Tech Data has now registered more than 110,000 end-user seats, all of which will be generating recurring revenues for Microsoft CSP partners. It is now calling on any resellers that have not yet engaged on the programme, and in particular, those who currently earn fees for Microsoft Cloud Solutions, through the Partner of Record scheme, to switch their customers to CSP before June this year, as all fees related to Partner of Record through the Advisor programme will be withdrawn by Microsoft.
“It’s vital for resellers to act”, said Dwayne Earl, Software Business Unit Manager at Tech Data. “Under the Advisor scheme, although the partner would earn a fee from Microsoft, not only has this fee eroded over time, it will disappear completely at the end of June. The preference now is for all sales to go via partners, but they need to do that through CSP, so those resellers who did act as Advisors need to make their move and switch their customers across now.”
Resellers that do move their end users from the direct billing model through Microsoft to CSP will see benefits such as annuity based revenue, more profit and the ability to blend in their own services with the sale.
Tech Data has a full CSP programme in place, with sales, technical and marketing workshops running on a regular basis to support with the above transition. It has already assisted more than 300 partners in getting onto CSP and has a team of ten staff dedicated to the scheme.
The distributor is also seeing more Microsoft Partners to take part in its Velocity accelerator programme. Designed to act as a ‘concierge’ service for resellers that want to attain Microsoft Silver Cloud Platform Competency for Azure, it provides a complete support framework and set of resources for sales, technical and marketing enablement.
The Velocity scheme is ideal for resellers looking to provide IaaS, PaaS, or any other Microsoft cloud solutions. Tech Data offers a complete hand-holding service with support provided by some of the best Microsoft experts in the UK.