Channel Sales - Azure SMC at Microsoft

The Global Partner Solutions team mission is to: build and sell intelligent cloud and intelligent edge solutions with partners, empowering people and organizations to achieve more. GPS is a sales organization accountable for the commercial partner business at Microsoft. Building on the GPS mission, the Channel Sales Small Medium Corporate (CS-SMC) role is key to Microsoft's channel management strategy as part of the GPS Organization. You will have a primary focus on understanding where the greatest areas of opportunity exist within your segment, and to then create a plan and execution model with your partners. This is an opportunity that will deepen your Solution Sales (Azure) expertise, hone your collaboration skills and accelerate your career growth. The seniority of the role evidences Microsoft’s deep commitment to building a best-in-class partner ecosystem. This role is flexible in that you can work up to 50% from home.

Responsibilities

The Channel Sales Role SMC - Azure:

• Leads the creation of partner ecosystem connections and builds impactful relationships. Works closely with partner to facilitate solution area sales, gains input and support from Microsoft executive stakeholders, and defines a governance structure to merge and manage lead pipelines. Leverages deep Azure understanding and the competitive landscape to identify and attract partners that can deliver solutions that drive broader customer adoption of Microsoft technologies.
• Leads partner strategy ac Microsoft aspires to help our customers achieve their own digital transformation, leveraging the power of Microsoft Cloud solutions and support offerings. To this end, Microsoft invests in a dedicated Customer Success team that will help Microsoft customers successfully realize their business outcomes.

Azure is the most comprehensive, innovative and flexible cloud platform today and Microsoft is hiring professionals that will drive customer cloud adoption within the most important companies in the market.

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate Data Platform & Advanced Analytics/Artificial Intelligence Cloud Solution Architect to drive high priority customer initiatives on the Microsoft Azure Platform in collaboration with customers and the Microsoft field in Enterprise accounts segment of our business. This is a customer facing role, owning overall technical relationship between customer and Microsoft Data, Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Platform.

You will own the Data Platform & Advanced Analytics technical customer engagements including architectural design sessions, specific implementation projects and/or MVPs. The ideal candidate will have experience in customer-facing roles and success leading deep technical architecture discussions with senior customer executives, Enterprise Architects, IT Management and Developers to drive Data Platform and Advanced Analytics solutions to productions.

Responsibilities

Key responsibilities include:

• Understand customers’ overall data estate, IT and business priorities and success measures to design implementation architectures and solutions.
• Apply technical knowledge to architect solutions that meet business and IT needs, create Data Platform, Data Migration Strategy, Analytics and AI roadmaps, and ensure long term technical viability of new deployments, infusing key analytics technologies where appropriate (e.g. SQL Server, Cosmos DB ,Azure Synapse, Azure ML, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Data Factory, Big Data, Data Lake, Azure Databricks, Power BI, etc.)
• Ensure that solution exhibits high levels of performance, security, scalability, maintainability, appropriate reusability and reliability upon deployment
• Develop deep relationships with key customer IT decision makers and relevant business decision makers, who drive long-term cloud adoption within their company to enable them to be cloud advocates
• Be a Voice of Customer to share insights and best practices, connect with Engineering team to remove key blockers
• Assess the Customers' knowledge of Azure platform and overall cloud readiness to support customers through a structured learning plan and ensure its delivery through partners.
• Collaborate with other Cloud Solution Architects and MS stakeholders in developing complex end-to-end Enterprise solutions on Microsoft Cloud platforms.
• Maintain technical skills and knowledge, keeping up to date with market trends and competitive insights; collaborate and share with the technical community while educate customers on Azure platform
• Be an Azure Platform evangelist with customers, partners and external communities.

Experiences Required - Education, Key Experiences, Knowledge and Skills: Professional Experience. 5+ years of success in consultative/complex technical sales and deployment projects, architecture, design, implementation, and/or support of highly distributed applications required

• Relationship Building. Proven track record of building deep technical relationships with senior IT executives in large or highly strategic accounts. Experience in managing various stakeholder relationships to get consensus on solution/projects. Required
• Good business acumen to quickly understand the customer’s industry and business to have relevant discussions with business decision makers.
• Problem Solving. Ability to solve customer problems through cloud technologies Required
• Collaboration and Communication. Acknowledged for driving decisions collaboratively, resolving conflicts and ensuring follow through with exceptional verbal and written communication skills. Ability to orchestrate, lead, and influence virtual teams, ensuring successful implementation of customer projects. Presentation skills with a high degree of comfort with both large and small audiences (Senior Executives, IT management, Database administrators and Data Scientist) Required

Technical

• Enterprise-scale technical experience with cloud and hybrid infrastructures, architecture designs, database migrations, and technology management. required
• The technical aptitude and experience to learn new technologies and understand relevant cloud trend
• Competitive Landscape: Knowledge of cloud development platforms
• Partners: Understanding of partner ecosystems and the ability to leverage partner solutions to solve customer needs preferred

Breadth of technical experience and knowledge, with depth / Subject Matter Expertise in two or more of the following Data Analytics and AI Platform Cloud solutions required

• RDBMS including OSS (Postgresql, MySQL etc), Azure SQL
• NoSQL Databases including OSS (Maria, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc), Cosmos DB
• Big Data including SQL DW, Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift
• Advanced Analytics including Azure Data Bricks, visualization tools as PowerBI, Tableau
• Data Governance
• Data Engineering, Modeling and Business Intelligence

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineer or related field preferred
• Certification in one or more of the following technologies preferred: Cloud, Database, Big Data, BI, Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

Preferred Experience

• Prior work experience in a Consulting/Architecture position within a software and/or services company such as Amazon, VMware, Google, IBM, Oracle desired
• Prior solution delivery experience on SQL, NoSQL and OSS platforms at scale