PC Retail

While some may dismiss sites such as Facebook and Myspace as fads of questionable long term interest, the modern equivalent of the laughably un-fun CB radio, or perhaps, a tool for raising the pulses of middle managers – no-one can deny the explosive popularity of the social networking revolution.

Essentially the model allows quick, easy interaction between large groups of people for any purpose they fancy. While there are millions of people in the UK who have decided the best use of this technology is to send a 'gift' in the shape of a cake icon to their tenuous list of friends, businesses have identified a trend that could be put to use in a much more tangible and productive way.

Leading the charge for internet based business-to-business networking is Microsoft, with its Partner Network and Pinpoint. Both of initiatives are designed to help businesses make more money out of selling products through communicating with buyers and fellow resellers/retailers alike. And there's not a 'which Thunderbird puppet are you?' application in sight.

"The Microsoft Partner Network has been in pilot for six months now – there are over 1,500 partners now signed up," says Clare Barclay, director of partner programmes and strategies at Microsoft UK. "The feedback I've had from partners recently is that increasingly they are getting more and more complex needs and they are getting more and more complex requests.

"So their ability to team up with other partners so that they can offer a complete solution for their customers has become more and more important. There is a statistic that says partners who collaborate with other partners are more successful and profitable.

"One of the things we wanted to do by formalising the Microsoft partner network was to find a way to help partners to facilitate that relationship. You can do this at events like the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference once a year, where there's lots of partner-to-partner networking.

"But once they're away they need a service which is very easy for them to find a community on a specific subject, connect with a partner and then they can do some business with each other. We think it will be an important matter for our channel going forward."

And it's not just communications between partners that Microsoft is driving. Microsoft Pinpoint will give customers the ability to network with and qualitatively rate the selling of products.

"The other major announcement from Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston was about Microsoft Pinpoint," continues Barclay. "In the UK that's going to complement our work with the Partner Network.

"Imagine a market place for partner-to-partner connections or partnerto- customer connections, it will have the ability to rate partners, kind of like an eBay or Amazon style function where you can say: 'that company wasn't very good'.

"We will continue to build the community – taking Microsoft Partner Network as an example, we really want to make sure customers are able to reach out to our partners and find the right ones to serve them properly and that's the idea of Pinpoint. We'll will be rolling that out in the UK within the next three to four months."

As well as incorporating the changing way people are communicating with each other into its business plan, Microsoft is reflecting the way shopping habits are evolving by offering more ways to sell its products as a service. While retailers can no longer ignore the fact that some customers simply prefer to buy products online these days, Microsoft has responded to the trend by boosting the ability of its partners to sell via subscriptionbased models.

"One of the things that's changing and evolving quite rapidly since the internet has become more prolific is that customers are looking to consume software in quite a different way," says Barclay.

"Our traditional software, whether that's packaged or licensed software, is currently growing somewhere between six and twelve per cent, yet the appetite for customers to buy online services – software through a subscription – is growing more rapidly than that. At the moment Gartner is predicting that by 2011 about 25 per cent of new business software will be delivered as a service.

"So for our channel, and for Microsoft, we have to make sure we can respond to that and make sure we can deliver software in new ways. So the announcements that we made at Housten were really about how we can enable choice for our customers; if they want it on premise via traditional means then our customers are able to serve them.

"Equally if they want a subscriptions service where they pay on a monthly basis then partners will be able to do that also."

Not every company will have the resources to throw at such a project, however the move could well point in the direction many other firms will be looking to go.

As well as individual company led resources such as The Microsoft Network, perhaps through some form of unified portal created through cooperation between firms in the IT sector the true fruition of the social networking model could be utilised to help retailers and resellers in a changing market.

For now though, Microsoft's efforts are a shining example of how internet inventions can help the channel adapt to a changing sector and an ever changing marketplace.