By Steven Kellam, Chief Revenue Officer, Structured
Microsoft Ignite 2025 was a masterclass in market signaling. When you’ve got 500,000 partners representing trillions in global commerce, your annual conference, it’s less about product launches and more about a clear statement about survival in the next decade.
Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen’s message was clear: Partners are no longer resellers. They’re AI-powered solution providers. Microsoft’s “Frontier Firms” concept is a brilliant one and will be what is required to compete in this new era.
But the real story wasn’t happening on stage. It was in the Microsoft booth, where I watched partners experience our collaboration with Microsoft firsthand. That’s where strategy becomes reality.
From Skepticism to “How Fast Can I Get This?”
I watched the same pattern repeat throughout the day. A partner from Germany walked up, arms folded, with that “I’ve been promised the world before” look. They nailed the problem immediately: “We don’t want to sound like every other partner.”
That’s been the impossible trade off for years. Local relevance requires customization most partners can’t afford. Scale means generic messaging that makes you invisible.
Then they saw the Partner Marketing Center we, at Structured, built for Microsoft. Hyper personalized messaging in German, created in minutes, on brand, scalable across 130+ languages. Arms unfolded. Questions shifted from “does this work?” to “how fast can we start?”
A larger partner from Seattle saw the integration advantage immediately. Our platform doesn’t force you to abandon your existing stack. Create intelligent content through Structured AI, execute through your HubSpot, Marketo, or Mailchimp instance. Switching costs drop to zero while value multiplies.
In mature markets, interoperability beats feature bloat every time. Partners don’t want another system to learn. They want intelligence that makes their current tools better. When friction disappears like that, markets reorganize fast.
Distribution Sees Their Play
The folks from Ingram Micro, TD SYNNEX, and Arrow recognized something bigger. They serve thousands of small and mid size partners who depend on them for enablement and support. But helping all those partners execute effective demand generation at scale? That’s been close to impossible…unitl now.
The “New” Partner Marketing Center (again, in partnership with Structured) gives distribution a way to enable their entire ecosystem. Small partners get enterprise grade tools. The gap between well resourced partners and everyone else starts closing. That’s ecosystem expansion that compounds.
Microsoft Demonstrates at Scale
Microsoft’s “Customer Zero” approach, where companies deploy tools internally before selling them, makes strategic sense and they’re implementing it with Structured across their own massive partner ecosystem.
When your vendor is also your reference customer at that scale, it changes everything. No more theoretical benefits. No more “imagine if this worked.” Real data, real outcomes, real proof. I’ve seen how this credibility accelerates partner adoption across the board.
The New Partner Designations Matter
Microsoft’s updated AI Cloud Partner Program introduced new badges: “Frontier Partner,” “Frontier Distributor,” specialized designations. These look like marketing certificates. They’re actually market segmentation that creates pricing power.
Structured provides the execution layer that lets partners actually earn these designations and demonstrate expertise with actual campaigns that prove capability. That’s how you escape commoditization.
Agent 365 as a control plane for AI agents shows where this heads. Partners won’t just sell software. They’ll architect and operate intelligent systems for customers. Structured’s approach of combining Generative AI and Agentic AI through multiple specialized agents maps out how that happens.
What I Saw at Ignite
Ignite 2025 made something clear: Static portals are over. Generic content is over. The old channel playbook is over.
When Microsoft selects an AI-first platform that fuses content creation and execution into one system for half a million partners, that’s a signal about who survives. The partners I watched leave that booth energized and recognized the inflection point. They saw what happens when technology finally catches up to what the market has needed for years.
