Cyril Belikoff at Ultimate Partner LIVE in Redmond, WA

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Is your business ready for 2026?

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast.

I’m excited to bring you even more from the Ultimate Guide to Partnering®—and this one’s straight from the main stage at Ultimate Partner LIVE at Microsoft’s Conference Center in Redmond.

If you haven’t been in the room yet, these events are something special. The energy, the insights, the access—it’s where strategy meets execution, and the partner community comes alive.

In this episode, we feature a powerful session with Cyril Belikoff, Microsoft’s new leader for Marketplace, who joined us to share his bold vision for the future.

Cyril dives into:

• The “lightbulb moment” around AI and why it changes everything


• How Microsoft is mainstreaming the Marketplace as a core GTM motion


• What partners need to know about incentives, MCAPS priorities, and the rise of multi-party offers


• And how the shift to AI and ecosystem selling is redefining what success looks like in this era

We’re curating the very best of these moments—fireside chats, expert panels, and executive insights—so you can stay ahead of the curve and fully aligned to where Microsoft and the industry are heading.

And this is just the beginning.
More sessions. More voices. More of what you need to know.

If you’re not yet part of the UPX Community, now’s the time to join us. Access exclusive content, events, and strategies that keep you in front of what’s next.

Thanks for being on this journey with us.
— Vince

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Key Takeaways:

• AI adoption is creating exponential opportunities for partners, with leading customers seeing 10x ROI in just over a year.


• Microsoft’s marketplace is centralizing digital transactions, incentivizing co-selling, and simplifying procurement for customers.


• Microsoft prioritizes its partners, offering the highest compensation among hyperscalers and integrating marketplace deeply into its products.


• The multi-party offer (MPO) capability is driving significant sales growth, enabling partners to collaborate effectively and increase deal sizes.


• Microsoft emphasizes a channel-led approach, empowering partners to scale and leverage the marketplace for software and application sales.


• Microsoft views the current AI landscape as a “light bulb moment,” urging partners to innovate and build solutions within its ecosystem.

If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community.

At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.

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Transcript:

Key Tags:

Microsoft, Partner Ecosystem, AI, Marketplace, Cyril Belikoff, AI Adoption, Digital Transformation, Cloud, Azure, Co-sell, Channel Partners, ISVs, Software Development, Multi-Party Offer, Customer ROI, Partner Profitability, Technology, Innovation, Business Strategy, Future of Partnerships, Microsoft Azure, AI Foundry, Trade Ledger, Content Square, Hyperscalers, Managed Services, Data Quality, Ultimate Partner Live, Ultimate Partner Experience, UPX.

Transcript:

Cyril Belikoff Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Cyril Belikoff: You know, as the AI adoption increases, the opportunity for partners sort of exponentially explode, customers are seeing almost four XROI on average, and then the, the leading customers who are really leading into AI are seeing 10 XROI. They’re seeing that ROI in like 14 months.

[00:00:19 ] Vince Menzione: We believe this time is like no other.

We believe we refer to these as the tectonic shifts,

[00:00:25 ] Intro: all the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together. Managed  services will be one and a half times larger

[00:00:31 ] Cyril Belikoff: because it is the customer buying behavior that has created a need for all of us to rethink our models.

[00:00:38 ] Intro: Until we have data quality, the effectiveness of AI cannot be realized and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized.

Can you figure out, first, what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership.

[00:00:58 ] Vince Menzione: Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering.

We just came off Ultimate Partner Live at Microsoft Redmond Campus, our most powerful event. Yet, over two days, we gathered top leaders to tackle the real shifts shaping our industry. If you weren’t in the room. This episode featuring Cyro Beov, Microsoft’s new leader responsible for marketplaces. Brings you right to the edge of what’s next.

Let’s dive in, uh, all up, uh, Cy Beov, I’m so glad to have you join us. So good to have you here today, sir. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. I’m I gonna grab a water here. Oh, please do. Yeah. I’m gonna grab a coffee. In fact, you uh, you were, you’re second next to me here. Great. Perfect.

We put you in the center. The hot seat. In the hot seat. Yeah. So, so great to see you. Yeah. Um. Yeah, we were, I was sharing this with, with the audience, but you and I were supposed to get together in person. Exactly.

[00:02:00 ] Cyril Belikoff: We had a snowmageddon here. I think, you know, I picked the heck of the time. You get a dusting of snow and Seattle sort of shuts down.

[00:02:06 ] Vince Menzione: You know, I grew up in the Northeast, we get 48 inches of snow overnight, and everybody would continue on. And I was like, oh, what happened? I mean, I was, I literally was at the hotel going, okay, well I was doing all these, uh. These teams calls because I couldn’t get people in the meetings and that kind of thing, so I’m so glad we could.

Thank you. Do this in person. Thanks for the

[00:02:22 ] Cyril Belikoff: invite again.

[00:02:23 ] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Thank you so much. See you, all of you. So, uh, I thought we’d talk a little bit of a broader, uh, conversation too, and then we’ll dive in on marketplace. Great. Because I think it’s a greater conversation. Great. I happen to know your organization.

Um, Alyssa Taylor has been a podcast guest here, somebody I worked with at Microsoft. Yes. And who’s taken on bigger, bigger, and bigger responsibilities within the organization. Uh, leading. Leading, I would call it cloud Go to market probably is probably the right term. But, uh, talk to me about your organization because.

You, you drive a tremendous amount of the energy and effort around Azure and industry Yep. And partners, uh, even before this marketplace changes. Yes. Or happened recently. So tell us a little bit about your background. A long time at Microsoft Over, yes. Over 20 years.

[00:03:11 ] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Um, so yeah, I’ve been at Microsoft, I think 27 years.

27, 28, something like that. Right outta

[00:03:17 ] Vince Menzione: college.

[00:03:17 ] Cyril Belikoff: Yeah. Lots of different, pretty much. I, you know, I had, uh. I had three days at, uh, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and then I decided, no, no, Microsoft’s my thing. Um, it’s my move. And so, uh, it sort of paid off, I think. Um, so yeah, I, uh, I’m part of, as you mentioned, uh, the commercial, um, cloud and ai, uh, organization.

Yeah. Uh, and my particular remit is around solutions and. Partner marketing to really focus on how we take all our products and take them to market with more of a customer outcome solutions basis. And then obviously, how do we enable our partner ecosystem? And that’s where sort of marketplace sort of has now, um, fit, uh, fit in there.

So it’s, it’s, you know, it’s an exciting time for software development companies, system integrators, all types of partners really, particularly around this AI transformation. Yes. And what’s going on? Um, you know. And of course being in the, the AI team, I’d be remits to talk a little bit about that and what it really means for partners.

I think Please do, please do, please do. Um, for, you know, this is a massive platform shift, I think everyone is, is is talking about it sort of at the same altitude as cloud or mobile or the internet. I sort of prefer the light bulb analogy. Um, and what I mean by that is, you know, back in many, many years before cloud, um, someone inven