Microsoft Silver and Gold Partner Network

[ev_buyer]

Hi All,

Apologies if there's already answers on here but the search functionally on PH does not work that well.


I'm trying to write a business case for my company to become a Silver or Gold partner for Microsoft.

We have a load of Azure cloud architects and .NET developers and we're seeing more and more requirements from our buyers to be on these partner networks.

Are they difficult to get on and stay on? I assuming there will be a cost associated with it too.

If anyone would like to share their experience with me that would be most appriciated.

Thanks

EV

[Harpoon]

I got the previous company I worked for to Silver status for "Small & Midmarket Cloud Solutions".

The annual fee paid to MS was more than covered by the benefits. For instance, the Office 365 licenses you got in return reduced our O365 bill nicely and pretty much made it cost neutral. I have a vague memory of completing some online training as you need some basic sales & technical accreditations but nothing like MCSE standard (as it was back then).

[Flooble]

I think I did the same as Harpoon - we had to sit a bunch of exams to prove we could give the correct advice on licences etc.

It is a bit of a pain the exams were on top of having people with MCPs etc - but it does help with credibility. Treat it the same as all the other bits of paper you have to collect if you want to sell to corporates, with the bonus of reduced prices for some of the software.

[ev_buyer]

Thanks Harpoon and Fooble

I'm really interested in the Azure part. Can you do cloud without the need to do MS licensing etc. Our people are accomplished cloud engineers. We don't have people who do product installation and support. (If that makes sense) We're a software delivery and consultancy group.

TIA

[Flooble]

Unfortunately the Azure part was even more annoying. Exams having to memorise obscure trivia about Microsoft's cloud offerings. Drove me round the bend, especially as I knew full well that it would be out of date (or in some cases you had to memorise the "exam answer" instead of the then-current answer).

It's a really tricky one. I find organisations which say "we are AWS and Azure and GCP experts" to be disingenuous. They might be an expert in one of them, or they might be an organisation that is really three separate divisions. But it would be nearly impossible to stay on top of all three providers as they throw mud at the wall to see what sticks. It's bad enough keeping up with the changes from just one provider.

So I think it's worth you doing, provided you accept that you are either going to have to pigeonhole yourself to only the Azure shops, or come up with some clever branding for why you can do all three (or more, the other day I fell off my chair as someone said they were going to use Oracle Cloud!)