Partner Updates Switzerland articles

ICYMI: Microsoft Ignite 2023 Book of News

JillArmourMicrosoft — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:06:10 GMT

During last weeks' Microsoft Ignite 2023, more than 100 announcements in a wide range of topics, including infrastructure, Microsoft Copilot, the relationship between data and AI, new tools for developers and security.

Microsoft Inspire 2023 Hero Announcements

larabems — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 06:27:45 GMT

Customers’ cloud adoption needs have rapidly evolved over the last couple of years. AI is here now and partners are already driving innovation and transformation with customers across industries to help them realize the benefits of integrating AI capabilities into every level of their organizations. The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program is how we are investing in partners to enable them to capitalize on the economic opportunities that Microsoft AI presents.

Keep reading to learn more about this year’s Microsoft Inspire Hero Announcements and our commitment to accelerating AI transformation, driving customer success, and fueling partner business growth and profitability.

Fueling partner growth and profitability in the era of AI

We’re excited to announce the new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, the next generation of our partner program empowering every partner to deliver customer value leveraging Microsoft AI and the Microsoft Cloud, as well as other key investments including new Solutions Partner designations, general availability of ISV Success and its expanded benefits, and investments in the commercial marketplace. To learn more, read the blog post by Nicole Dezen, Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President, Global Partner Solutions.

The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program brings together everything across the entire partner lifecycle, including onboarding, skilling, go-to-market, incentives, and co-selling. Partners get all the value and benefits of the previous program plus access to new offerings and benefits specific to AI. And there is no action for a partner to take to move to the new program—we’ve moved all our existing partners into the new program effective immediately and partners maintain their existing benefits and designations.

AI-focused announcements to help partners adopt technology to deliver customer success and in their own organization include:

Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate offerings: We announced an unprecedented 3x investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernize and a new dedicated $100M investment in response to the incredible AI & Analytics demand—Azure Innovate. Now partners have everything they need in one place to be successful. More details below.
The new AI Transformation Playbook with guidance so partners can build their own AI practice.
The Build & Modernize AI Apps specialization for partners to demonstrate their deep technical expertise in building intelligent apps.
Expanded benefits for ISV Success, including access to GitHub Copilot (coming by end of 2023) so ISVs can use an AI pair programmer to spend less time on repetitive code and more time on building innovative applications.

Key marketing resources, including the new “Era of AI” marketing campaign in a box.
The Security Copilot design advisory council is a new way for partners who are interested in building their own solutions and services powered by Security Copilot to engage early with Microsoft.

We’re expanding Solutions Partner designations to provide opportunities for partners to differentiate their technical capabilities and demonstrate customer success. This includes a new training services designation for learning partners, ISV designations for partners building solutions aligned with the Microsoft Cloud and our industry clouds, and a support services designation.
General availability of ISV Success within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program—a curated path purpose-built for organizations building B2B applications. ISV Success empowers all ISVs to build innovative applications across the Microsoft Cloud and sell with us through our marketplace. ISV Success provides free benefits for a year, such as Azure credits, GitHub and Visual Studio as well as Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 seats. Participants also get free technical consults to advise on architecture design, marketplace publishing, and accelerate business growth with proven marketing benefits. These investments are strategically aimed at helping ISVs meet customer needs, accelerate innovation, facilitate go-to-market strategies, and cultivate a thriving business environment. Read Anthony Joseph's blog post to learn more.
The Microsoft commercial marketplace is central to our partner go-to-market strategy. We recently aligned co-sell to marketplace to support our field sellers to sell alongside you and we continue to introduce new features, like multiparty private offers, empowering partners to come together to construct custom deals, and for eligible solutions, sales count towards a customer’s cloud commitment.

In FY24 the Industrial Metaverse (IMV) will be joining the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program as a new offering. We have a new industrial metaverse learning path curated for partners, and this is now available. This curated learning path includes content like how to use services like Azure Mixed Reality Services, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, the AI engineer certification for AI, and more.

Announcing Bing Chat Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing, and new AI capabilities across Microsoft 365

We’re excited to share next steps in our journey to empower every person on the planet to work in a new AI-powered way. 

First, we’re announcing Bing Chat Enterprise, delivering AI-powered chat for work, and available in preview. Second, to help commercial customers plan, we're sharing that Microsoft 365 Copilot will be priced at $30 per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers, when broadly available. To learn more, read the blog post by Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work.

Bing Chat Enterprise gives your organization AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. With Bing Chat Enterprise, user and business data are protected and will not leak outside the organization. What goes in—and comes out—remains protected. Chat data is not saved, and Microsoft has no eyes-on access—which means no one can view your data. And, your data is not used to train the models. Whether researching industry insights, analyzing data, or looking for inspiration, Bing Chat Enterprise gives people access to better answers, greater efficiency, and new ways to be creative. Bing Chat Enterprise has rolled out in preview and is included at no additional cost in Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium—which means that more than 160 million people already have access. And in the future, it will be available as a standalone offering for $5 per user, per month. Read the blog post by Jared Spataro and Yusuf Medhi to learn more.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing: Bing Chat Enterprise unlocks generative AI for work. And Microsoft 365 Copilot brings a whole new way of working, using just your own words. It reasons over all your business data in the context of your enterprise, including the ability to ask questions and get answers from the web. Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers when broadly available. 
New AI capabilities across Microsoft 365: We’re continuing to innovate across Microsoft 365 with new AI-powered capabilities to empower people however and wherever they work to be productive and engaged in new ways.

Copilot in Teams Phone will quickly generate summaries of phone conversations, capture action items, and answer your questions about their phone calls. When summarizing calls, Copilot will highlight key points, such as names, dates, and numbers, and can also recommend next steps based on the discussion.
Copilot in Teams Chat helps you quickly get up-to-speed and synthesize key information across all their Team chat threads. 
Microsoft Viva updates include the launch of  Viva Glint, which will help customers understand employee engagement through organization-wide surveys and connected actions, and Viva Pulse, which helps managers and project leads get real-time, confidential feedback in the flow of work.

Windows 365 Frontline makes it easy and affordable to extend the power of Cloud PCs to frontline, shift, and part-time workers, enabling them to securely access their personalized Windows experience on any device no matter where they work.
Microsoft 365 Backup backs up and quickly restores an organization’s data to a prior point-in-time at unprecedented speeds after a catastrophic event or unforeseen data loss. Microsoft 365 Archive offers you a cost-effective, long-term storage of inactive or aging files that they still want to maintain for compliance or retention requirements.

Reshaping the future of business with Microsoft Sales Copilot, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and new cloud migration program

Since March when we introduced Dynamics 365 Copilot—the world’s first Copilot for both CRM and ERP—and Copilot in Power Platform, we’ve seen an incredible customer response from customers including Campari Group, Leatherman Tool Group, and Northrop & Johnson who are transforming how work is done, from the front office to the back office. Copilot assists employees wherever they are working, surfacing valuable business data and delivering business insights so they can focus on the most meaningful parts of their job. And with this momentum in AI, there has never been a better time for our customers to move to the cloud. Read the blog post by Emily He, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications Marketing, to learn more.

Microsoft Sales Copilot, a role-based copilot designed for sellers, empowering them to increase productivity and personalize every customer interaction so they can close more deals. It is experienced in the applications where sellers work, whether that is Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales, and connects to other CRM systems like Salesforce. Since February, we’ve been adding new generative AI capabilities to help sellers be more productive with capabilities like email drafts and email thread summaries with sales-specific prompts and actions informed by Outlook and CRM data. Within Teams, sellers receive coaching tips during meetings, helping them reply to customer inquiries, and meeting summaries with action items that are automatically converted to tasks in CRM, saving sellers time and personalizing customer interactions. These capabilities from Viva Sales are now part of Sales Copilot and available within Dynamics 365 Sales, along with new functionality like AI-generated opportunity summaries for sellers to quickly catch up on pipeline and meeting preparation which summarizes customer details, past interactions, and related news. Sales Copilot is generally available now both as a standalone subscription and included as part of customers’ existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise & Premium licenses at no additional cost.

The new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights solution and new copilot capabilities: To help organizations increase the speed of acting on customer insights and orchestrating personalized customer journeys, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution. The new solution has a different pricing and licensing model and will be available to transact starting September 1, 2023. We are also announcing new copilot capabilities that will be in preview in August: use natural language to orchestrate customer journeys and easily style your email, forms, and event registration pages to perfectly match brand guidelines.
Introducing Microsoft AIM for the future program: a brand-new program that offers a tailored path for our customers to move from on-premises to cloud-first Dynamics 365 business applications. AIM (Accelerate, Innovate and Move) is a comprehensive offering that unlocks the potential of AI-powered business systems while reducing costs, providing agility for business model innovation, and operating securely with resilience. AIM provides access to a dedicated team of migration advisors, assessments, offers, tools, and support to give customers a faster route to innovation and success.

Announcing Power Automate Process Mining and Power Platform licensing update

We’re excited to announce new ways to simplify innovation by using AI on a single, cost-effective platform for all your low-code development. To learn more, read the blog post by Justin Graham, General Manager, Process Insights.

AI Powered Process Mining in Power Automate provides AI-powered insights that enable customers to optimize existing processes and drive efficiencies with low-code automation. Power Automate Process Mining offers two industry standard capabilities, task mining and process mining, that break down barriers that might make it difficult for an organization to identify inefficiencies in their workflows and where to improve. Process Mining includes functionality such as the Process Mining desktop app with advanced analytics and Power BI customization. Download the Partner Starter Guide.

More value than ever in your Power Platform licenses: With the general availability of Process Mining, Microsoft further expands its low-code offering, providing customers with not only the most complete hyper automation offering in the market, but the most comprehensive low-code platform including copilot in Microsoft Power Platform. Customers are increasingly standardizing on Power Platform as their low-code platform to modernize at scale and build innovative solutions that amplify business value. To that end, we want to share changes that optimize our portfolio and align to our customers’ buying habits. The following updates will take effect on August 1st, 2023:

We are optimizing the Power Automate and Apps SKU lineups with a focus on Power Automate Premium per user and Power Apps Premium per user.
We are launching Process Mining in Power Automate Premium per user and announcing an add-on for additional capacity.
For the full details, read the announcement on the Power Platform Blog.

Turn vision into impact with Microsoft Azure

Organizations are turning to Microsoft and our partners to achieve efficiency by securely migrating and modernizing on Azure, maximizing value by optimizing cloud investments and innovating with agility by embracing technology. We are announcing new capabilities around our Azure technologies and investments to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernize, along with the launch of Azure Innovate, an all-new dedicated investment we are making in response to the heightened demands for analytics and AI. Read the blog post by Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Azure & Industry, to learn more.

Meta Llama 2 models available on Azure AI: During Microsoft Inspire Meta and Microsoft announced support for the Llama 2 family of large language models on Azure. Llama 2 is a LLM designed to enable developers and organizations to build generative AI-powered experiences. With the addition of Llama 2 to our Azure AI model catalog, we are providing our customers with more choice in the types of models they build on having previously announced support for Open AI, Hugging Face and many more. We are excited to be Meta’s preferred partner as they release their new version of Llama 2 to commercial customers for the first time. Now customers can fine-tune and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models easily and more safely on Azure.
Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate offerings: We announced an unprecedented 3X investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernize and a new dedicated $100M investment in response to the incredible AI and analytics demand—Azure Innovate. These offerings are built to work together to address every customer’s end-to-end cloud journey on Azure. Whether customers are migrating to gain a secure and AI-ready foundation or are ready to build their own AI solutions—now you have everything you need in one place to be successful. For partners, these comprehensive offerings help them increase deal velocity and reduce time to value with funding that ranges from pre-to-post sales, like assessments, POCs and implementation right within Partner Center. Furthermore, with automated approvals, partners can go from nomination to customer approval in just minutes.
Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc: With Windows Server 2012/R2 and SQL Server 2014 end of support approaching, customers can remain protected by upgrading or using Extended Security Updates, available for free in Azure or purchasable for on-premises deployments. For customers who cannot meet the deadline, we are announcing Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc. With Azure Arc, customers will be able to purchase and seamlessly deploy Extended Security Updates in on-premises or multi-cloud environments, right from the Azure portal.
Announcing the preview of Azure Boost: a new system that offloads virtualization processes traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host OS onto next-generation hardware infrastructure, delivering new levels of performance and security for your workloads. This marks a significant leap forward for Azure. With Boost, we provide remote storage throughput of up to 10GB/s and up to 400K IOPS, enabling the fastest storage workloads in the market today.

Azure AI momentum: We’re excited to showcase continued momentum for partners and customers:

Vector search in Azure Cognitive search, now available in preview, offers pure vector search, hybrid retrieval, and sophisticated reranking. Use vector search to create Generative AI applications that combine your own data with large language models, or to power novel semantic search scenarios such as image or audio search.
Azure AI Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI Service work together, bringing powerful generative AI to document processing. With the Document Generative AI solution, you can ingest documents for report summarization, value extraction, knowledge mining, and new document content generation.
Whisper model, coming soon to Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Speech, offers capabilities to transcribe and translate audio content as well as produce high-quality batch transcriptions at scale.
We are also excited to announce new features in Azure AI Speech: Custom Neural Voice, now generally available, and Real-time Diarization in preview.

The future of security with AI: Partner resources to support the customer journey

Cybersecurity is one of the most pressing challenges of our times. There has never been a more important time for specialized cybersecurity expertise, and our partners are critical to preparing customers for the era of AI by deploying end-to-end security solutions. We are announcing ways for partners and customers to engage with Microsoft Security Copilot. Read the blog post by Vasu Jakkal and Alym Rayani to learn more.

Security Copilot Early Access Program: When Security Copilot was initially announced in March, the new solution was available via a private preview. We’re excited to announce that starting this fall, we will make Security Copilot accessible to more customers through our Early Access Program.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing updates

Further, we have exciting updates for manufacturing and mobility customers and partners. To learn more, read the blog post by Dominik Wee, CVP for Manufacturing and Mobility.

The Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is open for business and ready to tackle our customers' biggest challenges with a robust ecosystem of partner solutions, complemented by the security and scalability of the Microsoft Cloud.
ISV designation for manufacturing solutions: Within the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program we are expanding Solutions Partner designations to provide opportunities for additional partners to differentiate their technical capabilities and demonstrate customer success. Coming in this fiscal year, ISV designations represents our commitment to bringing the best partner solutions to our customers and provides a way for customers to identify proven partner solutions aligned with the Microsoft Cloud and our industry clouds. The designation validates that our partners’ solutions meet the high standards of data accessibility specific to our industry.

Actions

Make the most of your partnership. Whether you’re building your first app, developing complex integrations, or exploring new services offerings, we offer opportunities to innovate, scale, and differentiate your business: https://partner.microsoft.com/partnership/maximize-your-partnership.

Watch Microsoft Inspire sessions live and on demand and browse the session catalog to explore all the available learning opportunities: https://inspire.microsoft.com.
Build your technical skills. Access role-specific learning paths and build your skills on Microsoft products and solutions. Discover your path: https://partner.microsoft.com/training/training-center.  
Achieve more with the commercial marketplace. Increase leads and grow revenue by publishing and selling your solutions in the commercial marketplace online catalog. Find out how: https://partner.microsoft.com/solutions/the-commercial-marketplace.
Sell with Microsoft. Create a winning sales strategy, scale your reach to global customers, and prepare for co-selling with Microsoft sellers: https://partner.microsoft.com/partnership/sell-with-microsoft.
Join the partner community. Connect with partners, find out about upcoming events, and crowdsource solutions: https://www.microsoftpartnercommunity.com/

Join ISV Success. https://www.microsoft.com/isv.

Fueling partner growth and profitability in the era of AI

larabems — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 23:47:29 GMT

Today at Microsoft Inspire we announced the new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, the next generation of our partner program empowering every partner to deliver customer value by leveraging Microsoft AI and the Microsoft Cloud. In this post, I am providing more information on the benefits for our partners as well as the other key investments announced today, including new Solutions Partner designations, expanded ISV Success benefits, and investments in the commercial marketplace.

Customers’ cloud adoption needs are rapidly evolving. AI is here now, and our partners are already driving innovation and transformation with customers across industries to help them realize the benefits of integrating AI capabilities into every level of their organizations. Through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, we’re providing partners with a comprehensive portfolio of investments for all partner business models at every stage of maturity, from startups to independent software vendors (ISVs), services to device partners.

Understanding the AI opportunity

Our customers are eager to experience the benefits of AI. In fact, 9 out of 10 leaders believe AI will give their organization a competitive edge. And employees are ready to embrace AI, with 70% saying they would delegate as much work as possible to AI to lessen their workloads. It’s no surprise that Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service is the fastest-growing service in Azure history, with more than 9,500 customers using the service. In response, we have seen our partner ecosystem rise to meet this demand with 9,100 partners transacting on Azure AI, more than 2,300 of whom have transacted on the Azure OpenAI service. And the day we launched the new Build and Modernize AI Apps with Microsoft Azure specialization, more than 200 partners had already met the prerequisites for the specialization, enabling them to showcase their organization’s expertise to customers and Microsoft sellers.

Partners who lean into this new economic opportunity are creating value for their customers, for their own company, and for the greater economy of their community or country. Microsoft succeeds when our partners succeed, and we are committed to supporting you along the way. Microsoft AI enables partners to monetize our intellectual property (IP), monetize your own IP, and monetize your services.

Monetize IP: Accelerate time to market, value creation, and market differentiation by building innovative and scalable software and solutions on the leading AI platform.
Monetize services: Enrich your AI services portfolio to empower customer innovation and success on the most comprehensive AI platform & ecosystem.
Monetize value-add services: Reinvent your value-add services portfolio to amplify human ingenuity by partnering with a responsible AI partner.
Monetize the edge: Innovate with AI-enabled partner devices powered by Microsoft AI to empower new consumer, commercial, and education experiences.

I’m excited to see some of the ways our partners are already benefiting from this:

Introducing the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program

Moving forward, the capabilities of AI and the Cloud will be integrated and inseparable. Our enriched AI services portfolio empowers partners and customers to innovate on the most interconnected technology ecosystem.

As Satya Nadella announced today, the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program brings together everything across the entire partner lifecycle, including onboarding, skilling, go-to-market, incentives, and co-selling. Partners get all the value and benefits of the previous program, plus access to new offerings and benefits specific to AI. And there is no action for a partner to take to move to the new program — we’ve moved all our existing partners into the new program effective immediately and partners will maintain their existing benefits and designations. For frequently asked questions about the new program, visit the partner website.

Powering your AI innovation

One of the investments we made last year with partners who earned Azure specializations was the Azure Migration and Modernization offerings. Our partners led strong momentum in core migration and modernization scenarios, activating thousands of customers.

Today, we announced a 3x investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate & Modernize and an all-new Azure Innovate investment. Azure Innovate is a dedicated, incremental $100M investment in response to the incredible demand for Analytics with the announcement of Microsoft Fabric and AI with our Azure OpenAI Service. These offerings are built to work together to address every customer’s end-to-end cloud journey on Azure. Whether partners are migrating to gain a secure and AI-ready foundation, or are ready to build their own copilot — now they have everything they need in one place.

Other new AI-focused offerings and benefits to help partners adopt this technology to deliver customer success and in their own organization include:

Build your own AI practice leveraging the new AI Transformation Playbook which provides guidance from skilling and innovating, through marketing to selling.
Differentiate your organization’s AI capabilities with a Build and Modernize AI Apps with Microsoft Azure specialization to demonstrate your organization’s deep technical expertise, skills, and demonstrated customer success building intelligent apps across AKS, Cosmos DB, and AI. Specializations also enable partners to unlock co-sell benefits aligned to the solution play. Combined with the six Business Applications specializations launched earlier this year, this brings a total of 31 technical specializations in market.
Tap into key marketing resources, including the new “Era of AI” marketing campaign in a box, and a suite of ready-to-go marketing assets, designed for whether you’re looking for a ready-to share marketing campaign in a box or want to customize your own demand-gen marketing campaign.
Register for the Security Copilot design advisory council, a new way for partners who are interested in building their own solutions and services powered by Security Copilot to engage early with Microsoft.
Accelerate moving customers’ business applications to the cloud so they can take advantage of AI guided productivity with AIM (Accelerate, Innovate, Move) and access a team of migration advisors, expert business value and technology assessments, investment offers, tools and migration support for qualified customers.

Expanding value for all partners

In addition to the new AI-specific offerings and benefits, we’re expanding Solutions Partner designations to provide opportunities for additional partners to differentiate their technical capabilities and demonstrate customer success:

Training Services designation for learning partners who are growing the skills and capacity of our channel. This designation differentiates partners who are providing Microsoft training and helping other partners grow their expertise.
ISV designations coming this fiscal year will provide a way for customers to identify proven partner solutions aligned with the Microsoft Cloud and our industry clouds.
Support Services designation coming this fiscal year will provide a way for customers to identify partners with support capabilities and demonstrated customer success aligned to the Microsoft solution areas. Sign up to participate in the public preview of this designation.

The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner program is the place for all partners to engage with Microsoft. To support our ISV partners further, today we announced the general availability of ISV Success and a new extended benefits package. ISV Success is the pathway for ISV partners within the AI Cloud Partner Program to access product and cloud benefits, demo and sandbox environments, technical consults to build and publish applications, and once published, sales and marketing benefits to help accelerate deals through marketplace. In addition, partners participating in ISV Success will also get access to GitHub Copilot as part of ISV Success benefits at the end of 2023. With GitHub Copilot, ISVs can use an AI pair programmer to spend less time on repetitive code and more time on building innovative applications.

Additionally, as we recently shared, we’re making new strategic investments in the Microsoft commercial marketplace to help partners expand into new sales channels and markets by harnessing the power of our global reach, expedite deals with a simplified sales process, and unlock sales growth by helping customers maximize their committed cloud investments. In addition, today we also announced availability of multiparty private offers for both ISVs and selling partners, which empower them to work together to sell customized deals through the Microsoft commercial marketplace.

Industrial metaverse

We are also bringing the industrial metaverse to the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. This offering, aligned to Solutions Partner designations, will be available for public preview in early 2024. To learn more about this offering and the curated learning path we’ve created to start your journey, or to sign-up to receive updates, visit the Microsoft partner website.

For more information on all the news shared in our Inspire keynotes, read the Official Microsoft Blog post or visit the Microsoft Inspire website to join in live or catch up with sessions on demand. Whether you are a startup or a well-established global business, there is an opportunity for every partner to monetize your IP or your services to accelerate customer success through Microsoft AI and Microsoft Cloud. This is an exciting time and I look forward to how we’ll grow together in this space over the coming year.

This blog was written by Nicole Dezen, Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President, Global Partner Solutions

Increase customer reach with new investments in the marketplace

larabems — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 07:49:13 GMT

Microsoft is excited to share our latest strategic investments in the Microsoft commercial marketplace to unlock Azure IP co-sell benefits. Year on year, we have seen a 138% increase in marketplace sales and 214% in Azure IP co-sell revenue made on the marketplace. Today, we are announcing that having a transactable offer published on the commercial marketplace is a new baseline requirement to access co-sell benefits, and we’re partnering across our ecosystem to help organizations transition to the marketplace and access maximum benefits to grow their profitability.

Our customers are increasingly seeking to discover, try, and buy applications online, driving rapid growth in cloud marketplaces with continued expansion ahead. That is why we are positioning the Microsoft commercial marketplace as an essential platform for co-selling with Microsoft sellers and unlocking sales growth by helping customers make the most of their committed cloud investments. As a Microsoft partner, you can seize this enormous market opportunity by selling your co-sell eligible cloud-based apps on the Microsoft commercial marketplace.

Today, we are also announcing new capabilities, Azure IP co-sell benefits, and updates to our criteria for eligible Azure solutions. These changes can help you:

Expand into new sales channels and markets by harnessing the power of our global reach: achieve global scale and accelerate your growth by selling on the commercial marketplace — and increase opportunities to sell with Microsoft sellers and other partners.
Expedite deals with a simplified sales process: sell your Azure solutions on the commercial marketplace to reach customers directly while saving time, cost, and effort. Microsoft facilitates customer purchases, allowing for streamlined customer setup and management in one location.
Unlock sales growth by helping customers maximize their committed cloud investments: by selling in the commercial marketplace and having a co-sell eligible solution, you can reach millions of Microsoft customers who are driven to buy your solution to make the most out of their cloud investments — further fueling sales.

New capabilities in the commercial marketplace

To help you sell with Microsoft, we are releasing new commercial marketplace enhancements and capabilities. These include multiparty private offers (currently in private preview), which empower partners to come together to construct custom deals, and for eligible solutions, sales count towards a customer’s cloud commitment. Initially, multiparty private offers will be available for partners to sell to customers purchasing in the United States. While any partner can participate, the partner making the sale must have a U.S. tax profile for marketplace in Partner Center. Availability to customers in the United Kingdom and Canada will follow the U.S. release, with other markets to follow. Selling partners will need tax or VAT profiles to sell to customers in the respective countries.

We are also providing the ability for partners and sellers to indicate intent to transact through the commercial marketplace, bringing alignment upfront in the deal-making process. As part of our commitment to partners everywhere, we’re always working on identifying additional commercial marketplace enhancements and capabilities that will better support you, however you do business.

New criteria to access Azure IP co-sell benefits

Co-sell — or collaborative selling — is a benefit of your Microsoft Cloud Partner Program membership and can include digital sales motions, account or territory strategic planning, or collaborative selling with Microsoft sellers. As you invest in your partnership with us and grow your business, we’ll also invest in your organization through additional co-sell benefits. Beginning on July 1, 2023, we will focus on the new criteria for your organization to receive Azure IP co-sell benefits. These benefits include access to customers’ committed cloud budgets and seller incentivization towards eligible Azure solutions.

After July 1, having a transactable offer published in the commercial marketplace and being Azure IP co-sell eligible is a prerequisite for unlocking Azure IP co-sell benefits, giving you access to pre-committed cloud spend. Once your organization meets these initial requirements, there are two pathways to access incremental top tier benefits, depending on your business and goals: marketplace performance or consumption commitments. To learn more about the criteria for each pathway, you can find the resources here.

Upon meeting the eligibility requirements for top tier benefits, Microsoft sellers will be incentivized for sales of eligible Microsoft Azure solutions on the commercial marketplace. In addition, your solutions will be promoted to our sellers so that they can more easily identify you for collaboration on joint sales opportunities with customers. Information on these new co-sell benefits for eligible Azure solutions is available here.

Partner resources

Visit the ISV resource gallery on the partner website to learn more about the new co-sell benefits, prerequisites, and eligibility requirements.
Sign up for ISV Success for help building, publishing, and growing transactable offers in the commercial marketplace. And, get marketing support with Marketplace Rewards — now part of ISV Success.
Review self-serve, technical resources to learn how to publish transactable offers in the commercial marketplace, attend the Marketplace webinars, and visit weekly marketplace office hours to have your questions answered.
Contact your Microsoft partner account representative to learn more about the new co-sell changes and the next steps for your organization.
Visit the partner website to learn more about the opportunity and the resources we have in place to support you, regardless of what stage you’re in, along your Microsoft partnership journey.
Review the enablement resources on multiparty private offers.

No matter where you are in your marketplace journey, we can help you advance toward your goals. If you are not currently selling through our marketplace, our onboarding and enablement resources will help you publish to the marketplace and reach customers across the globe. Once you’re ready to transact, tap into our go-to-market support to build demand for your offers, increase customer awareness of your solutions, strengthen your marketplace deal pipeline, and strategize for success. We are committed to being your partner in planning for growth, driving customer demand, preparing for co-sell, and pursuing new growth opportunities.

This blog was written by Julie Sanford, Vice President, Partner GTM, Programs & Experiences, Microsoft

Solutions Partner: overview of the updates to designation requirements

larabems — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 14:16:41 GMT

We have some exciting updates including expanding performance requirements for Modern Work to encompass Microsoft Viva workloads and updating skilling requirements for certifications in five out of six solution areas. Here's an overview of the Solutions Partner designation updates.

Microsoft Viva added as eligible workload for Modern Work

Microsoft Viva is now an eligible workload for Modern Work under net customer adds, deployments, and usage growth. If you sell or manage Microsoft Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, or Viva Topics for your customers, you may begin earning points for those workloads as soon as June 5, 2023.

Solutions Partner designation skilling requirement updates

When certifications retire, there is no immediate impact. Certifications identified for retirement continue to count toward your partner capability score for one year after retirement or until your individual certification expires, whichever is sooner, in an effort to give you time to adjust. You can continue to take these retiring exams until their retirement date if they are the right fit for your business.

Solutions Partner for Security

We updated the way we validate partners’ capabilities with adjustments to Solutions Partner for Security designation requirements. These changes include new prerequisites and a more flexible approach to meeting Security designation skilling requirements.

Download the overview for all Security skilling changes.

Change highlights:

Mirroring Azure designations’ skilling structure, you’ll now see two prerequisite certifications that must be met before you start earning points. However, we’ve moved away from the requirement that those prerequisites be held by the same individual. Your prerequisites may now be earned by the same or different individuals. We’re shifting to this new model to give you more flexibility in how your business achieves prerequisite targets.

From now until December 2023, you can meet the prerequisites with one individual certified in Azure Security Engineer Associate (AZ-500) and one individual certified in either Security Operations Analyst Associate (SC-200) or Microsoft 365 Certified: Security Administrator Associate (MS-500).

From now through December 2023, we will also count Security Operations Analyst Associate (SC-200) toward your scoring certifications. One individual will count toward your prerequisite and scoring certifications if they hold this certification during this time period.

Starting in December 2023, the prerequisites will need to be earned by two individuals each, and Security Operations Analyst Associate (SC-200) will no longer count as a scoring certification, only as a prerequisite.

Microsoft 365 Certified: Security Administrator Associate (MS-500) will remain a prerequisite but will retire June 30, 2023. It will continue to count toward your prerequisites through June 30, 2024, or until your individual certification expires, whichever is sooner. Between now and June 2024, this certification will be an alternative to earning Security Operations Analyst Associate (SC-200) as a prerequisite.

Microsoft Certified: Cybersecurity Architect Expert (SC-100) is now an eligible scoring certification; you can earn points for this certification once the prerequisites have been met.

There are no longer restrictions on which individuals on your team can earn certifications in order for those achievements to qualify toward points needed to meet Solutions Partner for Security designation requirements. The individuals who earn these certifications can be the same as or different from the individuals who earn the prerequisite certifications. There are also no restrictions on which certifications in this category need to be achieved.

Learn more about the skilling requirements for Solutions Partner for Security

Solutions Partner for Business Applications

Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Commerce Functional Consultant Associate will retire June 30, 2023.

Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing Functional Consultant Associate will retire June 30, 2023.

Microsoft Certified: Power Platform App Maker Associate is not retiring but will be removed from eligibility for intermediate certifications on November 1, 2023. If you have individuals holding this certification, they will not earn points toward your score as of November 1.

Microsoft Certified: Power Apps + Dynamics 365 Developer Associate is a legacy certification retired over one year ago and has been removed from the list of eligible intermediate certifications.

Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 + Power Platform Solution Architect Expert is a legacy certification retired over one year ago and has been removed from the list of eligible advanced certifications.

Learn more about the skilling requirements for Solutions Partner for Business Applications

Solutions Partner for Data & AI (Azure)

No changes for this solution area.

Learn more about the skilling requirements for Solutions Partner for Data & AI (Azure)

Solutions Partner for Digital & App Innovation (Azure) designation

Microsoft Certified: Azure IoT Developer Specialty will retire July 31, 2023.

Learn more about the skilling requirements for Solutions Partner for Digital & App Innovation

Solutions Partner for Infrastructure (Azure)

Microsoft Certified: Azure Stack Hub Operator Associate will retire July 31, 2023.

Learn more about the skilling requirements for Solutions Partner for Infrastructure

Solutions Partner for Modern Work

M365 Certified: Collaboration Communications Systems Engineer Associate is now an eligible certification for the intermediate certification subcategory.

M365 Certified: Teams Application Developer Associate is still available for partners only. You can find the registration code for the exam in Partner Center.

On July 1, 2023, the names of two certifications will change:
- M365 Certified: Modern Desktop Administrator Associate certification is changing to M365 Certified: Endpoint Administrator Associate.
- M365 Certified: Enterprise Admin Expert certification is changing to M365 Certified: Administrator Expert.
- You will see these name changes in Partner Center ahead of July 1; however, they will not impact your partner capability score.

Learn more about the skilling requirements for Solutions Partner for Modern Work

To learn more about the training and certification resources available to Microsoft partners, visit the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program training webpage to build the skills you need today – and the expertise to achieve more tomorrow.

Read the blog written by Dan Rippey, Senior Director, Partner Program Management, Global Partner Solutions, here.

Microsoft Build 2023 Hero Announcements

larabems — Thu, 25 May 2023 14:43:47 GMT

During Microsoft Build 2023 more than 50 updates for developers were announced. From Bing to ChatGPT, to Windows Copilot, to a new Copilot Stack with common extensibility, Azure AI Studio and our newest data analytics platform Microsoft Fabric.

In this book, we will unveil the hero announcements made during Microsoft Build 2023, empowering you with the knowledge and insights to unlock new opportunities, accelerate your growth, and shape the future of technology together.

Check out the Microsoft Build News Book and dive in to see the full set of announcements here.

All you need to know as a Microsoft Partner - FY24 Edition

larabems — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 12:30:55 GMT

Dear Swiss Partners,

The updated version of the FY24 All you need to know as a Microsoft Partner collection is finally here! As many of you might remember, the Channel Sales SMB Team in Switzerland, has already published a version of these contents for the past couple of fiscal years and is regularly updating it, to reflect the new programs and resources available to Partners.

What is the All you need to know as a Microsoft Partner?
It's a document (you can find it in the attachment of this post) with curated contents for Microsoft Partners that operate in the SMB segment aka "unmanaged" customers. The goal of this document is to help Partners in easily identifying programs and engines that are available, to either grow the partnership with Microsoft or support in accelerating customer deals.

What contents can I expect to find in this document?
Cross-Cloud topics: Relevant to all Microsoft Partners. These contents include basics as well as more advanced topics.

Solution Area specific programs and engines: Each SMB Channel Seller has picked solution area specific contents (Azure, Business Applications, Modern Work & Security), to address the different needs.

Swiss-specific resources: Make sure to profit from the learning path on Cloud Compliance and Data Privacy in Switzerland and all the other great resources available to address compliance, privacy and security topics with your customers.

Make sure to bookmark https://aka.ms/all-you-need-to-know in your favourites and have this slide deck at hand at all times!

- The Swiss Channel Sales SMB Team