 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley. I am excited to be back with another collab talk tweet jam summary, and the topic today was expanding Microsoft's partner service economy, and I'm joined here today with points Jason Beale. Hey Jason, thanks for joining. Yeah, it's great to join and I really enjoyed my first official tweet jam today, so it's good to be here. Yeah, I think I always start off like as I post out to the tweet jam. I say, you know, anybody that follows me, get ready to drink from the Twitter fire hose, and that's how the tweet jams. If you attempt to follow along with every conversation, you quickly get left behind, left in the dust. Yeah, I noticed as I was continually refreshing, and I'm sure there was a better way, but I was continually refreshing, and there would be 13 seconds, and then 16 seconds and 27 seconds, the messages were coming in. So it was fun, but your ride is difficult to digest all that content. Well, you know, I miss the old days when the Twitter API was open, and we had that dedicated page, and sometimes it was fun to see that, but it also was because that would refresh every second, and so you just see it flying by, because every second there might be multiple tweets, and so it just goes by very quickly. But yeah, it's always great, and that's why I'm thankful for the Tigraph partnership, and the tools that they provide, and anybody could go find that if you go to link.tigraph.com, whack, collab talk, and you'll be able to find everything, all the stats from the event, as well as every single tweet in order that was shared during the event. Well, we typically do a partner-focused topic after the partner conference, which is every July, so Microsoft Inspire, and so this was a little bit different, but given that there's so much that's happening, and it happening in the channel side of things, of course that's your area, but why don't we let you do it, before we jump into that, introduce yourself, what you do, your role at AvePoint, and we'll go from there. Sure, so I'm now officially 90 days into my AvePoint tenure, I joined about the middle of December. I came from a cybersecurity company, and then before that I came from distribution. I have been in the IT industry all about two decades, living and working both in the United States and in Europe, presently back in the United States and based out of Southern California, and I lead our global channels and partner ecosystems with AvePoint. Well, it's great to have you on, and I know that part of this discussion, there's been things that have been happening in the MVP and the RD circles around partner, that around channel development, and of course in my role and your role, we've been having conversations around this, and I thought it was a timely discussion to talk about. So let's jump right in. So seven questions, love to get your take on these. So let's start with question number one was, Microsoft talks about growing the partner services economy. Where do you see the greatest future opportunities within the Microsoft partner ecosystem? You know, I've had a lot of conversations with partners and I have seen a lot more partners, you know, focusing even more on services than they always have. So partners have always been quite services but really there is a heightened focus, heightened sensitivity, more investment and more strategy in that. Some of that heightened focus on services driving some of this M&A activity in fact that you see in the channel. And then the other term that I would say is, you know, pretty hot with partners as DevOps. Microsoft is doing a great service to the industry by talking about the needs for driving custom solutions, right? ISV to ISV work, integrating in the platforms developing having partners really develop intellectual property or co-create IP with them or with other ISVs. And so that's certainly a hot topic. I'm gonna, you know, look at the Microsoft technologies that I as a partner am selling, build out that total economic opportunity which might include hardware, might include my services and might include either custom or integrated software. Yep, and I know that we've got some other questions where we'll go into a little bit more. I mean, you know, with App Point as an ISV and obviously has services sides but you know, you're building out the channel for App Point and see that opportunity and push those opportunities to partners. But beyond even, you know, what people think of as the ISVs and the SIs or the consulting companies the strategic integrators. And I mean, Microsoft has talked about, you know companies to expand and add on MSP and CSP capability to look into learning development training aspects and kind of really expand their thinking. And it goes back, I think it was the first or second keynote that Satya Nadella gave what after became CEO of Microsoft where he called, you know, it says every Microsoft partner is a software development company like every company is a software development company. And he wasn't saying, hey, every company go out and become an ISV, but it was kind of pushing those boundaries of look at what your customer is trying to do and figure out if I'm gonna grow my business, how can I help better help those customers solve those business needs? And it might increase the boundaries of what I thought an ISV was an SI was, you know and do some of these other things. So it was interesting to get some feedback from the community on that topic. Yeah, you know, there's a, if you look at the end customer whether it's for their particular company whether it's for their particular industry or even their particular geography slash nation, right? There are individual needs and requirements. And then customer has some homegrown software applications, they may have some, you know third party and proprietary applications specific to an industry. And then they may have, you know a full suite of what we would traditionally see as some of the industry leading enterprise software applications and platforms like Microsoft. The trick, the opportunity for that partner community is how do we bridge all that together? How do we integrate it? How do we make sure that there's a solution for the end customer that shares data makes a very seamless and frictionless experience for that end customer. And that's right now where we're seeing a lot of partners focus. So are they a software company? Man, there's a lot of open source tools a lot of SDKs, a lot of APIs that's out there that helps a partner help the end customer create these unique solutions. Well, there's, and I know we've got a question about this later, but somebody made a great comment that just that said something in the fact of well, you know, Office 365, Microsoft 365 is really just an amazing platform for SMBs. And yet when you look at the history of the individual solutions, it's all enterprises that had, you know largely on-premises versions of those solutions. And so it has that history. And so, you know, Office 365 and a lot of these cloud services enabled smaller organizations to go take advantage of that. And the key to that is that they no longer require you to go and hire a SharePoint architect who manages the servers that are sitting in your building. You know, like that world is gone. And so you could focus on your business and just get more and more of these solutions that a partner or Microsoft is managing on your behalf. I think there's been that evolution going on for quite some time. You know, that AppPoint is a kind of a perfect example of this trend that you've seen in the last decade that SaaS and Pass are taking what were enterprise grade and for enterprise-only affordable technology, democratizing them for the masses and for the SMBs. So that's what, whether it's Office 365 or there's some of the backup migration governance solutions that AppPoint brings to market. We truly have democratized enterprise grade technology for the masses. I mean, think about it, Christian. You and I as small businesses, we can get into Azure and in 15 minutes an hour, we can spin up some incredibly complex IT infrastructure with virtual workloads and storage and virtual servers and applications and pick and choose. What would that have cost us as far as OpEx, CapEx and man hours, people hours, excuse me, 10 years ago? And now in 15 minutes, that technology is democratized and we use it, we click and we pay as we go. Yep, it's amazing. Well, we'll talk more about this. Question number two, are you making changes to your business model or capabilities or forming new relationships to expand your Microsoft ecosystem opportunity? I would say, and let me first speak with a voice of partner, right? And some of the conversations that I've had with partners, we partners have always worked together well. As you know, there's been peer groups, there's partner service networks. We do see a lot more of that peer to peering within the partner community to take advantage of each other's strengths and to ensure that the solutions that they're bringing to market, they can integrate, work well and add value to their end customer. So certainly we're seeing that. Second, again, with partner business model, these DevOps capabilities go moving even further from the resale of hardware and software licenses to truly bringing out more intellectual property, more unique and custom solutions for end customers. And we're seeing that. And then the continued acceleration of managed services and where managed services a decade ago was, let's call it endpoint, the server, network monitoring and management. Now we do see a full suite of managed services where the partners are managing some pretty complex end customer environment. So it's no longer your basic managed services. We certainly see some kind of advanced and consulted and managed service business models from the partners. If you look at AvePoint is a company that we also have transitioned from a largely on-prem license and custom software to where much more scalable through the delivery of our technology in SaaS. We also are customizing technologies to specific vertical markets and industry segments. A latest example of that is our Edge Tech offering, which is much more than learning management for educational institutions that directly integrates into the Microsoft platform. So that's a perfect example where we've been able to take advantage of platform approach, integration into the Microsoft suite, customize the solution, build it on SaaS and then make that available to the masses. Not, I think that's great. I think that there's especially smaller organizations, tech companies that are concerned about, like we don't have to bandwidth to go out and build vertical specific solutions. And so they'll even turn down opportunities where they're asking for something very specific because like through the partner ecosystem you can actually go and make yourself much larger or in like in our case being a large ISV vendor but partner with these smaller companies that have that industry specific experience to go and build that personalized customized solution for customers that need something very specific. So I'm a, as you know, I'm a huge advocate for the channel been involved with like an international association of Microsoft channel partners, IAMCP for many years. And so that is something that when people ask those questions, I generally go to, it's like, well have you talked to the channel what partners are doing and find opportunities that way? Cause I think it just opens up opportunities. Let's see, question number three, has the pandemic changed your fundamental business activities, if so how? And if not, why not? Yeah, thoughts on that? I was first let me speak personally. Yeah. Yeah, first let me speak personally. I'm one of those that I used to travel every week. All right, so whether what I was living in Brussels, I travel all around Europe, the Middle East and come back to the United States and travel domestically and internationally. So for me, it's been a big transition. They the great right thing from a personal level is that I'm spending more time with the wife and kids and I'm here more when they go to bed. I'm here more when they wake up and picking them up from school and dropping them off at their sports activities. So that's been great. It's been interesting quite frankly, Christians who started a new company and have building a team and working amongst a team and not being able to meet people face to face, right? So I will call them three dimension. We meet face to face on teams, but that's been an adjustment. And when you start a company, you wanna meet your partners face to face. You wanna meet your distributors, you wanna meet some of the Alliance partners. And I haven't had the opportunity and I'm not alone. Most of our industry and most industries are like that right now where it's been work from home and it's been virtual. So that's been a big change. I will say, there is an art and a science of effectively meeting people and building relationships, building rapport and trust and then just effectively running meetings and doing performance management when it's only virtual. And I think that a lot of us have been able to and have learned some of that and share some of the tips and tricks. And then that will continue and that'll make us some much more productive workforce going forward even when we have the ability to meet face to face but also still work remotely a lot. I think you will see notable productivity improvements that have come out of this very challenging last 12 months. Yeah, so I've also spent most of my last decade on the road a lot but I've been working from home most of that time. So almost 10 years. And so I'm always the odd one out that is the person that always dials in but then flies to events and speaks at events and things that are all over the world and the major Microsoft conferences. But I made a comment a couple of times today during the tweet jam that, so I've been working specifically within collaboration technology. Project portfolio management is kind of where I spent the late 90s and into the early 2000s and found my way into SharePoint and got involved. Other information management, ERP systems prior to that but collaboration technology really for the last 20, 22 years focused on and yet throughout almost all of that time including my time at Microsoft, all of those companies had policies against work from home as a standard. And so I think one of the changes that's happened and this is a topic all on its own, I realize this but is that if anything it helped companies realize hey, there's a lot that we can do remotely. We do not have to have that standard centralized everybody in one place to get a lot of what needs to happen done. Like you, I mean there's doesn't replace face to face. There has to be some degree of that. And for the two of us both being remote workers I looked at it as being, flying out to headquarters in New Jersey like once a month or every other month at the very least and being there for a few days to have that face time with people and extend the relationship. But there's so much that can be done is when anybody's working on a deliverable we all know this, we just wanna be left alone. We close the door, we put on the headphones and we're in a shared space. And so a lot of the individual contributor work that needs to be done, we just need a loan time to focus on that. So that's great, but that has to be mixed with how do we engage, what do we do as a team and how does that work? So it'll be interesting to look at this next phase as things start to open up again what hybrid looks like. Cause I don't think we go back just to where we were. I think it's going to change and be a hybrid. So they say that telemedicine right is a great example of that where there was always for whatever reason the technology was there but the user preference, the patient preference was not to do that. And what did we do? We drove through traffic to sit in an office to sit in a waiting room for a long time to see a doctor for 10 or 15 minutes to drive home through the traffic. Well, the pandemic forced this huge increase in telemedicine. And now they've been blown away by some of the statistics around the number of these remote doctor's appointments and the customer satisfaction. So will we go back to purely go into an office? No, will we stay with purely telemedicine? No, but the benefits and the predictivity and the satisfaction with telemedicine has been proven. And so now the new normal will be something in between. That in between my prediction is that we have WebMD. I just need to be able to write my own prescriptions and then we're good. We'll see how that works out. Let's see question number four with Microsoft's new industry cloud efforts. They made these announcements at Ignite. So they talked about the four new industry specific cloud skews, really. But is your business model shifting focus towards verticals? Yeah, I can all speak from the reference of my conversations with partners and partners of all shapes and sizes and in all GEOs. And I've seen partners, some partners that have been very focused on vertical markets for a decade. I remember I can look back more than 10 years and some of the early managed service providers were specifically targeting the hospitality industry, retail industry and K through 12 because those were right targets for that IT outsourcing, watch the blinking lights, keep the students or the workers up and they had a sales play and they repeated that sales plan. Boy, there were plenty of K through 12 school districts, hotels and retail slash other hospitality for them to go after and they ran that play and they built huge businesses focusing there. You have other partners that based on a particular application that they either had written or go to market with was specific to a legal vertical or a pharmaceutical vertical. Then at the same time, we have a lot of partners that are quite horizontal in nature and like to reach out to the masses. They may target SMB or they may target generally mid-market or they may target generally enterprise but horizontally across many different industry segments. So I don't know, I haven't seen and I haven't seen any notable trend in my conversations with partners that they've swung one way or another. I would say that the conversation, once you're into a prospect or in with a customer, that certainly needs to be much more focused on that customer and their industry needs or the line of business needs or the requirements rather than just let me tell you about the technology solution. The conversation, the pain points, the problem, the solution needs to be based on that industry and that particular line of business need but on the main, the partners are either still going deep into a set of verticals or I've seen they're still more horizontal. Well, again, I mean, I would look at that as potentially if you can find the right partner, a great partner to partner opportunity to go in there and obviously you have to respect like who's bringing the client in and those lines of what role that you play within that but I've worked with other companies that had partners that were competitors from all of the marketing materials and customers that they would go after and yet they would work together and bring in consultants that had vertical depth expertise on these horizontal solutions so they could go at this together and they worked out something, a deal between them and so that's something that like the within the Microsoft Partner Network, NPN and within IAMCP specifically it's really what that's geared toward. So it should be, I guess my point is if we're talking broadly about how business is changing, evolving and how we can grow with kind of the new rules of working within the ecosystem is that you should not saying no to a potential client project if bringing in a partner might be less dollars, fewer dollars for you for the overall that's business that you might not otherwise win without partnering up around something. So, go and weigh the pros and cons of that, but. I agree. The other thing I was thinking too is that Microsoft for a long time has been focused on the vertical solutions. When I joined Microsoft in 2006 and was part of MMS which is Microsoft managed services which became B-POS which became Office 365. I was the liaison for the MMS team working with HMC which is the hosted messaging and collaboration team and they were going and building of small to medium business server solutions for verticals and would package a bunch of stuff together with SharePoint as part of that and go as an on-premises solution that they would drop in. And so that's, they've always focused around that but when you look at a lot of what we do especially around collaboration this is true for Avpoint while we may have, we've got certainly depth of customers, of wins, of case studies in every vertical that you can think of globally but these are collaboration, communication, messaging solutions that are horizontal solutions. Like they're fundamentally the same across the various verticals. So, it really comes down to where are we finding the most traction with customers and where are those opportunities to kind of drive where we might go and create vertical solutions like the edge of tech, like the things that we've done within the federal, state and local government space. A lot of solutions in that area. I mean, I certainly would pivot off of that by actually giving a sneak peek or a bit of a teaser on the enhanced partner program that's coming out from Avpoint and we refer back both to what you had just mentioned and what we were talking about at the beginning with partners to doing more and more dev ops and really wanting to co-create IP. I mean, Avpoint is in a wonderful position with the technology that we have that the platform on which it's built to work hand in glove with the partners in order to customize some last mile solutions for particular customer or vertical needs. And we want to build a true next generation partner program that's not necessarily based on simply the resell of our software but really on creating unique and differentiated solutions for end customers. And you'll see us working really closely and having like opening up a lot of capabilities and resources to our partners in order to co-create IP for specific customers and vertical markets. I know a lot going on there and a lot of activity happening behind the scenes here with Avpoint for sure in this space which is why I wanted to have you on for this discussion. All right, so question number five. So many customers employ solutions across different cloud platforms. How important to your business is support for multi-cloud? And I actually extended this a little bit. I said, I know they're completely different things but I said multi-tenant as well as multi-cloud. And I have two different things where you might have, I mean, a lot of multi-tenant that happens when there might be an acquisition and they are also a Microsoft 365 client where you have multiple domain names, multiple properties within one corporation and maintaining those and working across those. Some similar issues with multi-tenancy with multi-cloud where you wanna have a consistent way that you manage all of your data no matter where it is. Yeah, I tend to look at this from a pretty practical perspective. Like so first, Christian imagine that you and I have Buckley Beale MSP business together and we try to go in a customer to provide managed services for them. I think we're gonna have more success if we go in and we say, we can help to optimize and manage your existing environment over time we'll show you how you can potentially reduce the cost reduce the resources and then standardize on particular technologies which will drive additional benefit. That's probably a more successful strategy than if we said, if we win your business we need to flip you and pull you out of this cloud and take you off of this piece of software and take you off of this one in the immediate term. So I think that's one way that I look at it. Second, on the multi-tenancy side like certainly for a managed service provider where they are able to derive real leverage real cost efficiencies and thus profitability are by working with vendors like AvePoint and even other software or hardware companies on truly having multi-tenant solutions single pane of glass a very consistent way to manage their end customers at the click of a button. As far as multi-cloud I'm one of those that believes it's a hybrid world some customers will still want or need certain things on-premise in some sort of proprietary private data center the others that are out in a public cloud they may have multiple public clouds there's in this industry as you know Christian there's just constant innovation who knows what's coming around the corner in three months from now that's the latest technology that has some notable impact to quote unquote online storage whether it's functionality or cost which then changes the way that an end customer could make a decision around what's stored here or what's hosted there. Well, I just looked at it practically if I'm a partner I may have a great allegiance to a wonderful partner like a Microsoft but I also have to be to recognize that for my end customers they may have disparate or multi-cloud or multi-tenant environments and in order for me to add the most value to them and come off as somewhat agnostic I need to be able to work with those various clouds as well. Well, I just I know from a lot of my friends that are on the engineering side that you got friends that like Rackspace and other hosters providers and we always talk about how in the early days of Azure how well SharePoint for example performed on AWS or Rackspace compared to Azure and I know that that's no longer the case it's cheaper and it performs on Azure but it just kind of speaks to that issue especially we go back to kind of the vertical topics there might be advanced solutions and a certain vertical that are essential to a business they might be Microsoft shop and have all those pieces but need that healthcare solution which is hosted over on Oracle or AWS or wherever and so to be able to for companies to be able to understand it maybe you still specialize in the Microsoft stack there's nothing wrong with that but I think it's very few companies in the world that exist still that are a we're a pure Microsoft stack that's we don't touch anything unless it's on one of those things that you know people who say that are usually unaware of all the shadow IT efforts that are happening within their organization where their data actually lives would you have that argument but the reality is from an enterprise perspective especially you know we that you need to have a backup of various options there and so it's a standard thing it's becoming a standard thing to have the multiple clouds and for vendors like App Point to be able to support you know our customers and their data wherever it lives through these integrations primarily Microsoft but be able to communicate with and collaborate through other solutions and clouds is essential. Yeah, yeah without point you know we have we're a great example we have our the more backup products where we give customers a choice we'll have it where we're built and it's a complete solution on Azure on App Azure infrastructure as close as you can get to the Azure network which derives certain efficiencies we also have a bring your own storage opportunity for those customers. Yeah. All right, oh this is a big one okay this is what I was referring to earlier Microsoft is historically focused on the enterprise with channel driving the long tail do you see this changing and has your focus on enterprise and or small to medium size businesses changed? And certainly with first I'll speak from App Point's perspective and SMB is a market that we've been investing in just the past few years right? Historically we've been very focused on enterprise and public sector and even the mid market but boy you know the company also recognized a big need around the SMB helping our helping SMB customers we talked earlier about the democratization of technology as we've transitioned to SaaS making that available to the SMBs and we've had a pure channel strategy working with some of the best global distributors on their cloud marketplaces and empowering a network of over a thousand managed service providers with specialty product products easily managed and sold on a monthly basis. So we're a great example of a historically enterprise focused company that has now made the solutions available in a channel delivered model tightly integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem and those Microsoft managed service providers. So then let me pivot to the other trend that I've seen and you know it's sometimes it's hard to put the public sector market in the guise of enterprise or SMB some might equate selling to a small local school district as SMB and some might equate selling to the you know ministry of defense of XYZ country to enterprise where I've really seen partners pivot and do a lot more in the past year has been in that public sector largely driven by a lot of the various stimulus that we needed either to quickly react to the need to set up collaborative environments and secure networks and secure remote connectivity and secure employees or whether it's been you know with the more broader macroeconomic trends and helping you know families and companies all around the world there's a lot of money going in and partners are helping public and private entities with that. The third thing I'll say is I mean I've always been a big fan of SMB particularly through the channel I still firmly believe in that role of that local trusted advisor. If you're a small manufacturer or you're a retail shop you have a certain core competence you have certain competitive advantages in what you do but building and managing your technology is not your core competence and so to be able to rely on a local trusted advisor who can come by understand your business provide on what you might need to solve immediate term problems but also give you a nice roadmap keep your costs down. I firmly believe in that model and I think with SMB boy they need it they really need it the most so Microsoft you know focusing and helping out their partners on both enterprise and SMB is perfect. Well I think there's a certain truth that out there is that the size of an organization does not determine the complexity of its collaboration needs and its information management needs like you could have small organizations that understand and view the data that they have as a strategic and so they could be in they could have 50 people that didn't work within highly regulated industries and need to have all of the additional controls and security and things of a very large enterprise and likewise you see very large enterprises that go and buy this complex software and then use like SharePoint as a file share that they don't get the most out of that so you see kind of both sides of that and so there are certainly opportunities for partners like large ISVs like AppPoint small consulting the local regional consulting partners around the world there are opportunities again through partner opportunities but to go in and especially with this democratization of this technology everybody can have with 10, 15 years ago to really scale up and get what we have today would have been like a million dollar solution entry point and now you can get it for like an E3, E5 you can get it for what is it 30, 35 bucks a person a month for the most robust and there are cheaper options for that but for that E3 license gets you the bulk of the capability just like any of the largest of enterprises which is pretty incredible but then you want to get the right partner to support you on the backend when your needs outgrow that and you want to more closely align and operationalize the technology to fit your unique business patterns. Yeah, you know who you brought up a good point as far as it's not necessarily just the size of the company that directly translates into their collaboration with security or their cybersecurity needs, right? So one industry by industry, country by country there are more and more regulations around providing data protection, data privacy and being able for organizations to demonstrate that they have at least tried, right? Using state-of-the-art technology and the state-of-the-art processes and partnerships to protect their user data. You look at, you know, I'm a good example. My uncle is the certified financial advisor financial planner. He's here in Newport Beach, California. We may have a hundred clients and let's say those clients on average have $10 million under management. That's a billion dollars under management for a very small business company. Right, yes. Small company, but boy, imagine how sensitive that data is, the personal data and the financial data for those clients. And, you know, hackers are no longer only targeting the state or large enterprise. Hackers are everywhere and they're looking for the path of least resistance and you look at ransomware attacks are happening on small business because it's easy and if they can make a quick 35,000 or the 50,000 equivalent in Bitcoin, they're going to do that. So you're right, those SMBs might have just as sophisticated as the IT and collaboration security and cyber security and data management needs as larger companies do. Yep, agreed. All right, the final question here, and I know this is always interesting to look at the responses to these questions, but what are your top three pain points as a partner within the Microsoft ecosystem? So it's always good to end it from the Microsoft standpoint on a negative note with people like, come on. No, but I always like asking that kind of three and you get, there's always one or two people that say that it's like, look, there's just one thing and it's whatever that one thing is. But the variety of different, the feedback, it's interesting to look at the trends to some of the responses. But I'd like to know, like with you, relatively new to the Microsoft ecosystem, do you have a top three things that you have a more difficult time where you'd like to see improved? I think Microsoft, like many of the vendors that are out there and many partners have always have opportunities to improve with their go to market, with their programs, with the remuneration and compensation. That's the Microsoft language right there. It's not a problem, it's an opportunity. Yes, they have a lot of opportunities. So let me answer it the other way. And I always have a tongue-in-cheek comment where I say every industry survey, every kind of partner survey in the history of mankind that has asked the partner community what they want and need in their vendor partnerships have yielded the same results. Number one, they want profitability. What does that mean? They want a growth opportunity for the technology and a services opportunity. Number two, they need to protect their reputation. That means they need reliable products and they need support when they need support, right? And then number three, ease of doing business, right? Partners are juggling so many balls and doing so many, they want vendor products, vendor programs, vendor compensation levers to be easy to understand. So that's the lens to which I would look at it. Every company has an opportunity to improve. Microsoft continues to have various opportunities for its various partner bottles that it works with, but is there an opportunity around profitability? Is when Microsoft talking about the total economic opportunity in the services economy, are the products reliable, best in class and great support when they need support from Microsoft and or their distributors or third parties and the number three, ease of doing business. Are there partner programs, the compensation, this specialization, are they easy to understand and easy to follow? Partners are busy, partners are busy, right? Keep it easy, give them something to sell, give them something to service and then be there to support them when necessary so that you can uphold their reputation in front of those end customers. But I think that's a great summary because I think you're right. I mean, the problems that exist in partners, they're not unique to Microsoft, the Microsoft partner ecosystem and they're consistent across there. And it is also an opportunity for partners that can go and figure out how to optimize their relationship with working with Microsoft and partnering with other partners out in the ecosystem. But if you're able to find that so that you can best serve your customers to never say no to deals, to quickly get solutions or get opportunities registered and turn that around and all focused on delivering the right solution in the fastest way to the customer to meet their needs. Happy customer translates up throughout this. But if you can look at that strategically and build that, there is an opportunity for any partner to come in the Microsoft ecosystem and to find success. I mean, at point, here's a company that was built on and for the Microsoft ecosystem. We're getting ready to go public here in days. I think the switch will be flicked here when we cross over. But it just shows that there are opportunities we've seen partners so much growth, so much success. It's the opportunities are there for partners to go and take advantage of. Agreed. There's always gonna be a room for improvement across the board, but usually where you have that kind of movement, there's just so much deal flow going through in the Microsoft ecosystem that you can't help but find some degree of success in there. Now, that's my soapbox speech here for the channel. But well, Jason, really appreciate your time talking today. Thanks again for participating in the tweet jam for everybody that is watching the video out on YouTube. Of course, you can find the blog post to this and other information about participating in the tweet jams out on buckleyplanet.com. And then we're also gonna do a summary article that'll show up on the AvePoint blog. I think sometime in the next week or two, but you could definitely find out more. You can reach out to Jason and myself via LinkedIn and we're both on Twitter as well. So thanks a lot, Jason, for your time and have a great rest of your week. Yeah, thanks. This was fun. I appreciate the opportunity and it was a good catch up afterwards. So thank you.