New Partner Designations
We are a Gold Partner 20+ years and trying to work through the new partner designations. We sell to government so are unable to buy Azure or credit any Azure purchases to the new designations. How are we able to fit into any of the new designations if all of them require Azure purchases?
Microsoft Solutions Partner designation in Azure - concerns
Hello, I was recently in touch with Microsoft support querying the calculations for new clients and ACR growth within the Microsoft Solutions Partner Azure designations as I believed the ACR usage calculation in particular was not showing correctly. They confirmed that the calculation is correct and explained how this currently works which immediately flagged concerns for us. They recommended that I raise these concerns with the community as well as with our account managers which is currently in progress. The concerns currently relate to the requirements and calculations for new clients and growth which compare the previous year and corresponding month(s) as well as the fact that you must have more than zero points in each metric to qualify for a designation. The certification aspect while difficult are known targets rather than moving ones (mostly) and the deployments do not compare to previous years. We are using benefits from the competencies which we previously qualified for, since the changes to designations, we no longer qualify and so are working towards resolving this. If we are unable to achieve a designation by May 2024 then there will be a significant cost increase for us with 365 licenses and Azure usage. The usage growth ACR calculations are based on a comparison for a single month against the previous year equivalent e.g., May 2022 vs May 2023. The calculation looks at total usage across all clients we are working with for that month and if a larger client has had a reduction in usage which can occur for many reasons it can result in 0 or negative points for any given month. The new client calculation is similar and doesn’t factor in us working with our current client base even if we were able to grow there. Even if we were able to add new clients, if in a previous year/month we were more successful, no points are awarded. My understanding is that every month these are re-calculated and so in any given month we may not qualify when we are due to renew our benefits. We can put plans in place to attempt to ensure we meet these requirements when we are due to renew our benefits however currently we cannot guarantee this will be the case as it depends on many factors including how well we did the previous year for that same month and several factors that may be out of our control such as client usage. I found another article also talking about this and other issues here https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/partner-benefits/concerns-related-to-the-annual-changes-microsoft-partner/m-p/3851543. I know Microsoft do want partners to succeed and for some partners that continually better previous years this may not be an issue. Any assistance is appreciated. Kind regards, Dan