New Partner Opportunities

Microsoft Ignite 2024 has proven to be a groundbreaking event, bringing a lot of innovations and opportunities for partners in the AI and cloud sector. For Arrow partners and their end customers, this year’s Ignite was particularly significant as it highlighted several key announcements that will shape the future of our collaborative efforts.

This event emphasized building an agentic world with personal, organizational, business processes, and cross-organizational agents, all designed to enhance productivity. The other important topic of Microsoft Ignite 2024 is Security.

One of the most exciting announcements was related to Copilot, Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant. Copilot has been positioned as the user interface for AI, with several new features unveiled:

•    Copilot Actions: Private preview of features that include the automation of everyday tasks with simple, fill-in-the-blank prompts that you can set and forget.
•    Microsoft 365 Agents: With general availability and preview versions, these agents will revolutionize how businesses manage workflows and data. It will provide real-time language interpretation in Microsoft Teams meetings (Interpreter, preview early 2025) and automate employee self-service.
•    Agents in SharePoint: Generally available now, allowing for seamless integration and enhanced functionality.
•    New Monthly Billing Option: Microsoft has introduced a new monthly billing option for annual subscriptions of Microsoft 365 Copilot and related services. This option is priced 5% higher than the annual billing plans, aligning billing structures across various platforms.
•    Copilot Advanced Specialization: coming June 2025

At Microsoft Ignite 2024, Azure introduced key updates focusing on AI integration, new billing models, and unified data platforms to empower users in the cloud.

•    Azure AI Foundry: a secure platform that helps developers build, test, and deploy AI applications efficiently. It supports the entire AI development lifecycle and integrates with tools like GitHub and Visual Studio.
•    Within Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Agent Service enhances the capabilities of Azure AI Foundry by enabling the creation and management of autonomous AI agents.
•    Copilot Studio is transitioning to a pay-as-you-go model on Azure. This new billing structure offers greater flexibility and scalability for users, allowing them to optimize costs based on usage and adapt to their evolving needs.
•    Fabric Databases including now SQL Server 2025: bring together both transactional and analytical workloads, creating a truly unified data platform.
•    Designed to bring Azure's capabilities closer to customers by providing localized cloud services, Azure Local ensures that data and applications are hosted in local data centers.
•    Windows Server 2025 and SQL Server 2025: General availability and preview versions respectively, bringing enhanced performance and security features.
•    Windows server management now enabled by Azure Arc
•    SMB Path for Azure Designation is announced for February 2025.

•    Secure Future Initiatives (SFI): security is top priority for Microsoft, they are expanding the scope of SFI by ensuring that cybersecurity approach remains robust and adaptive to the evolving threat landscape.
•    SMB Path for Security Designations: coming February 2025.

Arrow has enhanced its AI-infused ArrowSphere Cloud platform, allowing channel partners to create custom AI assistants that tap their own data, workflows, content, and vendor-specific data to deliver efficiency, cost reductions, and faster market entry.

ArrowSphere AI, introduced at Microsoft Ignite 2024 is supporting hundreds of ready-to-use cases and prompts, designed to fast-track customization and boost channel partner go-to-market strategies. AI assistants can be tailored to support the sales lifecycle, from marketing and sales enablement to business support and catalogs. It uses partner data sources and those of their vendors to enhance support for their end customers.

To learn more about ArrowSphere AI, please watch the recording of this Ignite session.