Software princeling of the world, Microsoft, has managed to get its channel partners hot under the collar over changes to its billing which will see them made responsible for their customer’s debts.
Vole has decided, in its ineffable wisdom, to suggest that its partners should take on financial responsibility if their customer becomes unable to pay for their O365 licence, after all, someone must and it is certainly not going to be Microsoft.
The idea is part of something dubbed a New Commerce Experience (NCE) which includes a number of changes for its “partners”. Under the new agreement, partners claim that they would have to take on the financial risk of paying the rest of a subscription if a customer was no longer able to due to insolvency or another reason.
If a company takes out a three-year Office 365 on CSP and they go bust in year two, then the reseller still has to pay the remaining two years. If it’s a big licensing agreement and they go bust, they still have to pay Microsoft the remainder of that contract.
Of course, there are no reasons why a reseller would take responsibility for a customer’s business plan working, or have deep pockets to fund its IT budget and some resellers are wondering what Microsoft has been smoking to even suggest a plan.
Microsoft last week published a blog post announcing that it would give partners until January to implement the changes required for NCE.
It states that partners can cancel “within the first 72 hours after the initial order or term renewal” but goes on to say that there will be “no cancellation available and no prorated refund” after that time and that the partner will be “billed for the remainder of the annual term if monthly billing was chosen”. It has obviously got its knickers in a twist, the way corporations do.
So far Microsoft has been made aware that its resellers are sharpening pitchforks and have lit a few torches, but are have not made any comments other than it expects its partners to pay up if their customers are poor business people. It is a kind of Peasants’ Revolt that spells out the word “bully”.
