The Microsoft One Commercial Partner (OCP) organization is losing veteran Gavin Orleow. A 19-year Microsoft employee, Orleow is taking a job, beginning Sept. 8, as Intuit vice president of global partner channels.

Intuit’s Gavin Orleow

In his new role, Orleow is responsible for expanding the company’s global partner channel and offerings into the midmarket. The role is a new one at Intuit.

“At Microsoft, I had amazing opportunities and experiences, helping to build global partner ecosystems across Microsoft’s cloud businesses. Now I get to take my passion for building global partner channels and apply it to small businesses via QuickBooks. QuickBooks has been the partner of small businesses for more than 20 years, helping customers achieve success,” said Orleow.

In his most recent role at Microsoft as general manager, solutions strategy, One Commercial Partner group, Orleow led the global team accountable for building and managing Microsoft’s cloud computing partner ecosystem. He’s been in this role since March 2018. Before that, he was senior director, partner strategy and channel development at Microsoft for almost eight years.

New Channel Strategy

Intuit’s channel strategy to date has been primarily through resellers and accounting firms. However, as the vendor’s QuickBooks product and service capabilities have grown, it has seen a market fit outside of its traditional SMB space.

“This traction gives us confidence that now is the time to leverage the scale of a strong partner ecosystem to expand our reach, and power prosperity in the midmarket,” Bobby Morrison, chief sales officer, Intuit QuickBooks, told Channel Futures. “As our QuickBooks strategy has evolved to include more of the small business midmarket and product-based businesses, Gavin will evolve and lead our partner strategy to help meet these objectives on a global scale.”

Orleow will focus on building a new world-class partner channel at Intuit. There are several basic tenets for the company’s channel program. Those are ease of doing business; robust enablement and support; go-to-market investment; and integrated co-sell sales plays.

“He will leverage the best of what he has learned in his career and apply those insights to build a competitive advantage for our partners. Success is achieved at the intersection of our solutions, partners and customers,” said Morrison.

Microsoft-Intuit History

In an interesting tidbit of M&A history, Microsoft, in 1994, agreed to buy Intuit, founded in 1983. However, the $2.3 billion deal, under Microsoft founder Bill Gates, fell victim to a U.S. Dept. of Justice antitrust complaint blocking the acquisition.

The challenge had to do with Microsoft’s Money software introduced in 1991, an Intuit competitor. The U.S. Department of Justice feared that Microsoft’s acquisition of Intuit would give it too much control over the emerging personal finance management market. Quicken had a 70% share at the time

Microsoft discontinued selling Microsoft Money in 2009.

Sasan Goodarzi has been Intuit’s CEO since January 2019. He is a 16-year veteran of the company.