Context
Microsoft's enterprise channel reached scale during Brendan T. O'Connor's tenure as Senior Director of Worldwide Enterprise Partner Incentives from 2012 to 2016. The role spanned the cloud transition that reshaped Microsoft's commercial relationship with its largest reseller partners. Annual incentive budget under management exceeded $1.2 billion, distributed across 400+ resellers operating in 160 country subsidiaries.
What the Work Covered
The Worldwide Enterprise Partner Incentives function set the rules of engagement between Microsoft and the resellers selling its enterprise software and cloud services. Work spanned incentive program design, partner economics modeling, fiscal-year planning, geographic rollout, and the ongoing operational mechanics of paying partners accurately and on time at scale.
Why This Matters for Clients
Operator-level experience designing and running an incentive function at this scale is rare. The Brushton Group brings that perspective directly to client engagements: how to design an incentive that actually moves partner behavior, how to model the economics, how to roll it out across geographies without breaking the partners on the receiving end, and how to operate it once it is live.
Selected Outcomes
Trusted by clients in 24 countries. The cloud-era incentive architecture Brendan helped lead supported Microsoft's expansion of cloud and hybrid-cloud reseller economics across the world's largest enterprise channels.
About the Author
Brendan T. O'Connor is Founder and Principal of The Brushton Group. He served as Senior Director of Worldwide Enterprise Partner Incentives at Microsoft from 2012 to 2016, managing a $1.2B annual budget across 400+ resellers in 160 subsidiaries during the cloud-first transformation. He holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.