Alliance Aces

How do you combine a business of 130,000 people with another of 230,000 people? The complexity of this task is enormous. Joerose Tharakan is in Strategic Partnership Business Development at Microsoft, and she represents Microsoft’s largest partnerships. Joerose and her team cover both GSIs and high value advisories.   Microsoft has a large ecosystem of alliances (around 100,000), but she’s focused on 14 GSIs in particular. She has seen Microsoft and Cognizant (one of the GSIs she manages) come together as two enormous organizations.  We caught up with Joerose at the SAPPHIRE NOW conference to talk about the complexity of aligning two companies and what best practices she’s learned along the way.