Channel part of Microsoft plans for GitHub

Microsoft has indicated that the channel have a clear role to play in helping it take the GitHub offering out into the enterprise market.

The vendor announced plans to acquire the development platform earlier this week as it looked to gain a stronger foothold in the open source world and reach those developers looking to create the applications that will drive the success of IoT.

In a blog post Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear that one of the priorities was to work with the channel to get GitHub in front of more enterprise level operations.

"We will accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub, with our direct sales and partner channels and access to Microsoft’s global cloud infrastructure and services," he said.

The view of Nadella was that developers were the future and it needed to have a stake in the ecosystem that existed outside of the Microsoft universe.

"The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us. Computing is becoming embedded in the world, with every part of our daily life and work and every aspect of our society and economy being transformed by digital technology. Developers are the builders of this new era, writing the world’s code. And GitHub is their home," he stated.

"As every industry – from precision medicine to precision agriculture, from personalized education to personalized banking – is being impacted by technology, the developer community will only grow in numbers and importance," he added.

When Microsoft announced the $7.5bn acquisition of GitHub earlier this week the firm promised to let the developer community carry on without interference.

"We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform. We will always listen to developer feedback and invest in both fundamentals and new capabilities,” stated Nadella.