His team works with national partners, VARs and ISVs (Officially termed Breadth ISVs; I just love these terms.) His predecessor was David Smith who served for four years was GM with the U.S. Microsoft Dynamics Partner Group. Smith moved to the SMB sales team in July. Thies started at Microsoft in March 2005. He spent the four years previous to this promotion as a sales director for a U.S. subsidiary, according to his Linkedin page. Before joining Microsoft, Thies worked at General Electric where he held jobs in sales strategy, finance and Six Sigma as a Black Belt.