Going to Market with Microsoft

To compensate for less-frequent product launches and a focus on integrated solutions rather than specific products, Microsoft now organizes its marketing efforts around annual “go-to-market” (GTM) campaigns. GTMs focus Microsoft and its partners on strategic challenges and provide consistent marketing approaches for most of its business products. Partners can align their products or services with Microsoft’s GTMs to benefit from these campaigns.

The GTM Solution

A GTM is how Microsoft addresses a particular “customer pain” in a given year, although in some cases the pain addressed is also Microsoft’s. For example, the Operational Efficiency and Productivity (OE&P) GTM for 2005 is aimed primarily at corporate IT professionals, and addresses the high proportion of IT resources (approximately 70%) spent simply maintaining current systems. The objective of this GTM is to give IT departments more time to implement new systems or business processes. But one of the campaign’s other major goals is the migration of millions of remaining Windows NT 4.0 and Windows Server 2000 servers to Windows Server 2003. Meeting this goal is critical for Microsoft to create more demand for other server products, such as Exchange 2003, and compete with Linux.