Understanding the new Microsoft Cloud Partner Program

Microsoft recently announced the launch of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Platform, to replace the previous Microsoft Partner Network programs.

This includes new Solutions Partner designations, which replace the legacy Silver & Gold competencies previously used. The new designations are a clear way of validating a Partner’s skills and experience in those specific areas, making it easier for businesses to identify appropriate Microsoft partners for their requirements.

The designations are aligned to six solution areas within the Microsoft Cloud:

How do Partners achieve these designations?

In order to gain each designation, the partner must achieve a certain level of points across the categories included below:

Performance: based on net customer adds, taking into consideration customer churn and based on a trailing 12-month period.
Skilling: verifies and demonstrates the partner’s expertise with intermediate and advanced certifications.
Customer success: evaluated through both the growth in usage and the quantity of solution deployments.

What are the benefits of this evolution?

This change has been introduced for several key reasons:

To simplify the partner competencies mechanism by aligning to Microsoft’s six solution area cloud offerings
To increase transparency with a new Partner Capability Scoring mechanism
To provide partners who specialise in certain technologies with additional tools and benefits aligned to their solution area
To give businesses more clarity on Microsoft partner capabilities to assist with their partner selection

Microsoft comment “This change better reflects the enormous and ongoing transition of business operations to the cloud, and how Microsoft intends to support partners in the future. It aligns our partners’ go-to-market motions with the way customers buy today.

As things continue to change and evolve, we are committed to investing in and delivering what partners need to innovate, grow their businesses and deliver on the promise of digital transformation for customers across organisations and industries”. (Read more here).

Where do Advanced sit?

We’re delighted to announce that we have already been awarded with the Infrastructure (Azure) Designation, showcasing our expertise and experience in this area.

This demonstrates our capabilities in the below activities:

Designing, implementing, operating, and optimising customers’ infrastructure architecture, cost, and security.
Migrating and modernising customers’ infrastructure for virtualized workloads (including SAP) and virtual desktop environments
Onboarding high-performance computing workloads onto Azure and overseeing them
Handling management, governance, security, and DevOps across on-premises, cloud, and multi-cloud environments using Azure Arc.

“The recent announcement from Microsoft with launching the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program has led to a greater emphasis on Microsoft partners having the technical capability to support their customers.

It is great news that Advanced have already achieved one of the 6 designations at launch, and it won’t be long before we add to this! It’s a great achievement which shows all the hard work the team have put into delivering an excellent service to our customers in partnership with Microsoft”. Reece Gohil, Microsoft Product Manager – Advanced.

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