Forum Discussion
Does Microsoft discriminate against health care providers?
At Health IT we specialise in looking after doctors in private practice. If you are in Queensland we probably look after your local GP and your local specialist. Almost all of our customers are the very definition of a small business.
For many years we've been driving technology forward for these customers on the Microsoft platform. Until now we've been official partners which means we know what we are doing and have some access to Microsoft to help solve our customer's problems.
To be eligible to be a current Microsoft partner we have to have some certifications and prove some growth. Our growth is well and truly above their requirements EXCEPT, they only count customers with seats between 11-300. Your local doctor has an average seat count of 7.5, and we look after more than 300 of these customers.
An MSP half our size but without our specialty would easily qualify to be a Microsoft partner. But because we focus on and work almost exclusively for doctors, we can't be. Although we're growing much faster than they require, they don't count our growth.
I have taken this up with Partner support and obviously they can't change the rules, as unfair as they may be. How can we get some common sense applied to this problem, or are Microsoft happy to discriminate against the most important industry in the country?
2 Replies
- A common point of view, which applies to all small partners focusing on (very small) SMB business. It's not about the industry you're in. Like you said, it's about the customer size you're focused on.
As a large CSP Provider we've seen a lot of partners complaining against these new rules, as we did as well towards Microsoft to support our partners. Microsoft has made some changes to these requirements before, and is still improving on them (making new adjustments as recent as last week). But I doubt Microsoft is not going to change the >10 seat requirements anytime soon for MWP business. Their focus is just not there for the <10 customers.
You could also see this as an upsell enforcement. To get those customers from 7.5 seats to >10 seats, by selling other workloads as well.
Regardless of what we think, these are the rules we need to play with..
Of course, while you might not be eligible for the new Partner Designation status anymore, you should still be able to renew your old Silver or Gold Competency Benefits. Or as an alternative, purchase the Partner Benefit Packages which include a lot of IUR licenses for partners to use.
Yes, with both options you don't actually have a partner status anymore. But at least you can still get most of the benefits from them.
Unfortunately I don't have answer, but hope I gave you some insights.
Cheers,
Martijnthanks for considering my point of view Martijn. As I understand it we were able to renew our Silver partner status for the last time last year. If I'm wrong and we could do that for another 12 months that would be great.
I disagree that it's not about the industry. Private doctors are quite unique in that the majority of them do not band together like lawyers, accountants and other professionals. The best doctors in the world don't have 11 seats in their businesses, and are not looking to grow their seat count. Why should they not be looked after by a competent Microsoft partner focussed on their technology needs?
Our seat size and revenue are equivalent to MSPs with less customers. Most of our suppliers understand that and bend rules around customer size to make it a fair playing field. I think that's very reasonable of them.kind regards,
Peter.
