Surface Announces New Plans to Expand Business Channel
Businesses are rapidly adopting Surface Pro 3 and we’re seeing great interest and momentum with Surface 3 and Surface Hub. We see this recognition of the unique combination of productivity and style across industries including healthcare businesses, banks and financial companies, retailers, airlines, manufacturers, schools, governments and more. Windows 10 will only increase this momentum.
We’ve had a somewhat limited business channel for Surface and we’ve heard from a lot of customers that they’d like to see more partners offering Surface. So we’re taking our next big step to serving our business customers.
Surface Channel Expansion
We are expanding our channel and will go from having a few hundred partners selling and servicing Surface to a few thousand globally in the coming months.
So if you’re a reseller or systems integrator with strong hardware capabilities, we’re looking forward to welcoming you and we’re excited to see how Surface’s presence in the commercial space will continue to grow – with your help.
Interested partners should go to the Microsoft Partner Network Device Partner Portal and contact an Authorized Device Distributor to learn how to become a partner.
This expansion of our partnerships is directly related to our optimism for much broader success that will come with the release of Windows 10.
New Opportunities with Surface Hub
Surface Hub is an exciting addition to our Surface line-up, adding the best group productivity and collaboration device to the most productive personal devices in the world.
As we announced last month, we’re working closely with a set of strategic partners – from distributors to resellers to system integrators and AV specialists – to make it easy for businesses to deploy Surface Hub into their organizations in a way that naturally integrates into their existing rooms and IT environments. And we’re continuing to bring on new partners to further strengthen and scale our channel.
We started taking pre-orders on July 1 and we’ve seen strong demand out of the gate. Based on the early interest we see, we’re tuning our manufacturing process to prepare for production at broader scale. To do this, we are adjusting our product roll-out schedule to ensure we deliver a great customer experience and set our partners up for success. We will not start shipping on September 1 now. We’ll have more details on our updated shipment schedule in early August. In the meantime, we will continue to take pre-orders.
Microsoft authorized partners with strength and expertise in the areas of Audiovisual (A/V) and Unified Communications (UC) will be able to extend and enhance their core offerings with Surface Hub, capitalizing on new opportunities with new and existing customers. We encourage interested partners to visit the Microsoft Partner Network to learn more and determine how Surface Hub may fit into their plans.
We couldn’t be more excited about our Surface roadmap and opportunity to help people and businesses be more productive.
Thank you,
Brian Hall
General Manager – Microsoft Surface