Ultimate Partner®
Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executive
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267 – The 1% Club: Elastic’s First Secrets to Partner of the Year Status
Recorded Live at Ultimate Partner LIVE in Redmond, WA Unlock the secrets to explosive growth in the digital landscape! Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Is your business ready for 2026? Welcome back to the Ultimate Partner® Podcast. This was a fan favorite as I was joined by former Microsoft executive and current Elastic leader, Alyssa Fitzpatrick, as she reveals the strategies behind achieving pinnacle success as a Microsoft partner. Learn how Elastic consistently earns “Partner of the Year” awards by prioritizing technology innovation, fostering deep engineering alignment, and ensuring maniacal focus across all functional teams. Alyssa shares invaluable insights on gaining executive buy-in, establishing clear communication “swim lanes,” and leveraging data to drive impactful decisions. Discover the importance of consistent engagement, human relationships in partnering, and why adaptability is the new IQ in today’s rapidly changing market. Key Takeaways: Achieving “ultimate partner” status requires a deep understanding of how to congruently apply principles across all aspects of the business. Executive commitment is paramount; the entire leadership team must be on board and actively driving the alliance strategy. Aligning functional teams (build, go-to-market, sell) with their Microsoft counterparts through dedicated points of contact ensures effective feedback and execution. Leading with technology and embedding innovation is the “secret sauce” for winning partnerships, going beyond traditional co-selling to integrate roadmaps and push for new functionalities. Resource allocation must align with strategic focus; sometimes trade-offs are necessary to maintain intensity on critical hyperscaler relationships. Data-driven decision-making and continuous analysis of performance are crucial for adaptability and predicting market shifts, allowing leaders to defend and explain their strategies to leadership. 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. https://youtu.be/DgzjeaUiYM8?si=fScjJ-a3QaZlMMh0 Key Tags: .Microsoft partner, Elastic, ultimate partner, partner of the year, cloud go-to-market, alliance strategy, executive commitment, technology innovation, engineering alignment, co-selling, go-to-market, influence strategy, partner resources, adaptability, data-driven decisions, human relationships, BRS, QBR, EBC, channel leadership. https://youtu.be/s33fltuizEo Transcription: [00:00:00] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: Adaptability is that has become really the most important thing that any leader needs to do in this, this world that we’re in. Um, it’s no longer one, two year roadmaps. It’s three months. [00:00:16] Vince Menzione: We believe this time is like no other. We believe we refer to these as the tectonic shifts, [00:00:22] Intro: all the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together. Managed services will be one and a half times larger [00:00:28] Vince Menzione: because it is the customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models. [00:00:34] 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. [00:00:54] Vince Menzione: Welcome to The Ultimate Partner. 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 fireside chat with Eissa Fitzpatrick, the partner leader for Elastic, an award-winning partner, brings us right to the edge of what’s next. Let’s dive in. So we always talk about like the pinnacle of success, like how do you get to be the top Microsoft partner? And that’s one that we aspire to is where we came up with the term ultimate partner. ’cause an ultimate partner is a partner that she’s their greatest results. They understand how to be part of that 0.001 point. Percent, you’re not in that 99, 9 per percent. And I saw that quite a bit when I was at Microsoft. I got to see the one per the 1% that knew how to, how to operate in a, in a, in a congruent way. They knew, knew how to apply all these principles in order to be successful. So we wanted to have, as our next guest, an organization and a leader that’s been driving that. In fact, this is also somebody who’s former Microsoft who’s gonna be joining us and having a conversation about. How do you get to be partner of the year? How do you get to the pinnacle of success as an organization? And so I’m thrilled to invite, and I think she’s in the back ready, uh, Alyssa Fitzpatrick, I don’t know if anyone knows Alyssa. Alyssa was at Microsoft for many years. She was in the global partner organization. Uh, she’s now running Elastic, which if, if you, if you haven’t been keeping up, like who are the top partners, especially in the marketplace world, elastic is at the very pinnacle of success across the entire ecosystem. Of partners and cloud go to market. And so I’m so thrilled to have her spend some time with us talking about how do you get to that level? How do you become the most successful partner out there? How do you become a pinnacle partner? And so Alyssa, so great to see you, my friend. That’s great to meet. Thank you. Great to see you. Thank you. Great to see you. We were comparing scars the other day. Yes. I had, um, we both had accidents within the last month or two, right? Yes. Yes. Your, yours is much better. You look much better. Mine. Mine was a little bit easier [00:03:13] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: than the getting hit by a car. I, uh, I did it all to myself. Um. When you have low blood pressure, there is a you swoon sometimes, and if you don’t get yourself to a place where you’re stable, you can fall over and the heaviest part of your body is your head. So I broke my fall. Right there. So it was three weeks ago. I’m healing pretty well, but I had a couple of black eyes for two weeks, which was really wasn’t Turn the camera on, I’ll tell you that. But um, but yeah, I was, [00:03:43] Vince Menzione: I wasn’t turning the camera on either, so. Well, it so great to see you. Thank you, dad. So great to have you. Yeah, we’re in, we, we brought the event up to you. [00:03:50] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: Yes, you did. We did. I love it. Yeah. Yep. [00:03:53] Vince Menzione: And I wanna sit, I wanna sit down with you and have some conversation’s today. Let do, let’s do, uh, it’s so great to have you. I mentioned the fact that you spent many years at Microsoft. That’s how we first met you were at Microsoft. [00:04:03] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: Yep. [00:04:03] Vince Menzione: I knew. I knew even back in that day. You were in the sailing. You were a big sailor. Yeah, [00:04:07] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: I did. But you didn’t grow up in [00:04:08] Vince Menzione: the Pacific Northwest. No. Yeah. So tell us more about your background. I grew up in [00:04:11] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: Colorado, actually in Boulder, Colorado. Nice. Beautiful town [00:04:14] Vince Menzione: and, uh, [00:04:16] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: kind of, it was a small town in the seventies. Very, very small town, very different. Um, but I did come to University of Washington for school, but I quickly left because I was only up here for the school year, never spent a summer. Oh, and if any of you have ever experienced a summer in Seattle, that’s why, you know, we live here and I didn’t until 30 years later. When I came back to work for Microsoft and I was like, how did I not know this? I got to work in all these other places. I lived in San Francisco, I lived in London, I lived in New York. Um, finally came back here and, uh, it, it’s outstanding. [00:04:54] Vince Menzione: Summers are beautiful here. Yes, absolutely gorgeous. [00:04:56] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: It is, it’s amazing. And I, yes, I love boating and I’ve taken my passion for sailing, which I’ve been sailing for about 35 years, and I’ve transitioned that into cruisers. Um, there’s a lot that you can accomplish up here and up into Canada and just, it’s the most beautiful boating place in the world. So I love it. [00:05:16] Vince Menzione: I love it. And you know, we had Lori Borg gun just before you. Mm-hmm. Spent 26 years in the Microsoft ecosystem at a partner. You, I know you’ve had several. Points before you got to Microsoft, but you went from being a Microsoft executive. I want you to talk about what you did at Microsoft and then you went back, you went back out now and leading a top award-winning partner. So take us through a little bit of that. Yeah, [00:05:36] Alyssa Fitzpatrick: it’s, it’s actually been a lot of fun. Yeah. Um, and, and I will, you know, kind of caveat it, that you don’t have to come from Microsoft to have a successful partnership. Um, because it was already happening before I got there. It was, it was already in line. And so, um, I can’t take credit. For the, the Partner of the Year awards because I joined Elastic a year ago. And, um, and that motion was already happening and, and what the, what I see is, um. A company that made commitments and followed through on them and was very, very focused in, uh, making the partnership
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