It’s been a good month for Microsoft. Last week, the company announced its strong Q4 earnings, fueled by growth of 102% in Azure revenue and Azure compute usage more than doubling. In the previous week, the company held its 14th Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, welcoming a sellout crowd of more than 15,000 attendees including martinwolf‘s Marty Wolf and Matthew Putzulu.

Yesterday, Marty published some key takeaways from the event, especially in light of the company’s strong cloud-centric earnings report.

Microsoft’s cloud prioritization will be challenging for services partners who have built successful business models centered around “on-prem” contracts, or for those whose customer verticals remain slow to embrace cloud-centric services. It’s also proving disruptive for supply chain and distribution partners, who are navigating a combination of eroding margins, reduced incentives and increased competition.

But above all it creates the conditions for significant value creation. The partners we met with at the conference were bullish on the state of the Microsoft ecosystem, and there are multiple established companies both public and private with the mandates and capital to make meaningful acquisitions. Growth is key to success, and the cloud transition has created significant demand for partners of all sizes.

To read Marty’s complete analysis, and to share your thoughts, click here.