Forum Discussion
MicrosoftISV Success FAQ: ISV Success benefits vs MAPS
sid6mathur, well ISV Success isn't free, there's an annual charge, at least from the 2nd year.
We're in the ISV success programme, its really good and we'll be continuing. However, I had a question about whether we still need to renew MAPS each year now that we're part of ISV success, i.e. does ISV success give us sufficient benefits to make MAPS redundant.
Its not very clear (very little is from MS!), I didn't find a clear answer, and I raised a support request with MS, which just confused things further.
However, I worked out that we do need MAPS.... in particular (for us), ISV Success provides Office 365 licenses, but these are 'Development' licenses, i.e. they can only be used for development purposes, not for business use. So, we need MAPS for that - I think the D365 licenses might be similar.
Also, we use the £75 a month ($100?) Azure credits from MAPS to cover a lot of our Azure costs for dev/demo sites. So, overall the cost of MAPS is very much worth it as ISV Success doesn't cover the same stuff.
My original comment applies though - the original question is to 'compare the benefits', which the answer doesn't do at all, it just gives a brief outline of what ISV Success is...
On my journey (of confusion), I also found out about 'Partner Success', which is different to ISV Success and seems to overlap with MAPS.
I understand the need for multiple partner programmes to suit different needs and different levels of engagement, and this is fantastic. But, (as with much of MS info), all the guidance is written from the perspective of an 'expert' (i.e. someone who already knows how it works, the buzz words and acronyms) and there is very little explanatory guidance.
Rsdraig I'm totally in the same boat as you. In our case, we ignored the request to "renew" the ISV for a fee payment in Year 2. I agree with your observations.
- We're renewing (and I'm replying for those in a similar position). Its around £1,300 - £1,400 (can't remember), but we get $5,000 of Azure credits, so its a very simple decision for us. There are other direct benefits too, but MAPS pretty much covers us (we're a small ISV).
We did quite a few (about 10) SaaS listings in our first year - they're really easy as there was little change to what we already do. We'll remove about half of them this year and add some more (which will help us qualify to stay in). Though historically we get little in the way of MS referrals, since we overhauled our listings we are getting around 1 inbound enquiry a month - not 'formal' ones via the MS Store (which is so hard to use, its almost impossible), but people who have seen our listings, googled as and made contact.
This year, we're going to build template VMs with our software pre-installed, so will be able to start to list them too. (apologies if I'm using 'proper' MS terms!). Again, this is an easy(ish) step, we've improved the product to self-provision from a license key and we're going to start writing the use of Azure template VMs into our quotes as an option for customers to deploy our solution, but with us still engaged with implementation services.
So, ISV Success is good for us, we're on a 3-5 year plan to make our solution fully self-provisioning (i.e. 'buy it now'), but it can be broken down into manageable steps (SaaS listings, template Azure VM + services, etc).
Sorry, I have digressed from the original question and my original point, but it has taken a lot of reading and fitting our plans into/around ISV success, but we are seeing the benefits beyond the direct (azure credit) benefits.