Boarding the Microsoft journey to the cloud: Our OCP and co-sell story so far

As a small ISV in relation to the enormous Microsoft environment, my company's last six to nine months have been interesting, to say the least.

Lasernet has been working within ERPs for more than 10 years - particularly within the Microsoft community. However, with the introduction of Dynamics AX 2012 and now Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations things have started to move even faster, which has left me feeling as though I want to try and do more, too.

So, when Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, launched the newest Microsoft vision in the summer of 2017, with an increased focus on cloud and partners, it fit in perfectly with the Lasernet way of thinking, as a partners first business.

For many years Lasernet has tried to get closer to Microsoft, but we've always been rated behind the large system integrators, so it was never really a success.

With the Microsoft keynote from Inspire 2017 in the back of our minds, we decided to try yet again, and since then things have more or less exploded in the way we are working together with Microsoft.

From the first meeting in September 2017, it seemed like all of the participants (including Microsoft's own) were a little clueless about what was next.

Q4 2017 was used to position our solution, and ourselves, in the Microsoft system; getting through the onboarding process, and becoming a Co-Sell ready ISV, as well as a Gold Cloud Partner as of January 2018