Tag: microsoft

Microsoft is starting to make significant piles of cash from its cloud thanks to the efforts of its channel.

This year Office cloud revenues surpassed traditional licences for the first time and Richard Ellis, Microsoft Office Division lead, says much of the impetus behind the growth in the company’s cloud business has been driven by the success of its cloud solution partner (CSP) programme.

“The CSP framework is a great example of the huge opportunity for partners,” he says, “giving them the ability to bill, invoice and provide managed service and support to Office 365 customers using our infrastructure. It allows partners to set their own pricing, their own support contracts and work with ISVs to add value.”

There are 35,000 CSP partners globally and the number is growing at the rate of 6,000 a month. “CSP is enabling partners to grow their revenue share with customers,” Ellis claims, revealing that CSP partners enjoyed 10 percent year on year average revenue per user growth.

Ellis said most partners were aware of Vole’s shift to the cloud and are taking advantage of it. “It’s for every partner to assess what their own services are and what their value proposition is to their customers. That’s always been crucial and it will be crucial going forward. Partners need to be very clear what value they are adding.”

Microsoft has admitted that it has not kept pace with the speed that its partners have moved to the cloud.

The software king of the world has revealed more details of its newly formed One Commercial Partner business, which brings together all partner-facing teams across the organisation.

One Commercial Partner was first announced in January, as Microsoft revealed plans to bring together its enterprise and SMB teams, and more details have now been announced.

Ron Huddleston commercial vice president of One Commercial Partner, said the new business will incorporate Microsoft’s offerings in technical, marketing, business development and programmes. He declared that the new team is “not just partner led, it’s partner first”.

Microsoft is appointing dedicated channel managers for the first time, which Huddleston claimed will help to fit the right customer with the right partner.

“We’re investing $250 million in connecting partners to customers,” he said. “We’re starting with one new role, globally – the channel manager who specialises in connecting partners to customers. This will feel very different. This is not a partner account manager, they’re focused on customer success.”

Gavriella Schuster, Volish corporate vice president, said that Microsoft has in the past been guilty of asking its partners to ready themselves for digital transformation but, from a sales point of view, had not done so itself.

Schuster realised Microsoft was falling behind its partners and had innovated its engineering, services and business models, but had lagged in the innovation in our sales model and it shows.

She realised that partners had changed and Microsoft had not kept up, and now we were getting in their way.

Microsoft has committed to giving its internal sales teams 10 per cent commission on an Azure solutions that are co-sold with partners. Microsoft account teams will also, for the first time, be aligned by industry – to develop specialisations in specific fields.