Chris Goodwill has spent 15 years in the Microsoft partner ecosystem, long enough to have sold and deployed Lync 2010, Skype for Business and then Teams, and three decades in voice and data overall. Speaking to UC Today at UCX London, a week into his new role as a UC and contact centre specialist at TTEC Digital, he says the speed at which Microsoft now ships has become one of the biggest challenges partners face.
He has joined a firm deep in that ecosystem. TTEC Digital was a launch partner for Dynamics 365 Contact Center in 2024 and was named Microsoft's 2025 Dynamics 365 Service Partner of the Year, which puts Goodwill at the sharp end of a Microsoft Teams contact centre portfolio that changes month to month.
How Microsoft's Release Cadence Is Reshaping Partner Go-To-Market
In the Lync and Skype for Business years, upgrades arrived in phases, and partners had time to learn how to sell and deploy each one before the next came along. Dynamics 365 followed a similar rhythm with its twice-yearly release waves, which Goodwill says have now given way to a single AI roadmap. That shift, combined with the iterative way hyperscalers now build, has changed the planning horizon for partners and their customers.
With the constant release of updates and the iterative nature of how the hyperscalers are working, things are coming so thick and fast that building a go-to-market is very difficult, and so is keeping clients up to speed. You can be working on a project for six, 12 or 18 months, then something else comes along and you need to rethink it.
The answer, he explains, is agility in how partners work with customers and close relationships with their chosen vendor. He also sees a change in what customers expect from the partner itself, and in how the best partners position technology.
We've talked about it forever, but being a trusted partner is more important than ever. Being consultants means asking what's not working and how we can help, not saying here's something new, can we sell it to you?
For IT leaders running Teams deployments, the practical upshot is that roadmaps written at the start of a project are likely to need revisiting before it finishes, which puts a premium on partners who track Microsoft's changes closely.
Teams Consolidation and AI Agents Are Giving Workers Time Back
Goodwill spent 15 years as a comms engineer, watching hardware rationalise and shrink. He sees the same thing happening now in software, with Teams pulling more applications into a single interface. The platform's reach keeps growing too: Teams Phone passed 26 million PSTN users at the start of 2026, up 30 percent in under two years.
