Powers Unfiltered

I went to New York again this week to see customers, prospects, partners, and so on.  But it pays to keep your plans flexible — because while I was there, a friend got me an invitation to a reception at Club 21 on Tuesday evening with a bunch of financial services executives and Steve Ballmer.  Earlier in the day Steve had headlined a private lunchtime briefing for a dozen or two of these same execs, describing Microsoft’s growing commitment to high-performance computing (HPC). 

I had a chance to talk with Steve for a couple of minutes.   Apparently, the briefing went well, and Digipede was mentioned favorably by speakers from Microsoft and a mutual financial services customer.  (It didn’t hurt that I had spent weeks prior to this event supporting the other speakers with material, customer references, follow-up demonstrations, etc.  See my philosophy of events, summarized in this earlier post.)  

I was not invited to the lunchtime briefing (no partners were, and only a handful of Microsoft staff), but there are definitely benefits to being in the right place at the right time.  At the reception, Microsoft account execs had heard all about the briefing, and were all over me. 

Probably shouldn’t say any more (so far, all this could be figured out by hanging around the midtown Sheraton lobby at the right time), but it was a fun evening. 

I was encouraged by Steve’s continued positive attitude about the importance of partners in this area.  Indeed, the continued positive attitude at Microsoft toward partners overall is most heartening.  There’s still plenty of room for improvement — but the commitment to that improvement is evident, even at the highest level.