The road to becoming a global Microsoft partner of the year 2021

Every journey starts with a single step or action. For Mobile Mentor this was before I joined and by our founder Denis O'Shea over a cup of coffee in Auckland with a person who wanted to get more from her new smartphone. The problem statement was a simple one. If someone could just sit with me for an hour and show me what to do... Mobile Mentor was born. One by one we met with people in their boardroom, on their lunch break at the park or even at their home after hours to get them m-powered to do more with their smartphone (putting an M in front of words was a cool thing to do 15 years ago as mobility was gaining traction)

Pop quiz. What is the device pictured? Did you own one, did you get the most out of it and did you get a mentoring session from us to get m-powered?

Chapter 2: After ramping up the one by one Mobile Mentoring services over a few years a young upstart called Research In Motion (RIM) turned up to the party with a new smartphone called the Blackberry. The genius (apart from the keyboard) was actually under the hood, offering the first over the air (OTA) configuration tool. With this, suddenly we did not need to visit everyone one at a time. Configuring 1,000 or more smartphones at a time became the new normal as government and enterprise customers all over the world adopted smartphones on mass. Mobile Mentor V2 was born.

Did you own a Blackberry? Which one was your fav? Despite the best efforts of Dean Forde, I never really spent any time on one as I was busying playing around with early versions of Windows Mobile. Did I miss something?

Chapter 3: Just a few short years later it was time for the late Steve Jobs to change the world with the introduction of the iPhone. Although a very unfriendly business device at launch, this did not deter a wave of young start-ups such as MobileIron, AirWatch and Zenprise to name just a few from diving in head first into the world of over the air device management.  We will call this era Mobile Mentor V2.5 as we expanded beyond Blackberry to iPhone and later Android management.

Pop quiz: What was the email service the iPhone launched with and demo’d on stage. 

... How small does that iPhone look now...

Chapter 4: Brings us to our recent times and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) maturity as acquisitions started coming thick and fast with VMware, Citrix, IBM all getting in on the OTA device management action while Microsoft quietly continued to build out capability with Intune in house rather than joining into the acquisition party that was raging on. 

About 4 years ago we started to field an increase in requests from our customer base around Intune as an alternative.  After a lot of gap analysis work with customers we started to see the functionality gap closing and Intune as something we needed to look deeper into. It was at this point we put together our Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and posed the question of what Mobile Mentor v3.0 was going to be and how Microsoft fits into the picture.  This included how we would manage a desktop OS such as Windows 10 like a smartphone.

Like the opening sentence of this article every journey started with a step or action and in this case we picked a goal of becoming the Microsoft global partner of the year in 2022 and to be on stage in Las Vegas at Inspire.  Our first stop was to invest heavily in becoming a Microsoft Gold partner.  This was not an easy process and is not unlike trying to change an engine out on a plane while flying. Trying to manage engineering time between paid work and training/certification work is not an easy task. We got there and are very proud of the effort the team put in to get us there. 

With Gold status achieved the next step was to understand the Microsoft machine more and more including how to become an Elite partner for endpoint management and how the annual award process works. Picking New Zealand as the best place to start we set out to become a finalist in the partner awards in 2020. A goal we achieved. The next step was to do this on the global stage and then finally to win on the global stage. As it turned out we hit our mark a year early being awarded Microsoft Global Partner of the year 2021 for Modern Endpoint Management.  

This was not luck, it was because of our focus into a category that we have invested nearly 2 decades into understanding deeply, endpoint management.  Remember the first 90% of any IT project is really quite straight forward. It is just the last 90% that is hard. :)

This is my story of how we (Mobile Mentor) became the 2021 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Modern Endpoint Management.   The management tools have changed, the OS's have changed (and multiplied) and even the names have changed, but the outcomes have not. Empower your employees to do more with what you have. If you are not managing all your devices from the cloud in 2021 you are definitely missing out.