After closing out a strong second quarter, July has been an exciting month here at AvePoint. I recently came back from attending Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington, DC. It was a very busy week for us – full of major announcements and a testament to our continued close relationship with Microsoft as it pivots to a cloud-first, mobile-first mentality across its entire business. We presented five sessions at WPC this year, most of which were with Microsoft sharing our cloud strategy.
It was evident listening to the executive keynotes and also speaking directly with Microsoft that for the first time in recent memory, we are really seeing a true “challenger” mentality from Microsoft. It’s clear that product companies like AvePoint that can execute business solutions will be key partners for Microsoft moving forward.
The week of WPC we had a couple of major announcements that showed further evidence of our execution and innovation in delivering these types of solutions and experiences for organizations worldwide using Microsoft products and technologies in the cloud or on-premises.
- Our partnership with Rackspace, in which Rackspace’s SharePoint hosting customers will be able to use AvePoint’s data protection, content management, and reporting solutions, offers organizations the most secure and reliable managed hosted SharePoint experience available today.
- The general availability of DocAve Cloud Connect, our Box and SharePoint integration solution, marks another step in AvePoint’s journey to stitch together a collaboration story by connecting other collaboration platforms and repositories to Microsoft products and technologies in order to break down data silos that exist in many organizations today.
At WPC we were also honored by Microsoft for our first-ever Partner of the Year Award for Public Sector: Public Safety & National Security, which was in large part to the work we’ve already done in terms of data governance and compliance in the public sector space. With Microsoft’s emphasis on its global CityNext initiative this year – which empowers people to make cities safer, smarter, healthier, and modern – it opens up a tremendous opportunity for us to continue implementing business solutions that bring transparency, engagement, and collaboration back to the people. Stay tuned for more news from us on our citizen connect, project transparency, mobile workforce, town hall portal, document and grant management solutions that we believe will help government agencies of all sizes better serve their citizens.
The last major takeaway from WPC for me was that in our quickly evolving business landscape, moving boxes and dropping customer .NET code is no longer good enough for businesses: They want the Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) experience, the ease of use that comes with cloud and mobile. At the same time, they continue to demand enterprise-grade data governance and security of their data. Microsoft adding security as another vital trend along with big data, cloud, mobility, and social collaboration points squarely to this demand.
All of this which aligns well with our evolution into enabling enterprise collaboration for how you work, where you work. I encourage you to visit our website, as we’ve just rebuilt it from scratch to tell a more cohesive, simple story across our vast solution set on how we increase productivity, reduce risk, and lower cost. After hearing the future of Microsoft at WPC, I’m more bullish than ever on the fact that we are uniquely positioned to help lead the charge into the disruptive technology trends that are shaping the next generation of the workplace.
