New Partner Opportunities with Microsoft Foundry: Ignite 2025
The landscape of enterprise technology is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Agents are reshaping software, moving from mere assistants to dynamic collaborators layered within everyday tools. This shift requires software to evolve beyond rigid workflows, becoming systems that reason, adapt, and act with purpose. This represents a significant opportunity for developers and businesses to embrace this moment with confidence and control.
To embrace this new era, enterprises require a consistent foundation to build intelligence at scale. That foundation is Microsoft Foundry, defined as the AI app and agent factory.
Microsoft Foundry helps builders everywhere turn vision into reality with a modular, interoperable, and secure agent stack. The platform unifies models, tools, and knowledge into one open system, empowering organizations to run high-performing agent fleets and intelligent workflows across their business. Foundry provides a powerful, simple, and trusted path to production AI apps and agents.
Table of Contents
- Foundry as the Foundation for Solution Customization and Scale
- IP and Integration Capabilities: Agent Service & Tools
- Establishing Trust and Governance with Foundry Control Plane
- Accelerating Client Migration and Growth
- Conclusion: Partnering for the Next Era of AI
Key Takeaways
- Microsoft Foundry is the AI app and agent factory providing a modular, interoperable, and secure agent stack.
- The Model router (GA) and new Anthropic/Cohere models in Foundry Models ensure optimal choice, performance, and cost balance.
- Foundry IQ (Public Preview) reimagines RAG as dynamic reasoning powered by Azure AI Search, providing grounded and reliable agent context.
- The Foundry Agent Service introduces multi-agent workflows and Memory (both Public Preview) for complex, stateful processes and personalized interactions.
- Foundry Tools (Public Preview) enables agents to act using more than 1,400 connectors with business systems like SAP and Salesforce.
- Foundry Control Plane (Public Preview) centralizes governance, security (Entra Agent ID, Defender, Purview), and observability for agents.
- Foundry Local on Android (Private Preview) extends AI capabilities to the world’s most used mobile platform for real-time inference.
- Managed Instance on Azure App Service (Public Preview) simplifies moving existing .NET web applications to the cloud.
Foundry as the Foundation for Solution Customization and Scale
Scaling AI solutions demands flexibility in model choice and the capability to ensure accurate, grounded responses. Microsoft Foundry delivers the essential pillars to achieve this through Foundry Models and Foundry IQ.
Choice and Optimization with Foundry Models
Innovation thrives on adaptability and choice. Foundry Models offers the broadest model selection on any cloud, with more than 11,000 models available. This selection includes leading frontier models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5, making Azure the only cloud offering both OpenAI and Anthropic models. Cohere’s leading models also join Foundry’s first-party model lineup, providing ultimate model choice and flexibility. Furthermore, new models from NVIDIA have been added.
The Model router, now generally available (GA), is a crucial tool that enables AI apps and agents to dynamically select the best-fit model for each prompt, balancing cost, performance, and quality. This model router is also in public preview in Foundry Agent Service, helping developers build more adaptable and efficient agents, particularly for multi-agent systems. A new Developer Tier (Public Preview) makes model fine-tuning more accessible by leveraging idle GPU capacity.
Knowledge Grounding with Foundry IQ
An agent’s reliability depends on its context; the more context it has, the more grounded, productive, and reliable it is likely to be. Foundry IQ, now available in public preview, fundamentally reimagines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as a dynamic reasoning process rather than a one-time lookup.
Powered by Azure AI Search, Foundry IQ centralizes RAG workflows into a single grounding API, simplifying orchestration and improving response quality while respecting user permissions and data classifications. Key features include simplified cross-source grounding with no upfront indexing, and the use of multi-source selection, iterative retrieval, and reflection to dynamically improve the quality of agent interactions. Foundry already powers more than 3 billion search queries per day.
IP and Integration Capabilities: Agent Service & Tools
Foundry Agent Service empowers developers to create sophisticated single and multi-agent systems, connecting models, knowledge, and tools into a single, observable runtime.
Foundry Agent Service: Orchestrating Complex Agent Systems
Foundry Agent Service empowers developers to create sophisticated single and multi-agent systems, connecting models, knowledge, and tools into a single, observable runtime.
Managed Environments
Hosted Agents (Public Preview) enable developers to run agents built with Microsoft frameworks or third-party frameworks in a fully managed environment, allowing teams to focus on agent logic rather than operational overhead.
Complex Workflows
Multi-agent workflows (Public Preview) coordinate specialized agents to execute multi-step business processes using either a visual designer or a code-first API. These workflows enable long-running, stateful collaboration with recovery and debugging built-in.
Persistent Context
Memory (Public Preview) enables agents to securely retain context across sessions, reducing external data-store complexity and enabling more personalized interactions.
Instant Deployment
Microsoft 365 and Agent 365 integration (Public Preview) enables developers to instantly deploy agents from Foundry to Microsoft productivity apps, leveraging Agent 365 for secure orchestration, governance, and enterprise-grade deployment.
Foundry Tools: Enabling Actionable Intelligence
Foundry Tools, now in public preview, transforms agents from simple responders into intelligent problem-solvers by providing secure, real-time access to business systems, business logic, and multimodal capabilities.
Developers can enable agents to act on real-time business data using more than 1,400 connectors with business systems such as SAP and Salesforce, as well as UiPath. Furthermore, developers can expose any API or function as an MCP tool via API Management, reusing existing business logic to accelerate time-to-value. Out-of-the-box tools such as transcription, translation, and document processing enrich agent workflows. Foundry Tools also includes Azure Content Understanding and Azure Speech.
Extending Intelligence to the Edge
After reaching 560 million devices on Windows and Mac, Foundry Local is now in private preview on Android. This is the world’s most widely used mobile platform. This capability means agents can run natively on phones, unlocking real-time inference, privacy-aware computation, and resilience even where connectivity is unpredictable.
Establishing Trust and Governance with Foundry Control Plane
Scaling intelligence requires trust. Organizations relying on agents and AI-powered systems demand clearer visibility, stronger guardrails, and faster ways to address risk. The Foundry Control Plane (Public Preview) addresses this by centralizing identity, policy, security, and observability signals and capabilities for AI developers in one portal.
Controls and Guardrails
The Control Plane enforces unified guardrails across inputs, outputs, and tool interactions to keep agents focused, accurate, and within defined boundaries. It includes Content Safety in Foundry Control Plane.
Integrated Security
Security is anchored in Entra Agent ID, Defender, and Purview to provide durable identity, policy-driven access, integrated data protection, and real-time risk detection across the agent lifecycle.
Observability
Features include built-in evaluations, OTel-based tracing, continuous red teaming, and dashboards that surface insights on quality, performance, safety, and cost.
The new Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security integration (Public Preview) closes the signal gap between development and security teams. Developers receive AI-suggested fixes directly inside GitHub, while security teams track progress in Defender for Cloud in real time, ensuring AI systems remain secure throughout the app lifecycle.
Accelerating Client Migration and Growth
Foundry also supports modernization efforts. Managed Instance on Azure App Service, available in public preview, allows organizations to move their .NET web applications to the cloud with only a few configuration changes, saving the time and effort of rewriting code. The result is faster migrations with lower overhead, and access to cloud-native scalability and Foundry’s AI capabilities. Organizations can also utilize the Azure cloud migration and modernization center.
Microsoft provides resources for accelerating growth. Resources available to partners include the Microsoft Marketplace, Azure Accelerate, and the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. These tools, along with the ability to Find a partner and utilize Azure for partners resources, position organizations to capitalize on the agent revolution. Resources like the Microsoft Business Solutions Hub are also available.
Conclusion
Microsoft Foundry is the trusted platform for production AI. It equips developers with the modularity, security, and integration capabilities necessary to build impactful, large-scale agent solutions for clients, moving them from prescriptive logic to shaping intelligent behavior. The future of AI starts here, and the platform invites developers to envision their next great AI app with the latest technologies.
To get started, explore Microsoft Foundry and visit the Microsoft Foundry tech community to connect, find answers, and build skills.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Microsoft Foundry, and why does it matter for Microsoft Partners?
Microsoft Foundry is Microsoft’s new AI app and agent factory that provides a unified stack of models, tools, agent orchestration, governance, and deployment. For partners, it is the fastest and most secure way to build production-grade AI solutions that qualify for co-sell, earn incentives, and differentiate in the market.
How can CSP/MSP partners use Foundry to deliver AI services to customers?
Foundry enables partners to build agents that automate workflows, integrate with customer systems (SAP, Salesforce, UiPath), run multi-agent processes, and deploy directly into Microsoft 365. This allows partners to package new services, assessments, managed services, and industry-specific AI solutions.
Can partners build on Foundry and still use OpenAI, Cohere, or Anthropic models?
Yes. Foundry offers 11,000+ models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and NVIDIA models, with automatic routing to pick the best model. This gives partners maximum flexibility for industry-specific needs.
Does Microsoft Foundry help partners accelerate Solution Partner Designations or Specializations?
Yes. By building AI workflows and agent solutions on Foundry, partners can drive:
Usage & Deployment (Customer Success score)
Net customer adds
IP-led solutions for Marketplace
This directly impacts Azure, Security, Data & AI, and Modern Work SPDs.