Gavriella Schuster
Gavriella Schuster is a C-level Microsoft leader who has grown a P&L to $6.5B and currently leads their global portfolio of channel partners that reached $1 trillion in ecosystem revenues. With 20+ years of leadership expertise in digital and cloud transformation roles, her strategy and execution expertise spans all aspects of business model and product development, launch, marketing, sales and partner development. She leads the global recruitment, enablement and engagement of Microsoft’s fast-growing partner ecosystem. Additional areas of her specialization include licensing models, digital marketing and global routes to market. Gavriella specializes in starting up and turning around businesses by inspiring a vision for future customer relevance and engaging the team in developing the roadmap.
Gavriella’s experience makes her immediately qualified to assist a board in developing their vision to transform the organization through new technologies including cloud and artificial intelligence (AI).
Gavriella grew a $6.5B P&L for Microsoft’s U.S. Cloud and Datacenter business to a growth of over 35% CAGR in three years. The product mix included managing the sales and marketing growth strategies across the U.S. for the datacenter businesses of SQL Server, Windows Server, Azure and System Center Management technologies.
As the Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner “Channel Chief,” Gavriella currently leads the global teams building an ecosystem of over 700K engaged partners, adding 30% more partners YOY and over 7K net new partners to Microsoft monthly. She leads global partner management of top software and cloud distributors, systems integrators, large account resellers and managed services providers who deliver over 95% of Microsoft commercial revenues. Gavriella heads the investment strategy and portfolio of channel incentives, defining where to invest $2B annually to achieve a 10-20X return.
Gavriella has five years of experience leading the product go-to-market strategies for Windows Client, including the inception and development of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, Windows Intune, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. She was the P&L and commercial leader for this business. Gavriella has led the development of 15+ product releases and was instrumental in four company acquisitions resulting in consistent 35% YOY growth and propelling product adoption to over 50M licenses sold and deployed.
Gavriella transformed and delivered Microsoft’s licensing strategies from 2000-05 when the company moved from a consumer-packaged goods licensing strategy to an annuity licensing approach, redefining the core business model for the enterprise. She devised strategies to lead the transition from software annuity licensing into cloud subscription licensing. As part of these transitions, Gavriella was instrumental in defining the Microsoft seller compensation plans to support the sales approach and the partner incentive strategy to support the sales approach and transition.
Gavriella is well known for her communications approach to partners and teams on the benefits and business case for a transition. Her industry reputation as a mentor and role-model technology leader was featured in a 2018 podcast on amazing transformation leadership secrets. She was awarded the 2018 Channel Influencer of the Year. Gavriella is sought-after speaker, quoted regularly in tech publications. She was a keynote speaker at 2018 Channel Conference & Expo with 6K registrants, Inspire 2018 featuring 40K attendees. Gavriella earned bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and Social Psychology from the University of Michigan.