Microsoft Launches Customer Engagement Alliance
Microsoft has launched the Microsoft Customer Engagement Alliance, a strategic collaboration between Microsoft and Infusion, Perficient, Quisitive, Rightpoint, and SapientRazorfish, five Microsoft National Gold Partner digital consulting firms. The goals of the Customer Engagement Alliance are to accelerate digitally-enhanced business for customers through best-practice sharing, thought leadership, and solution innovation built on Microsoft's cloud platform.
The alliance diversifies Microsoft's partner ecosystem beyond traditional IT services to now support marketing leaders.
"Historically, Microsoft has centered its partner focus on solution providers that offer world-class IT solutions," said Eric Loper, Microsoft's director of partner sales for national solution providers, in a statement. "Marketing technology is becoming a higher priority, and bringing these five expert firms to the alliance is the first step in diversifying the ecosystem, while providing our joint customers with best-in-class solutions and strategies that truly enable organizations to meet the modern digital engagement needs of customers."
"There are more than 5,000 marketing technology products that exist on the market today, all with similar features and functions to parse through, which is near impossible at the speed and movement CMOs need," said Chris Crombie, senior vice president of business development and alliances at Rightpoint, in a statement. "Working with the Microsoft Customer Engagement Alliance, we look forward to honing solutions that offer CMOs the agility they need today and in the future."
"CMOs will be responsible for an increasing number of IT decisions. Unifying digital engagement, data, and modern cloud technology enables true, long-term digital transformation and competitive advantage, but connecting and optimizing those technologies both at the customer engagement level and on the back-end is often difficult for organizations to execute," said Will Clevenger, chief strategy officer at Quisitive, in a statement. "Joining the Microsoft Customer Engagement Alliance gives us a strong platform to share best practices and develop new ways to support the CMO of the future. We look forward to collaborating with other digital leaders in our field and working closely with Microsoft to streamline the process."