Nimble Highlights from #MSInspire 2019

Our Nimble team has just returned from attending Inspire 2019, the Microsoft Partner conference that offers community members more opportunities than ever before to network and cultivate relationships with the people who can have a significant impact on their success. 

It was a tremendously productive conference; we are beyond excited about the new friendships and partnerships we made over the week and also for the chance to connect with our Microsoft family. 

Here are a few highlights from the conference: 

Together We Are More

Gavriella Schuster, Corporate VP One Commercial Partner,  kicked off her session with something that has been very much talked about in the Microsoft community: their recent announcement to make changes to the Internal Use Rights (IUR) and their plan to eliminate them by July 2020.  

gavriella schuster

“I’m fortunate to work for a company where our culture is based on listening, learning, and a growth mindset.” She continued to say that the response from the Microsoft ecosystem was overwhelmingly negative. “We clearly underestimated the value of those benefits and the impact that it would have on you and your business. Your partnership means more to us than anything.” 

She explains that when she heard the partner community’s response, there really was no other way than for Microsoft to walk back on the change. “We are going to keep the FY19 competencies and internal use rights just as they are. And you have my commitment that I will continue—we will continue to listen, and to learn. Though we may stumble, we will grow together and we will celebrate our wins together.”

Watch the entire Microsoft Inspire 2019 Corenote with Gavriella Schuster and Judson Althoff below:

Jon Ferrara + Eamon Moore Discuss Why Nimble Bridges the Dynamics Gap 

The Microsoft partner ecosystem has opportunities throughout the world to drive market-leading innovation, expand business opportunities, and increase deal size. 

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara and Hikari CEO Eamon Moore discussed how Nimble built a global presence through leveraging the Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 channel ecosystem in their keynote presentation

jon ferrara eamon moore

Nimble is unique in that it is the first CRM that automatically builds itself from your company’s siloed contacts and works with you everywhere you engage: inside Office 365 & Outlook desktop, Outlook Mobile, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics CRM. We build your CRM for you by connecting your companies Office 365 contacts, emails, and calendars into a unified team relationship manager enriched with the business insights you need to effectively engage.

Nimble helps make Office/Microsoft 365 sticky and is a gateway to PowerBI, Flow, PowerApps, Azure, and Dynamics. Integrations with Common Data Services, Azure, and Power BI help Nimble deliver detailed reports and visualization, enabling teams to keep their finger on the pulse of their business engagements. 

jon ferrara

Nimble Now Available Globally Through Microsoft’s New Commercial Marketplace

As the simple, smart CRM for Office 365 teams, we’re excited to announce that Nimble is now available to Microsoft’s billions of customers and hundreds of thousands of resellers through their new Commercial Marketplace. Microsoft’s Commercial Marketplace makes it easier for customers to discover, try, and buy cloud-based software and services from its global partners or directly from Microsoft. 

microsoft commercial marketplace

One of Nimble’s key benefits of being a Microsoft Commercial Marketplace pilot partner is the significant global reseller foundation and momentum already created. Nimble has signed over twenty of Microsoft’s top distribution partners and on-boarded over 1,000 Microsoft CSP partners to bundle Nimble as the Simple CRM for Office 365. 

“Last year I told you that you want to be in the Marketplace,” explains Gavriella Schuster. “Many of you heeded my advice. Now, we have over 12,000 applications and services in the marketplace. We are delivering over 350,000 leads every single month on those solutions out to you. And we’re doing about $90 million a month in the Azure Marketplace, which is really enabling services. This year I’m going to say, that not only do you want to be listed in Marketplace, but you actually want to have a transactive offer. That enables us to activate three additional channels to market for you.”

Additional Microsoft Innovation Priorities 

“All of our solution areas will get better in FY20,” says Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Business at Microsoft. “The innovation that we’re bringing forward is simply fantastic. You’re going to see more collaborative capabilities in Teams. AI capabilities enriched in Teams. Differentiation by industry. Investments in security, in compliance. The true richness in the modern workplace. Our business applications will have AI out of the box. Mixed-reality capabilities, open data, common data models for the industry to innovate on top of and unlock new business solutions at scale.

“In apps and [infrastructure], we’re going to invest in IoT, we’re going to invest in the hybrid capabilities. DevOps has really got to be, for us, something that we all work on together because it is really what unlocks this notion of democratizing digital and empowering developers. GitHub is a first-class citizen for us here at Microsoft. And of course, in data and AI, you’re going to see some just fantastic things. We’re going to bring you limitless data, unlimited analytics. HoloLens 2 will come to market, mixed-reality services will be open and available for you to innovate on top of … Our AI services will become richer and more powerful so that you can bring the future forward and enrich the work that people do.”

Office 365 & Teams

“How many of you remember the explosive growth of SharePoint about a decade ago? Teams is already on a faster trajectory than that,” notes Schuster. “You are able to bring the entire business process and create a whole new user experience [with Teams]. You can bring all the business applications to the forefront of that user experience in one single shared workspace.”

Azure Migration

“You know that we estimate about 60 percent of our server installed base is still on Windows Server and SQL Server 2008,” said Schuster. “That’s 24 million instances. That is a $50 billion market opportunity that you should be going after right now, this year. Because those customers are vulnerable and exposed. They are on server technology from 2008 … You run the risk of breaking trust with your customers if you leave them on that server technology. Because you leave them unsupported. And you know you could easily migrate those VMs into Azure and remove that vulnerability for them. And many of you are already doing a great job. 

“That Windows Server / SQL Server conversation really is a catalyst for a whole new set of services and book of business with that customer. Once you’re in, you’re in. And that earns you a way into the real conversation that you want to have. Because every single one of us knows that just moving legacy workloads into the cloud is not really what the cloud is all about. What the cloud is all about—where you get the power of the cloud—is when you can drive digital transformation.

“You have to earn your way into that conversation. We have barely scratched the surface there. Because if you take all of the work that we’ve all done, that every cloud service vendor has done over the last few years, we are still only 5 percent of that total addressable market. And that market is poised for explosive growth. And we want to help you take advantage of it.

Nimble recently migrated its market-leading SaaS CRM from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Azure.

The migration enables Nimble to tap into Microsoft’s world-class Azure platform and partner ecosystem to scale. With Microsoft as a global reseller, and promoting it as the simple CRM for Office 365, Nimble is able to help even larger teams build better relationships.

jon ferrara

Azure Lighthouse

“We’re investing in you, with a new service that we call Azure Lighthouse,” begins Shuster. “Azure Lighthouse builds partners in by design into Azure, by enabling multi-customer, multi-tenant management, at scale in a secure environment with automation. So that Azure becomes your best platform to deliver those managed services to your customers. 

“We’re going to continue to invest in that service for you. And once you unlock cloud migrations, you unleash the customer’s data. And data is the currency of the cloud. Then you have the opportunity to start reasoning over that data, to build intelligent design with AI and analytics, and help customer to re-look at their whole business and think about it in a totally different way, and think about their business decisions completely differently. And that moves you from being a strategic supplier to a strategic advisor. And I know that that is a place that we all want to be.”

Cheers to another successful year at Microsoft Inspire! We can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store.

How to Get Started

If you do not have a Nimble account yet, we invite you to try it for free for 14 days.

Stay tuned for more product announcements as we evolve Nimble into the best CRM for Office 365 and G Suite teams.

You can also learn more about our 2019 Roadmap here.