“There’s a mixture of things in my roll of looking after enterprise clients. The primary, frankly, is always to sell software because I essentially run the sales force. I meet big customers and check that we’re listening and doing what we need to do. There is sort of a double entendre here though. It’s about 18 months since we decided to form a subsidiary here and the team has made some quite material investment requests. I’m a great believer, having done this for quite a few years, that you have to actually come to a market. You don’t get it second hand. I felt frankly a little exposed not having been here for five or six years which is too long, especially when considering making investments in the market that I need to support.”

Witts had a high level meeting with Saudi Aramco to among other things define the agenda for the upcoming visit of the oil giant’s CIO to Microsoft. Asked which other companies in the Kingdom merit his special attention, Witts mentioned SABIC, Saudi Electricity Company, Saudi Telecom Company, government ministries, several Saudi banks and quite a few other smaller businesses. This was interesting because by the strict definition of “enterprise client,” Saudi Arabia has very few organizations that would qualify. Nearly all Saudi companies are considered small and medium firms. For instance HP, a Microsoft partner, focuses on just 1000 companies globally as enterprise clients.

Witts simply laughed and replied that where HP may be concentrating on the Global 1000, he’s considering the Global 10,000 as enterprise customers. “I’m way less picky, and I mean that positively. For us it’s more than Windows and Office and how many PCs, especially if you look at where the company is now on the service side, and data center and some of the things we’re doing online. We have split the world into five sectors and fifteen industries. If you actually get into the details, a very large part of what we do is to influence independent software vendors and system integrators for the vertical extensions to our products. So for us the reason for doing account management is probably a little different than linked to revenue. It’s much more linked now to how do you bring in an engagement management on the partners. That we’re doing deals with that differentiates us in my view. So enterprise has a broader definition. We probably have a bigger sales force as well. We have about 10,000 sales people.”

His visit to the Kingdom was clearly more about managing Microsoft’s customer relationships than making sales. Local enterprise customers wanted to speak to him face to face and Witts admitted that some Saudi customers are more demanding than others. After meeting with those customers, Witts came away with at least a few “to dos” but he said that he also demands back a few to dos. “A customer that’s going to push you hard is someone who’s pushing the technology hard,” he said. “I think at the very kernel of Microsoft we’ve always run our enterprise business as a market maker and not just a market server.”

One of Witts’ current frustrations is that the features and capabilities of Microsoft products are greater than ever, and yet few customers really understand the richness of the applications. Microsoft tends to add acquired technologies along with the fruits of its own R&D into existing applications. The bottom line is that Saudi customers could be doing much more with the products they’re purchasing. He’s pushing his team to work harder to educate enterprise clients so that the value of Microsoft applications is better realized, which of course will help customers have more confidence in their technology investments.

Witts is also concerned that while Saudi enterprises are investigating cloud architecture and have begun the virtualization of their data centers, they aren’t yet developing serious plans which would result not only in new ways of accessing and purchasing computing technology, but also in an evolution of their business models. With Microsoft getting ready to introduce its online business productivity suite to the Kingdom in the first quarter of 2011, it’s certain that in the months ahead the company’s conversations with local customers will increasingly focus on “the cloud,” and the opportunities and challenges it will bring.