Strategic ISV partner
Co-marketing a flagship AI demo with a strategic ISV partner
- Azure OpenAI
- Vector search
- Azure AI Search
- Microsoft Entra ID
Challenge
A strategic ISV partner needed a credible joint go-to-market story for the Microsoft + ISV motion in APAC and EMEA. The narrative existed in slideware but had never been demonstrated live at scale.
Approach
Co-built and co-presented a multi-screen mainstage demo that walked customers from a real business problem through the joint architecture (Azure OpenAI, vector search, identity) to a working result on stage. Iterated the demo on three continents over six months; reused the assets in partner enablement and field workshops.
Result
Reached an 800-plus-customer mainstage audience with the joint go-to-market narrative and turned the demo into a repeatable train-the-trainer asset adopted by several global SI and ISV partners.
800+ customers reached via mainstage; meaningful partner pipeline; multi-region adoption
Why this matters
Partner-marketing demos usually fall into one of two failure modes: either they’re polished slideware that no engineer trusts, or they’re working prototypes that no executive can follow. The win here was holding the line on both at once; the demo had to be technically honest enough that field architects would adopt it as a reference, and narratively clear enough that line-of-business executives would remember it the week after.
What I’d do differently
Bake in evaluation metrics from day one. The first version of the demo prioritized “is this impressive” over “is this measurable.” By the third version we had grounded latency, retrieval-quality and cost numbers we could point at on stage; that was the version that unlocked the train-the-trainer reuse.