Senior Director, Asia Datacenter Gtm Leader

Customers and analysts recognize Microsoft’s tremendous momentum in commercial cloud services, especially with Azure Open AI and copilot, as the foundation of Microsoft beating performance expectations year over year. To help customers achieve their goals, Microsoft continues to build the largest global footprint of any commercial cloud provider with >70 regions live and announced, with more in the pipeline. As we strive to be the leading cloud platform in the world, the Datacenter GTM Lead for Asia will be responsible for defining and executing the strategy for making Azure, M365, D365, Power Platform and other commercial cloud services available to current and new customers through a variety of cloud and hybrid options, including but not limited to regional datacenters and Edge capabilities. This role will also be accountable for datacenter capacity triage across the Asia region, as well as working with core engineering teams on mapping service landing to demand by region. This role will work with CELA and engineering to help the company navigate the increasingly complex local certification and compliance requirements in the region. The Datacenter GTM lead for Asia must be an exceptional business leader and sophisticated communicator who provides thought leadership, facilitates engagement across multiple senior internal and external stakeholders and develops robust business cases justifying our region expansion investments. This role will be a key member of the regional leadership team and will engage with internal product teams, the Asia CTO team, the Microsoft field, our Partner network, our end customers and regional governments and policy agencies. They are required to successfully navigate complex engagements encompassing multiple dimensions including technical, financial, compliance, regulatory and legal concerns. Acting as the conduit between local and corporate engineering teams the lead ensures all expansion plans are progressing as desired while keeping the customer at the center. The Datacenter GTM lead will report to the Asia regional Azure GTM leader but have accountabilities spanning all Microsoft cloud services. This is a people manager role with regional employees located throughout Asia. This role can be located anywhere within the Asia region. As a senior leader in the region, they are also expected to contribute to the coaching, training, and development of our diverse group of regional employees. Finally, they will work with regional Engineering leaders to identify, qualify, and prioritize emerging needs that result in new regions, optimization of existing infrastructure or incremental growth in penetration and scale of Microsoft’s commercial cloud across Asia. Significant international travel within the region, and to the main corporate offices in the US, should be anticipated. **Responsibilities**: - Define and execute the Microsoft datacenter region expansion strategy for Asia including: - Work with local field teams on GTM planning for new local datacenters that are already approved and scheduled - Identify, evaluate, and prioritize new opportunities, including developing the business case (strategic rationales and economics), structuring deal terms, developing a negotiation strategy and leading negotiations (customer facing and internal) - Manage the deal process with anchor customers from identification through agreement. Communicate with key stakeholders throughout the deal process to secure buy-in and approvals. Drive deals to closure while maintaining an objective sense of when to suspend an opportunity. - Work with customers, industry experts and specialized compute and storage resources to identify (and where needed build) services needed to enable customer success within their vertical scenarios. - Document and influence customer and local market needs for Microsoft commercial cloud services and hyper scale cloud innovations to work with engineering to determine future service landing in the region - Maintain ongoing relationship with partners to ensure compliance and commitments are fulfilled - Partner with engineering, infrastructure, marketing, compliance, and the field leadership to fulfill local certification and compliance needs across the Asia region - Manage datacenter capacity triage across the Asia region. Put in place clear principles and process to help manage tradeoffs. Work directly with the capacity planning team and field teams to do so. - Support Corporate and External Legal Affairs in negotiating agreements with government agencies over data sovereignty and security that support Microsoft’s Trusted Data Principles - Engage directly with customers at multiple levels, supporting executive briefings and innovation partnerships - Drive large strategic and complex projects, with executive visibility and many critical dependencies - Drive decisive action in partnership with others in a large organization, and deliver results that depend on other div