network, you do software, switches etc etc. Somewhere around 2007 we applied for our I mean that was the first nomination we did as a partner of the year because some folks in Microsoft India said listen you need to do it because we know your solutions are good. We did that and as luck would have had it, we won our first partner of the year award that was the WPC at that time it was WPC, it was in Denver and during that time we also Microsoft launched a program known as PAL, Partner Area Lead, where this kind of nominated select thirty-forty partners all over the world. I was the nominee from Asia and they invited all these partners to Denver. So it was a double celebration for us.
Suresh Ramani:One was as a PAL for Asia and second was our WTC award. I think that was the kind of time where we said it makes more sense for us to focus more and more on Microsoft platform rather than divide our attention among all other principles. So we started focusing more and more on Microsoft. 2009, I was nominated as a MVP for small business server. At that time, we had this great product called a small business server and pretty much our company knew this product inside out because we were able to implement all the modules of small business server.
Suresh Ramani:So that's how the whole thing went off and 2010, approximately 2009, 2010, I was asked by when I had gone for my second WPC, there was a stall by one three longish named association known as International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners. They could not think of a longer name so probably they finalized this. So they asked me, hey Suresh, you are doing some community work, would you want to consider doing something in this area for APAC region because we don't have anything there. I said why not? Let's try it out.
Suresh Ramani:So I came back in 2010, started the chapter in Mumbai, which is where I am based out of in India, started in Mumbai and we got the whole thing started. So that was in 2010, then 2011, 2012 when we had Microsoft coming out with cloud services, we had this nice very very imaginative name given business productivity online services BPOS that was the name given right. Again a very very fancy name. So, while the name was fancy, but I could judge that in the space I play. This cloud services would become very important. I could not visualize SMBs investing in three four servers and running their data center.
Suresh Ramani:So I kind of jumped fully into it and that's my again 2012 we got our second partner of the year award, second time right and then '14 we decided to stop everything and focus only on Microsoft. So that was the focus from 2014 onwards, it was pure pure Microsoft focus. Right now we got three separate solutions, may call it the brands. So we have a brand known as Teamwork 365, which is focused on productivity and collaboration. We have secure IT 365 which is focused on security and compliance and we have data center 365 which is focused on data center modernization and transformation.
Suresh Ramani:So these are our three service brands which we have set up and so while this was going on, my community hat was also active. So you know we kept on growing the IAMCP community in India and somewhere around 2019 we kind of set up our all India community in India with a proper legal body and proper everything stuff and that's when it became a very well organized stuff and we had our first annual conference that kind of coincided if you remember SOCAL had a ten year event in 2019, the SOCAL chapter right. So SOCAL and our ten years were kind of in sync with each other. We had a first event, very surprisingly for us it was a full show, we had to stop sponsorships, we had to stop delegates because we were all house full That gave us good confidence, but unfortunately COVID came immediately after that. So we went online and when we went online in terms of my community work, I knew that we had to have something to you know ensure stickiness.
Suresh Ramani:So we came up with two very unique programs in the IAMCP world. One of them was called as solution circles. In solution circles, we set up four solution circles to map with modern work, security, biz apps and Azure. So these four solution circles we mapped to these four areas and we appointed four leaders, partner leaders in this and with a mandate that one solution circle has to do one event every month. Which means typically if it's modern work, they will do three events in a year something like that because it's four.
Suresh Ramani:So that was from the solution circle point of view. Second program which I set up was ISV club, where we encourage partners to publish their IP solutions. We gave them a free publicity. So these are the two unique programs we launched. The aim was that once these programs are there, even with this remote work gig, people will at least remain engaged, which is why we were one of the few chapters worldwide whose membership did not really drop substantially during Covid because you know we were doing lot of engagement in those Covid days.
Suresh Ramani:So that has gone pretty smoothly and then again '21 to '22 was we won our third worldwide award. We are still stuck at three. I'm still looking out for my foot. Not happening so far. Let's see when it happens.
Anthony Carrano:It's coming.
Suresh Ramani:So this is happening and in last couple of years back, the IAMCP International, they did a reorg and they said now we're going to have three regions in the world Americas, EMEA, APAC and then I was given the task of kind of nurturing and growing APAC. So right now I am the founder president of IAMCP APAC. We have a new chapter in ANZ. We have a chapter in Greater China and we have just started one more chapter in Southeast Asia. So, you know, I'm kind of juggling two hats in this. One is my community hat and second is the hat which is my company where the bread and butter comes essentially.
Anthony Carrano:That's excellent. I really appreciate you sharing that rich history there. Well, you know we had a chance to, you know, to talk, you know, last year, so maybe give us some updates about what's been happening, you know, with with your company and specifically as it pertains to partnering just in the last year.
Suresh Ramani:Until last year, we were essentially, we were offering modern work migration setup, managed services in the modern world, same security deployment and services. Then again it was data center was migrations and setup. But then last year when AI and Copilot came in, we said this is going to change a lot of things. So we need to do something in that area. So we set up a fourth group, you may call it a fourth team or a fourth group whatever.
Suresh Ramani:It was within the teamwork. But in teamwork then we made a bifurcation, Teamwork 365 core and Teamwork 365, biz apps, business applications. And we shifted our AI copilot to the biz apps team. We set up a brand new team there. The charter of the team was not just AI, it was developed business applications around Microsoft 365 platform specifically around that and infuse every solution with AI.
Suresh Ramani:That was basic charter given to them. And in last ten-eleven months what we have done here is that we have developed a document management system which is purely based on Microsoft 365. We have also got a task management system where what we identified was that Microsoft 365 gives you planner and to do. However, the compliance part is very low in these two. Anybody can delete any task, anybody can you know assign to anybody.
Suresh Ramani:The compliance part is missing. It's a nice app, good UI, good UX everything, but there are certain pieces missing. So what we did there was we developed a task management which combines lists, SharePoint lists because the minute you have list means you got compliance in place you know then permissions compliance come into place. Which combines list, it combines power automate, power platform, It combines it combines Planner and To do because what we have done is allocation happens at SharePoint level, but the visual display of those tasks happen on Planner and To do. So, people can continue using planner and to do which doesn't have a reverse sync.
Suresh Ramani:So people can use it as a product personal productivity app and do x y z things, but whenever they do anything, it will not sync back to the SharePoint. So the compliance part is taken care of. The task management is an exciting solution which we launched and then we launched ticketing solution again based on M365 and finally we also launched Intranet. Intranet was again we didn't want one more Intranet coming into the market because there are a lot of Intranets. So my instructions to the team was we need to have Intranet which will have number one all the regular collaborative features of Intranet because Intranet is all about collaboration within the company.
Suresh Ramani:But then you have got Teams also as a hub of collaboration. So the confusion is there are two platform Microsoft deals. So you can either use Intranet. I said, let's have our Internet inside Teams inside Teams. So, you know, people will have one platform, one Teams, and then they can launch Internet from the Teams so that they continue using that.
Suresh Ramani:So that was one Teams based, having all the features of a typical intranet. And very importantly, we lifted lot of these hidden apps of Microsoft, Shift, updates app, Shift app, approval app. We lifted it and put it in the intranet. The idea was people have no idea that these things are available in their my m three sixty five platform, but when you put it on the intranet, they can see it where they are And, you know, they can launch it from there and go. So we are pretty excited with all this, and almost every app has got AI built into it.
Suresh Ramani:Like, DMS will have a DMS agent, retrieval agent built into it. Task will have a task agent which which you know you can query what are the pending tasks, is all lead tasks, all that kind of stuff. We are trying to now get into the area by which instead of telling people, hey, do AI, do AI, do AI. We don't want to do that. That's not going to work.
Suresh Ramani:We are going to give them applications which are super important for them. Document management, task management, Internet, super important application. But within those applications to make their life simple, we are integrating AI agents inside. That's a new development in last ten months, right, you know, and we are now in the process of kind of launching them on the marketplace also. So that's something new.
Anthony Carrano:Well, with all these exciting tech developments, how do you have time for, the, music and desserts?
Suresh Ramani:Absolutely. Look, look. I am super clear. If I come to a stage where the Lord Almighty says there is music and there is IT. Select one.
Suresh Ramani:I know what I'm going choose. I mean, it's a no contest. Let's be clear about it.
Anthony Carrano:Absolutely. Well, thank goodness your stuff's up on the marketplace then so you could focus on the music.
Suresh Ramani:I'm very clear about that. I mean look, the new gen they have this term YOLO. So I say yes, YOLO is very relevant and I do not want to have my life spent only on tech stuff and AIs and Copilots. Sorry, that will continue. But my music, my concerts, do two concerts, our group does two concerts a year.
Anthony Carrano:I remember.
Suresh Ramani:And of course, there are a lot of my friends, not just in India, even in The US who are unfortunately, they have this diabetes and other things. So their only source of dessert pleasure is watching my posts on Instagram.
Anthony Carrano:Okay. I'm glad to hear you still got that going. Well, let's kind of jump in. So I know we're here to kind of talk a little bit about, your, you know, I mentioned congratulations, you know, with, the IAMCP, you know, P2P awards. I know, you know, there's a story where it was, where it was you guys and, Graphtronics, with the deployment of your Microsoft Teams Room solution.
Anthony Carrano:So, you know, about that story, tell us a little bit about the client. You don't have to share their name or anything like that, But maybe just talk a little bit about that story and some of the challenges that they were facing.
Suresh Ramani:Interestingly, it was not one client. That's the interesting part. Okay. And I think some context is required to when this partner is a typical SI, they don't have too many skills on the Microsoft platform, but we work together because we do only Microsoft platform. Right?
Suresh Ramani:So it works quite nicely. That way I have a relationship with couple of other partners also, complementary skill sets. Now here, one of my existing customers came to me for Teams Rooms deployment and they had hardware and they had purchased XYZ and the hardware vendor had no idea and you know he said you don't require anything but ultimately I had to tell them no you require Teams, Room Pro, you need Intune, you need Entrap even, only then the whole thing becomes fun. That's when I said this is an exciting solution. So we need to do something about it.
Suresh Ramani:So I approached Graphtronics, a good friend. I said, hey, listen. I want you to consider getting into a new area which you are not doing and that area will give you good revenue per customer. So he said, I am all ears, tell me. I said, a typical Teams room gives you it's like you know two and a half three thousand dollars deployment let's say, right?
Suresh Ramani:Out of which the hardware part is 75%. So that will come to you. So I want you to tie up with one of the Teams room vendors, hardware vendors, have a proper tie up because I don't want to do that. I'm not interested because that's not something which I am very excited about. You do that, then with that I will give you my solution which is you know teams room, deployment, Entra, Intune, management all that kind of Microsoft angle, make it work, give managed services and then you go to your customers.
Suresh Ramani:You go to your customers and offer them an integrated solution and when and your team has to only pitch in for a one to one meeting, that's all. Rest we will do. Very clear. So, you know, I give a plan, then do it this way. Do it this way, I give a basic orientation to the team that what team swimming does.
Suresh Ramani:Essentially, I said, if there's any question, these are the two videos or three videos, send it out and that's all. So don't get too deep into it and get them for a meeting, team's meeting, simple. So we did that. It worked once, it worked second time, it worked third time, it worked fourth time. We ended up with six deployments.
Suresh Ramani:And my friend is very happy because for deployment he is getting me a billing of $2,500 and I am getting $500. So that is all right. So I think that was a very important aspect because when we do partnering and I say listen if anybody needs Azure services, am there. So they will give you a referral and then you but in this case, it was not just a referral part. It was much more.
Suresh Ramani:I was telling my partner friend, you will get five times my billing. Okay. You'll get five times my billing. So that is important. So I think that's worked quite well so far.
Anthony Carrano:And tell us a little bit about the results that the client has experienced.
Suresh Ramani:Very, very, yeah, yeah. I think, see, one of the things is Teams Room is a very good solution. Let's be very clear, right? And when we are pitching it against other solutions, this has got its own unique points. And very importantly, when your life revolves around Teams as a hub of collaboration, this is just an extension of that.
Suresh Ramani:Whereas when you have some other room solutions then it's like you are going into that different world like you know metaverse essentially entering a different world and trying to figure out. Here it is an extension. So I believe it's a good solution and our customers are saying that it's a 20%-25% collaborative you know the collaboration part has increased by that extent substantially and we are pretty happy about it and as I said the proof of pudding is an eating. So the first customers have already gone in for renewals, managed So I think that means it's working as simple as that. And I've got while in the last three four days back, some of the customers have sent us a inquiry for additional rooms because they are increasing the number of rooms.
Suresh Ramani:So they want more deployments. It's pretty simple and that's I think it's working out well and customers are saying easily we are getting around 20% improvement in our collaboration effort easily.
Anthony Carrano:That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Rudy?
Rudy Rodriguez:Well, Suresh, you know, I I really enjoyed the history you were telling us a little while ago because that shapes all of us in our careers. Right? So, you know, one of the things that I wanted to know from you, what was what was a pit a pivotal moment in your journey that shaped how you approach partnerships and you know, especially today, and how would things look if that moment hadn't happened for you?
Suresh Ramani:When I pick up something, I'm all in. That's how it is. So when when, you know, I started getting involved with IAMCP, it was not just about attending those meetings. No, I also wanted to understand everything like what are the assets available and one of the very interesting things which is available for all members frankly is a P2P maturity model, which my good friend Per was one of the authors of that and it is available. It is available for all.
Suresh Ramani:But how many partners have actually read it? Very few. Very few.
Rudy Rodriguez:Right.
Suresh Ramani:So I have read it and one of the things which was very important in that was moving from reactive to proactive. I think that was the key. Even today with all the kind of maturity we have, I would say 80% of the partnering still is reactive. I have an opportunity, I will shoot an enquiry and try to figure out who has the solutions, negotiate my rates and get going. But the minute you make it a bit proactive, I think the game changes totally.
Suresh Ramani:It changes totally. I don't think I have reached the top stage you know in that P2P maturity model there are four stages. I am still stuck between second and third. Am still trying to come to third properly and then go to the fourth. But at least I have a guidance that is number one.
Suresh Ramani:Number two is you know on our Vimeo channel of IAMCP, there is a partnering as a practice webinars. Some of them are amazing, absolutely amazing and of course some of your videos are also listed there. So I am just telling you it is a resource available there. So instead of my gut feel is people like us should not spend time trying to learn tech stuff. Tech stuff there is a team who is doing it.
Suresh Ramani:We should spend time in trying to understand how partnering works, what are the pros and cons, how do you do a joint account planning. So, I believe for me the pivotal thing was shifting from reactive to proactive where I kind of said, listen, this is it. We will do it this way and I went slightly out of my way because when I was initially doing some work with my partners, I would have an agreement, MOU, all those things and I would actually share some of the, you know, margins with them. But when my customers wanted hardware or any of the network part, I would give those opportunities to the same partner and say hey listen I don't want anything. I think that you know build the trust level substantially because they said my god if he is offering his services to my customers, he is paying me certain things and when he is giving references of his customers to us, he says do not give me anything just do a good job.
Suresh Ramani:I think that really kind of breaks the mean it really establishes the trust pretty well. So I think that is very important. We should not be transactional, we should we cannot always be proactive that is also the fact. But the minute you are comfortable with some partners, I think it is point to sit with those partners and say, hey listen, let us think through the whole thing properly and let me think it from your point of view rather than just my point of view. Which is how this team's room deployments came into picture.
Suresh Ramani:When I told them, you will do $2,500 billing and I'll do $500 billing, I think that kind of changed the mindset substantially.
Rudy Rodriguez:Yes. You know, I really appreciate the way you you, have adopted all the the p two p principles that we teach at IAMCP, and and that has helped you in in your journey, you know, your business journey. And as a result, you've been a multiple time winner of partner of the year with Microsoft and and p two p award winner at, IAMCP. But award winning, collaborations don't just happen by accident. What specific practices, frameworks, or agreements did you put into place to make sure that these partnerships thrive?
Rudy Rodriguez:I know you've done it in your business.
Suresh Ramani:Right. Right. No. I think, obviously the learning happened from some of the assets like the P2P maturity model and the partnering as a practice webinar series, but then one has to be very clear about certain key practices You have to be very clear. So what we do is there should be very clear division of responsibility.
Suresh Ramani:Like for example in this arrangement where we rolled out six seven room solutions, The partner has to do customer identification very clearly. We will handle the pre sales deployment and support. I mean the arrangement was very very clear partner will handle ABC, we will do D, E, F. So I think that if that is not defined, it can lead to confusion. That's number one.
Suresh Ramani:Then it's always joint promotions. It is not that Techgyan is doing a team's workshop and you can get your customers in. No, it's a joint promotion in terms of joint workshops, co presentations and knowledge transfers. Need to give importance to our partners by properly co branding these events which we do for customers. We don't want to give an impression that this guy is just a commission agent that's not going to work.
Suresh Ramani:No, it's an equal relationship because this is the team's room deployment for example is not about software. There's so much about hardware also whether hardware has been configured well, not configured well. Then if there's a problem, does the partner have a good rapport with let's say Logitech or some some other hardware vendor, which we don't do. So it it it goes hand in hand. And integrated marketing.
Suresh Ramani:I think it is super important that, you know, these few things should be there in place. If you don't have these things in place, then it becomes more like a tactical kind of a thing rather than more strategic kind of thing. That's super important. Absolutely.
Anthony Carrano:That's excellent. So obviously you've got a lot of great success with partnerships. What about can you share a time maybe where a partnership didn't go as planned and what you learned about either resilience or leadership from that experience?
Suresh Ramani:Yeah, I think life is not only roses because if it was only roses, you will not know that roses are roses. There have to be some thorns also. If thorns prick you and then you look at roses, you say, oh this is nice!' That's how it has to be always. So there were challenges if we are today we are structured, we are talking about all this because there have been some bad experiences also on the way. And that happens when the communications are not very clear, the gives and gets are not very clear, are not the focus is only that okay, how much margin are you going to give me, Those kind of things.
Suresh Ramani:So I think the prep work is super important. And also important is if I talk about let's let's take our discussion back to the team's room projects, which we have done. Lack of awareness at the customer level can be a big problem and it can be a problem with the partner also because partner goes, it happened in the first deployment, the partner went and said, okay, I have set up, I have started, now you get started in half an hour. He said hold on, hold on, that doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way.
Suresh Ramani:You know, there are things involved required to be done. So the expectations, setting up the expectations with the customer and the partner and initially, we dependent totally on the partner to do all the communications, initial communication with the customer. We realized that is not the right approach. We said you do the initial talk, then necessarily we'll have one call, joint call. And in that joint call, we would give a realistic picture of what is the duration, what is going to be your effort involved, what I'm going to do, all that time.
Suresh Ramani:Because initially we said, oh the customer is in urgent need, I've already delivered the hardware, let's start. And then there was two three days chaos, a lot of unhappy people around and that's when we said no, this is not the right approach. When we do our projects, our own projects like email migration, isn't necessarily one call which we do with the customer where we kind of post that call there's an action plan prepared with ownership of each task. That we kind of bypassed in our first deployment and when we bypassed it had its own implications which were not so great. And that's when I connected with the partner.
Suresh Ramani:I said, tell your team when my team is telling them that there has to be the first call, they kept forcing us no no no customer wants it urgently. So let's not let's just start. It doesn't work. So I think communication is so important, proactive communication, education and also when you have that first call you are able to gauge the mind of the customer. Oh, he has these thoughts regarding that you know there is going to be abrakadabra magic happening and you know things will happen.
Suresh Ramani:No, that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen. So set the expectations very very clear with the customer. This will happen more importantly this will not happen. If you do not do that, there are problems, but if you do not do that in a partnership, there have bigger problems.
Suresh Ramani:So you have to understand that. If it's 100% my project, there will be problems. But if it's a project with a partner, then there are problems multiplied by three. That's important. Absolutely.
Rudy Rodriguez:Well, you know, Suresh, one of the things that you mentioned, earlier in this interview was that the the tech landscape is always evolving. And right now, we're going through another major evolution that's taking place. So with AI and automation reshaping the partner landscape, what's the one area where you see where partners can both, leverage and and underestimate the opportunity and the risk?
Suresh Ramani:It's new for everybody. It's new for Microsoft also and I don't think partners get it. It's a fact. They feel they say that if I am going to talk send two brochures to the customer, customer is going to give me 100 license order in the next day. It's not going to happen that way. It's not going to happen. So, partners need to understand that AI is not a deployment solution. AI is adoption solution. And in an adoption solution, education business use cases are super important.
Suresh Ramani:It is not about going to the portal and doing this setting and setting up conditional access policies and doing DLPs. A tech project. AI is not a tech project. AI is more about adoption where we are actually talking about understanding the customer s business processes and telling this is all. So I will give you an example of what we do.
Suresh Ramani:Every license of Copilot or whatever is sold for thirty days, we send one use case per day to the customer. One use case.
Anthony Carrano:Nice.
Suresh Ramani:And we say spread it in your company. That is it. Because what is going to happen? Out of 30 use cases, person A will like three, other person will like other three, but those three cases will be different for each person. That is how it is.
Suresh Ramani:So that happens. Then we have also set up a Viva Engage community in our tenant and we have added our customers as external customer, external users in the Viva Engage community and every week we put in one use case in that. Because instead of trying to bombard the customers with new use cases, we are saying if you are interested you will come to my VY Engage site and see the video what we have done, see the use case and if you like it use it as simple as that. So the opportunities are there and I see greater opportunity in integrating AI in the flow of a business process for a customer. Instead of telling listen, this is great for Excel, use it Excel, it is not going to work.
Suresh Ramani:Ask a finance guy, what is your work? He will say this is my work. Said okay, fantastic. You know I will give you a simple, very simple use. I was talking to a customer and then I asked him, he came in and he said you know, sometimes Excel is so stupid.
Suresh Ramani:Now here is my column, a bigger column, smaller column, this column size, width is crazy and I am going nuts. I said, let us see some magic. So, I went to Copilot. I said, adjust the width of the columns appropriately. English, English and he saw it, he said wow.
Suresh Ramani:He just said wow. So, I think we have to understand that this is an adoption, this is not deployment. Do the adoption, understand what the user does with AI and if you are building solutions integrate that and very importantly what we are doing is we are not building too many agents for us. To be very frank, we are not deploying too many agents and there is a reason for it. Microsoft is giving us fantastic agents, researcher agent, facilitator agent.
Suresh Ramani:These agents are and now they have released two more. Workflow agent they have released, app builder agent they have released. I have told my team, listen, I do not care if you are not giving me some out of the world agents developed on your own, but use each of these Microsoft agents and give me 10 use cases on each one of them. Because if I can show these use cases of the ReadyMeasure agents to the customer, I'm done. I'm done. They are fantastic.
Rudy Rodriguez:Well, you know, one of the things that that hopefully our our listeners are learning was you have this broad experience of of working and and collaboration as part of your overall methodology. So can you share a story from your your many collaborations where you've had to and we know this has happened, where you've had to juggle the technical execution, team dynamics, and customer expectations, and how you found the balance to make it a success.
Suresh Ramani:I mean, it happens. Right? It happens to all of us. Right? Yeah.
Suresh Ramani:So what happens here is that initially when we when that if it is a first time collaboration you are doing with a partner, when things are not clear, when you don't know each other's strengths, weaknesses everybody expects the other partner to do everything. Which is what happened with us. We landed up at a customer location where they had a major malware attack. So everything ransomware, everything was kind of encrypted or whatever. And then what we were expected to do was that they had a NAS box which we have no idea what it does, know.
Suresh Ramani:So Synology was a brand of the NAS box. We were expected to ensure that the data from the servers comes to Synology and from Synology goes to Azure backup. I said, sorry. This is like, know, you are expecting me to be an expert on Synology, you are expecting me to be an expert on AD, that doesn't happen. So it took a lot of convincing and discussing and ultimately we convince the customer and the partner that listen, get me the data on that NAS box.
Suresh Ramani:Involve Synology because Synology has to do certain things on their NAS box to ensure that the backup happens to Azure, and then I will manage it. So we sometimes are forced to get into areas which we have no expertise, but because things are not very clear or because the partner is not really good in what they are doing, they expect us to do pretty much everything. It doesn't happen. Migration projects. Let's talk of migration projects.
Suresh Ramani:This has happened very recently. The migration project, we had to migrate from GSuite to M365. It was a complete stuff, and we also had to do device enrollment. We were very clear that our device enrollment plan is to push the, you know, various Intune and other policies. But no, customer insisted to the partner that I will not allow this to be done remotely, tell the partner to come to my office, sit in front of every laptop, wait for the person to be free, and then take up the job and do it.
Suresh Ramani:It came to such an extent that I said okay, we never ever do it, but since it's become you are under fire, we sent the person for two days and in two days he enrolled a huge amount of two devices. And that's when I told the customer and the partner, this is what happens when we come on-site. When we come on-site, the user will make you wait. He say, wait. I'm doing something important.
Suresh Ramani:Can't you see I'm doing something important? Okay? And then at 06:30 after office hours, he say, Now I'm free. Now you take it. So I'm expected to do the enrollment after office hours in front of him.
Suresh Ramani:So these are the small small nitty gritty things which we have to be very very clear and sometimes it creates issues, but I think it's all part part and parcel of the game, you know, that's how it is. But clear responsibilities are super important in partnering. If you don't have those responsibilities, very defined problems.
Anthony Carrano:Let me ask you this, when partnering with another company, what criteria or decision making process do you use to determine whether the partnership will truly complement your strengths and deliver a greater value to the customer?
Suresh Ramani:One, the first thing is complementary skill sets, very good. And when I say complementary, it could mean multiple things. Right? It could be that we take care of the Microsoft angle, you take care of everything else. That's the simplest way of, you know, talking of complementary things.
Suresh Ramani:Second way of partnering could be you are complementary as far as the geographies are concerned. I'm here. All your projects in Mumbai, I will do. All my projects in Delhi you will do. So that's another set of complementary skill sets that you know have to be there, then it works.
Suresh Ramani:Then after that comes clear division of responsibilities. That is again non negotiable. This is what I will do, this is what you will do. That is again super important. Third point would be willingness of the partner to invest in joint go to market activities.
Suresh Ramani:Because the minute the partner says, yes, I am open for joint go to market activities, you know that they are serious about They are not transactional. They are also looking at it as a more of a long term relationship. And finally, I would look at partnering on a solution if I get a sense that this is a repeatable solution, this is a scalable solution. If it's a one off solution, you know, then sometimes the effort is not worth it, to be very frank. But if it's a repeatable solution, I don't mind taking a hit in terms of margins for the first shot because I get to learn a lot of things.
Suresh Ramani:Teams room, simple example, maybe my first deal which we did with this partner, we didn't we actually must have lost some money because of lot of things happening. But every deployment after that, our costs we have been able to control better and better. So because it is repeatable, because it is scalable. So I think these four criterias should be are what we look at complementary, you know, complementary in all respects. Know, it's not necessarily the skill sets have to be complementary.
Suresh Ramani:Sometimes geographies can be sometimes, you know, even within. Let me give an example. SharePoint, we do SharePoint, but we don't do coding in sharepoint.net, we don't do. So I get a partner if I have to do coding in SharePoint, say listen, you do it because you are you have a coding team, you got a dot net team and stuff like that. But I think complementary has got a lot of areas in which you can be complete, but these are the four things which I believe are super important for us.
Anthony Carrano:That's excellent. Well, has been great. I do have one more question for you. So if, and it's almost, I think I'd curious to see how you answer that just in light of, what you just shared is if you could give your younger self one piece of advice about building partnerships in this ecosystem, what would it be?
Suresh Ramani:I think we started very late.
Anthony Carrano:Oh really?
Suresh Ramani:Yeah. Spent almost fourteen-thirteen years not partnering and we have been actively partnering for last eight-nine years. So, if that was one mistake we did probably that we should have from day one been on the lookout that partnering is a we wanted to do everything should be done by us that does not work.
Suresh Ramani:It does not work. Partnering, so partnering should be and that too strategic partnering. Strategic partnering has to happen in investing in strategic proactive partnering, look out actively for partners and see partners are very shy. So you go out to them. You tell them listen, now I will give you an example.
Suresh Ramani:Currently, are doing a project with another partner who is our customer, but it is a business central deployment. We do not do business central. So one was just to give the opportunity to the partner that okay let's do it. But I said listen I want to come to your office. Let's sit and talk.
Suresh Ramani:Let's not say this is a tactical thing one off thing. Let's grow it. So visited the partner worked out everything said this is what you will do this is what I will do and that partner does not do much of M365 migration etc. So his migration projects probably will come to me my business central projects will go to him. So you know that's something which we did late because you know learning about P2P and partnering took little time.
Suresh Ramani:So if I were to become my younger self from the first year I'll say I'm going to do only so much for everything else. I'm going to partner very important.
Anthony Carrano:No, that's, that's fantastic. That's excellent. Excellent advice. Well, Suresh, this has been just a, just a wonderful time. It's amazing how much time passes in these, just such a rich wealth of just perspective and insight.
Anthony Carrano:Thank you. Before we close, why don't you share us a little bit, share with our audience a little bit about kind of what you're doing with the Copilot workshops.
Suresh Ramani:Yeah, so, you know, kind of jumped into Copilot, quite early as soon as the Copilot chat was announced. And in fact, there's an interesting story. Last year when I was in Seattle, I depended heavily on Copilot chat for my planning for everything you know including I said okay I want to visit the Boeing factory so what time I should start, what time I should leave, all that kind of stuff. That's when I said this thing is damn good and more I use it, more I felt that this is an adoption exercise and when I am looking around with other partners, they are not looking it as an adoption exercise. Unfortunately, Microsoft also is not very clear that Copilot is an adoption piece rather than a deployment piece.
Suresh Ramani:So what we are doing right now is we are conducting workshops for customers. It's a very tight workshop for around seventy five to ninety minutes workshop. We first cover a little bit of theory about the AI and all that and then we say we divide into two three parts. First part we cover the power of Copalit chat where we actually take up day to day use cases and we tell customers you know something you have it free. You're using m three sixty five.
Suresh Ramani:You interestingly, so many customers don't know about that. That Copilot chat is free for M365. They don't know. They don't know. So we spend some time giving them various use cases.
Suresh Ramani:Then we take the second module where we say use cases in terms of the paid license. Third use cases agents, we pick up the researcher agent and other agents. Right? And then we have a section like off late whatever workshops I am doing, last ten minutes is I spent time. Okay.
Suresh Ramani:Now I am going to show you the favorite prompts of Satya. So he had published some four five prompts on LinkedIn which he said these are the prompts he uses to make his effect meetings more effective etc. So I said this is what Satya Nadella does. Now let me tell you let me do it in front of you about my employees and I actually show them by adding the employees and kind of results you get. Once that workshop is done, that's when then I tell them this is a free workshop.
Suresh Ramani:So that's a free workshop we do. Then we say you should do a corporate workshop for your company and I've done corporate workshop where 50,100, 150 people of that company have joined and there we try to show cases, take up their industry. For example, we did one for a chart accounting company. So we took up actually you know how a CA could use, a chart accountant could use the Copilot And once that is done, I have seen that the adoption kind of is at a different level altogether. So we we we do these workshops and we are having a special promo also which we have listed out on the Microsoft marketplace also because we are doing it for us it does not matter if the customer is in India or if he is outside India.
Suresh Ramani:I mean it really does not matter, right? It's working out quite well and mostly for the customer it is working very well.
Anthony Carrano:Well, excellent. Well, Thank you. And, what are some of the best ways that folks can, reach out and connect with you?
Suresh Ramani:LinkedIn. I mean, I don't know when did I last print my visiting cards. I have no idea.
Anthony Carrano:Absolutely. We'll include your LinkedIn and website, as well as some links to, those offers and AppSource in the show notes, for those that are listening. Suresh, thank you once again. You have a great day.
Suresh Ramani:Absolutely. Pleasure is all mine. I love, love the communication. It was wonderful. Thank you so much.
Anthony Carrano:Well, was a fantastic, interview with Suresh. I always really appreciate his perspective and just that just the experience that he brings. One of the things that really stood out to me, Rudy, just, you know, as I know we've been talking with a lot of folks about AI and Copilot and, you know, everything that's just kind of going on within the tech ecosystem, but this is one of the first ones where he just kind of the way he explained it as AI is an adoption versus a deployment solution. And thus kind of what that, either requirements that just the need to, you know, bring education as well as communication to properly set customer expectations. Just, I really appreciated that perspective.
Rudy Rodriguez:Absolutely. And, you know, the other thing that I took away from this is one, Suresh's insight and the principles that he follows, because he follows the principles that we teach in at IAMCP on the P2P maturity model and how partnering can work for your business and how you can how you can use it to grow your business. And in fact, at the very end of the interview, he mentioned that he would go back and teach that to his younger self as well. And and that's one of the things that we don't hear hear from a lot of partners about how to follow the model and how to use it and how to become a proponent of it and use it and teach other partners how to work work through the issues that you run into, when when working through partnering. I found that great insight, and and he did an excellent job of explaining it.
Anthony Carrano:Absolutely. And, you know, just to kind of piggyback on those thoughts, I mean, we know when he was just talking about like when partnering with another company, things to look for, and this came up, you know, a few times throughout the interview, you know, just the, just the importance of finding someone with, complimentary skills, you know, and geo, you know, geography, as pertains to like with the customer, but just the emphasis on communications, not only just internal communications, but also external communications. And on more than, you know, one occasion just mentioned how, you know, just about the joint co marketing and co investing, you know, in those go to market activities. I just thought that was a really good perspective and for him, how that sent as a signal that this is about long term partnership and relationship and not just, you know, merely a transaction. So I really appreciate him saying that.
Rudy Rodriguez:Absolutely. Absolutely. For those of you who have joined us on this episode today, thank you for joining us on this episode of IAMCP Profiles in Partnership powered by Dunamis Marketing. We hope you enjoyed this podcast and find it useful and inspiring. If you did, please subscribe, rate, and review us on your favorite podcast platform.
Rudy Rodriguez:One of the best ways to partner for success is to join IAMCP, a community of Microsoft partners who help each other grow and thrive. IAMCP members can find and connect with other partners locally and globally and access exclusive resources and opportunities. Whether you're looking for new customers, new markets, or new solutions, IAMCP can help you achieve your goals. To learn more, the website at www.iamcp.org.
