Microsoft Channel Chief: 10,000 Cloud Solution Providers and we're just getting started

T.C. Doyle has a great interview with Microsoft channel chief Phil Sorgen at MSPmentor, where they discuss the opportunity in the cloud ($500 billion by 2020) to how Microsoft will help customers get there (a growing army of trained Cloud Solution Providers).

Historically, the cloud and solutions providers have had a somewhat rocky relationship: SalesForce was the famous runaround, burrowing into end users hearts before bubbling up to the top offices (they've since, of course, established a robust partner ecosystem). And Google's enterprise cloud services have somewhat floundered as its struggled to build out that kind of ecosystem (an area Diane Greene has been working hard to clean up).

Microsoft is hoping for a smoother transition, pushing its partners to keep ahead of the market. To that end, they now have 10,000 members worldwide in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP).

As Sorgen explained to Doyle, there's three categories of where those partners are at:

Sorgen said that last bucket is operating on borrowed time, and that buying preferences are now rapidly shifting to be more cloud friendly. The whole interview is worth a read, and I'd love to hear how the partners you work with measure up on Sorgen's scale.