Jared Spataro has been with Microsoft for more than 15 years now, and he has been part of the transition from an on-prem software company to a SaaS business. Today his official title is corporate vp in charge of the company’s biggest SaaS product, Office 365. Spataro is going to join us on October 27th at TC Sessions: SaaS to talk about how his company made that grand transition successfully.
Today Microsoft Office 365 encompasses a variety of tooling including Teams, the company’s collaboration platform, Outlook email and OneDrive storage along with the Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools — Word, PowerPoint and Excel. There’s so much more too including PowerBI, Yammer and SharePoint to name but a few.
The division, which encompasses Office 365 and other online products, Productivity and Business, accounted for more than $14 billion in revenue in Q4 2021. While not all of that came from Office 365, and Microsoft doesn’t really break it down much further, it did account for a good chunk of income for the software giant.
When Spataro joined the company back in 2006, he worked on the company’s content management product, SharePoint. He was Senior Director of that product in 2011 when the company bought Yammer for $1.2 billion, a move that really helped the company begin that transition and Spataro was at the center of that.
In those days, Microsoft would release new versions of SharePoint every three years, an immense new version with all the new bells and whistles, but most customers wouldn’t upgrade because they had a previous version that they had customized and weren’t about to do anything to put that at risk.
Microsoft was spending years on product development and many existing customers weren’t getting the benefits of the latest and greatest version. When the company bought Yammer, they acquired a company with a continuous delivery methodology and the Yammer team brought an entirely new modern development approach to Microsoft.
When Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company went all-in on the cloud just as Spartaro was moving to the Office side of the house as General Manager. There he oversaw the company’s transition from boxed software to Office 365 SaaS.
We’re going to talk to him about that transition and what it meant to the way software was produced and sold and his role in helping Microsoft make that massive transformation.
In addition to our discussion with Spataro, the conference will also include Google’s Javier Soltero, Monte Carlo’s Barr Moses, as well as investors Sarah Guo and Kobie Fuller, among others. We hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a thought-provoking lineup.
Buy your pass now to save up to $100 when you book by now. We can’t wait to see you in October!