Partner Blog | Building Frontier Firms: How partner skilling accelerates innovation and growth
For partners, skilling is more than a support function. It’s the economic engine helping you grow, compete, and differentiate your business in the age of AI. New Microsoft research shows that project-ready and workload-aligned training directly accelerates partner success by increasing win rates, improving deal velocity, and unlocking higher margins. Skilling also serves as the foundation for building Frontier Firms, organizations that are defining the next wave of AI-led innovation through IP development, co-creation, and outcome-based solutions. Through the Partner Skilling Hub, Certification Weeks, LevelUp, and regional initiatives, partners are building the expertise needed to lead AI transformation and deliver measurable customer impact. Continue reading herePartner Blog | Transforming customer engagement into growth with Copilot and agentic AI
For Frontier Firms, every customer engagement is an opportunity to drive transformation. Each interaction creates space to unlock innovation, accelerate outcomes, and deliver lasting value. We’re entering an era where intelligence is becoming an on-demand utility. Just as the cloud transformed access to computing power, AI is now embedded into the flow of work. Customers expect insight and action in real time. They want faster results, stronger security, and continuous innovation. Meeting those expectations requires more than people alone; it requires an ecosystem that can scale intelligence and deliver outcomes with speed and precision. Microsoft partners are at the center of that transformation. You are the architect of change, realizing customer ambition with a full stack of technology. Through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, you have access to the technology, skilling, and go-to-market resources that make this transformation achievable. Together, we’re enabling every organization to operate with greater intelligence and agility than ever before. The journey to Frontier transformation AI transformation doesn’t happen in a single project. It’s a sustained journey that moves customers from pilots to full-scale adoption and long-term value. This is what we call always-on selling, where every engagement builds trust, adoption, and expansion. We’ve seen the impact of this approach firsthand at Microsoft. By embedding Copilot into daily workflows, our own Customer Zero experience increased revenue per seller by 9.4 percent and boosted deal closures by 20 percent. Continue reading herePartner Blog | Highlights from the Migrate & Modernize Summit: Accelerating customer transformation through AI
Modernization is one of the biggest technology opportunities of our time. Across industries, organizations are looking to move faster, operate more securely, and scale innovation. But legacy systems, technical debt, and fragmented infrastructure continue to slow progress. IDC reports that more than 37% of application portfolios require modernization today, and that need will remain high for years to come. It’s a challenge that demands deep technical expertise, and it’s your opportunity to lead. As a Microsoft partner, you’re central to enabling customer transformation and shaping what comes next. At the recent Migrate & Modernize Summit, we introduced new tools and programs that combine AI-powered automation with expert-led deployment support. These innovations make it possible to deliver faster outcomes, reduce complexity, and unlock long-term value for your customers. You can register or watch the summit on demand. Modernization is becoming faster, smarter, and more scalable At the summit, we introduced several key updates that support how partners accelerate migration and modernization across workloads and industries. Continue reading herePartner Blog | Microsoft & Oracle: The future of enterprise cloud data for partners
In today’s fast-changing cloud and AI landscape, our partnership with Oracle represents the power of collaboration to drive customer transformation at scale. Microsoft and Oracle share a common goal: to enable organizations to modernize their data estates, accelerate AI innovation, and deliver measurable business outcomes. Oracle Database@Azure brings this vision to life by combining the best of both platforms and putting our partners at the center of that transformation. Announcements from Oracle AI World At Oracle AI World, we introduced a new set of advancements that expand what’s possible for our customers and partners. Azure Accelerate, within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, support now includes Oracle Database@Azure workloads, offering partners funding, credits, and the Cloud Accelerate Factory for zero-cost deployment assistance. This allows partners to move customers to Azure faster, reduce migration risks, and increase delivery speed. Partners will also be able to resell Oracle Database@Azure directly through Microsoft Marketplace, making it easier to package, license, and deploy solutions globally while building new revenue streams. The platform itself also continues to evolve quickly. Oracle Database@Azure now supports Oracle Base Database Service, Exadata Exascale 19c, and Oracle Database 23ai across more than 28+ regions worldwide, enabling a broad multicloud hyperscaler reach. Native Oracle GoldenGate integration with Oracle Database@Azure now connects directly to Microsoft Fabric, making it easier to unify data across systems, reduce latency, and activate AI and analytics at scale. Partners can also use Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry to create and deploy custom agents and low-code AI solutions powered by more than 1,900 models. Security and operations are integrated across Microsoft Defender, Sentinel, and Entra ID, giving customers AI-driven threat detection, real-time monitoring, and unified identity management. Azure Arc integration adds full visibility, policy management, and automation across hybrid and multicloud environments, allowing partners to deliver consistent governance from a single control plane. The partnership between Microsoft and Oracle builds on years of co-engineering, centered on helping customers modernize mission-critical workloads without compromise. Together, we’ve brought Oracle Exadata infrastructure directly into Azure datacenters, unifying Microsoft and Oracle ecosystems through shared networking, identity, and governance. The result is a seamless cloud experience that combines Azure’s scalability and security with Oracle’s trusted database performance. Continue reading here!Azure Kubernetes Service Automatic: Fast and frictionless Kubernetes for all
AKS Automatic simplifies Kubernetes by offering a fully managed, opinionated experience that abstracts away from infrastructure complexity, while keeping the full power of Kubernetes at your fingertips. Learn how production-ready clusters and automated infrastructure operations can accelerate your time to delivery and simplify operations for you! Check out the announcement blog here!Partner Blog | Azure updates for partners: October 2025
AI is reshaping industries—and fast. Partners like you are at the center of this transformation, helping customers modernize, innovate, and scale with confidence. To help you stay ahead, we’re launching the Azure Partner Update, a recurring update designed to keep you up to date with the latest developments and accelerate your business. Expect curated insights, bold perspectives, and the latest tools to help you lead with cloud solutions and AI and build what’s next. Spotlight One of this month’s top updates is the reimagined Microsoft Marketplace, now a trusted central source for cloud solutions, AI apps and agents for customers, and a scale engine for partners. Marketplace continues to evolve as an extension of the Microsoft Cloud, connecting your innovations directly to customers where they work. The new AI Apps and Agents category empowers customers to discover AI solutions that integrate seamlessly with Microsoft products, creating new paths for partners to reach buyers and scale impact. We also announced several technical updates designed to make cloud deployments faster and more flexible: Broadcom’s VMware licensing changes now enable Azure VMware Solution (AVS) customers to bring their own VMware Cloud Foundations license, giving them more control and potential cost savings. Azure AI Foundry continues to advance, and now features GPT-5-Codex, gpt-realtime, and new browser automation tools that make it easier to build and deploy intelligent applications. AKS Automatic has reached general availability, simplifying Kubernetes management and reducing time to production. Oracle Database@Azure now spans 23 regions, expanding global reach and resilience for your customers. New integrations across data sources, CI/CD capabilities, and agent automation within Fabric were introduced at FabCon. Continue reading herePartner Blog | What's new for Microsoft partners: October 2025 edition
Your voice is instrumental in shaping the future of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. In our latest quarterly update, we share key enhancements driven by partner feedback, along with expert insights, new skilling resources, and the latest benefits to help you grow, innovate, and lead in the AI era. Continue reading here!Microsoft Blog | Microsoft Ignite: Shaping what’s next with our partner ecosystem
In just a few weeks, we’ll gather at Microsoft Ignite 2025 to focus on four pillars that define successful AI transformation: improving employee experiences, reinventing business processes, deepening customer connections, and bending the curve of industry innovation. Across every sector, organizations are asking how to realize these outcomes with speed and confidence, and Microsoft partners are the ones who can make it possible. Join us in San Francisco or online November 18–21 to see the latest innovations, connect with Microsoft leaders and peers, and learn how to deliver even greater impact for your customers. Registration is open, and there is still time to reserve your spot today. What to expect at Microsoft Ignite Learn how to unlock the most value from your Microsoft partnership through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. Continue reading herePartner Blog | Strengthening security and customer trust with technical and API changes
Staying ahead of evolving security standards and compliance requirements is about more than just protecting your organization. It also positions you to deepen customer trust, generate new business opportunities, and accelerate your ability to deliver high-value solutions, including AI transformation. To support that, we are introducing updates to Partner Center and across APIs your teams use every day. These changes are designed to keep you ahead of regulatory and technical requirements, reduce risk, and avoid disruption to your operations and customer transactions. We are also extending some effective dates for these updates to ensure you have the time to prepare. With these enhanced security standards in place, you can lead with confidence on the AI frontier and give your teams the tools they need to be prepared, protected, and positioned to stand out. Recent improvements to keep your business secure, compliant—and growing Over the last few months, we’ve released updates to strengthen security and streamline processes: Continue reading herePartner Blog | Becoming Frontier: Insights, resources, and partner opportunities
Across industries and job functions, Microsoft partners aren’t just transforming the way organizations work today, they're shaping what’s next. Together, we are powering the rise of the Frontier Firm. Structured around on-demand intelligence and powered by hybrid teams of humans and agents, Frontier Firms understand the value of pairing irreplaceable human insight with the power of AI. They embed agents into their workflows, not just as assistants but as essential teammates able to execute tasks under human direction. That’s how they move faster, operate with greater agility, and generate value in ways that traditional methods can’t match. Our 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries and analyzed trillions of productivity signals. The data shows that this shift—moving from experimenting with AI to building entire businesses around it—is already underway. 82% of leaders say it’s a pivotal moment to rethink strategy and operations. And in the next two to five years, we expect every organization will begin its journey to becoming a Frontier Firm. Microsoft partners are central to this opportunity, enabling customers to transform, modernize how they work, and activate the potential of AI. Continue reading here
