This week, we are celebrating the kickoff of our new fiscal year at Microsoft with MCAPS Start for Partners. Our inaugural digital event is designed to include partners in the Microsoft go-to-market strategy early in the fiscal year and foster collaboration to drive collective success.
We invite you to keep learning with links to the keynote and breakout sessions from this year’s event and to join us for an “ask me anything” (AMA) session later this month.
- Driving growth together: Our keynote event included Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, and Nick Parker, President, Industry & Partnerships, discussing how to accelerate AI opportunity and growth with Microsoft solutions.
- Unlocking success through engagement: on-demand focused sessions:
- Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program: the road ahead: The Microsoft Customer Engagement Model (MCEM) refers to the framework that connects all customer-facing roles across sales, customer success, industry solutions, and partners as one team, bringing together the best of what Microsoft has to offer to our customers through a unified engagement model. In this session you can learn about our new offers and benefits, aligned to MCEM, that are delivered through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. We also discuss meeting our customers’ needs on Microsoft cloud and share how to take advantage of new opportunities.
- Go-to-market updates: Join this session to learn about the FY25 solution plays, our customer value propositions, how they relate to our top five priorities, and the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program resources and investments available for partners to go to market and co-sell with Microsoft.
- Accelerate growth through partner incentives: Hear how incentives accelerate partner transformation and impact across our six cloud solution areas and the customer journey. Through intentional co-investments focused on our key strategic priorities, partners can drive outcomes to enable customer success. Learn more about our incentives principles to discover how you can take advantage of these offerings and start earning.
- Capturing the marketplace opportunity: Learn how to expand your business with the Microsoft commercial marketplace with guidance to help you accelerate B2B tech commerce, innovate with AI, and simplify sales.
- Evolution of co-selling with Microsoft: Find out more about the Microsoft Customer Engagement Methodology (MCEM) and how to increase the value of co-sell investments while ensuring the best possible outcome for our joint customers.
For additional resources related to these sessions, please check the end of this blog.
Join us live on July 18 for MCAPS Start for Partners AMA calls
We value feedback from our partners and are committed to ensuring your success in the coming year. To support this, we're hosting two Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions next week. Visit the MCAPS Start for Partners site to submit your questions.
News and announcements from MCAPS Start for Partners
Partner benefits and designations:
We are committed to providing the resources and support our partners need to deliver incredible solutions to organizations and communities globally. Earlier this year we introduced three new benefit packages called Partner Launch, Partner Success Core, and Partner Success Expanded. These benefits are purpose-built to meet the varied needs of our partners at different stages of growth and help you take your business to the next level.
The packages are all generally available now to every partner. At MCAPS Start for Partners we announced that we will be adding and updating more than 20 new product licenses into many of those benefit packages in the coming months, including Microsoft Copilot, Defender for Endpoint, and GitHub. More information on these benefits will be announced shortly.
Skilling:
At Microsoft we are committed to enabling partner skilling. Through our AI workshops and boot camps, we have trained over 818,000 AI learners on Microsoft Azure, Copilot, and Fabric since we launched them last year. Project Ready Workshops accelerate deployment and implementation, while our Sales Boot Camps boost mindshare and pipeline. We also introduced the AI Partner Training Roadshow to help our services partners grow their AI expertise.
Due to high partner demand, we will have 12 more in-person AI Partner Training Days next year, including alignment to the Microsoft AI Tour customer events. Learn more about training and certification resources.
Incentives:
One of our important benefits to enable us to grow together is a comprehensive incentives portfolio that empowers you to accelerate your growth, drive solution-focused wins, and maximize customer value. In FY25, we will continue to align with business priorities and offer differentiating incentives by partner type, solution area, customer segment, and MCEM stage.
We are continuing to deeply engage and support partners that focus on Small, Medium, and Corporate (SMC) customers, with continued significant increases in our incentives in this segment. As a partner making intentional bets in this segment, you will see meaningful earning potential across our business priorities.
Partners are essential to the Copilot customer journey. That is why we’ve developed a comprehensive set of pre- and post-sale engagements to guide partner execution in alignment with our existing go-to-market motions. To support this, we are increasing our Copilot investment by 10x over last year.
Security is a key priority and we’re investing $90M in incremental investments in FY25. We will continue the Threat Protection assessment and bring back the Data Security assessment. We are continuing Azure Migrate and Modernize with Defender for Cloud Attach that rewards you 15% for delivering secure migration projects and Microsoft Sentinel Migrate and Modernize. Finally, we’ve increased investments within CSP for ME5 and are boosting our strategic cybersecurity investments.
We continue to reward and support our partners for meeting customer needs beyond the sale, throughout the customer journey. Aligned with our foundational priority of Microsoft 365 Core Execution in FY25, we are increasing CSP incentives across strategic solutions including Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Business Premium, and with our incentives, you can earn up to $120K for Microsoft 365 E3 workloads per customer.
We have seen tremendous growth with more than 12,000 projects delivered through Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate. These are built to work together and enable simpler adoption of Azure to drive customer transformation. In FY25, we are adding new scenarios and increasing our investments for Azure Migrate and Modernize by 50% in FY25. For Azure Innovate we are increasing our pre-sales and post-sales investments to more than $150M, enabling partners to drive this innovation.
Azure Essentials is a new hub that provides guidance, resources, and tooling to help customers deploy and optimize their cloud and AI investments. It supports Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate with best practices, reference architectures, and skilling resources. Partners can use Azure Essentials to access content and enablement to deliver differentiated solutions on core scenarios across the Microsoft Azure solution plays and other topics like resilience and security.
Azure OpenAI Service Provisioned Throughput Units (PTU):
Microsoft is expanding customer purchasing flexibility of Azure OpenAI to include a Provisioned Throughput Unit (PTU) offering that will be available through customer self-service & CSP partner-supported models. PTUs provide throughput with consistent latency for uniform workloads, making them ideal for scaling AI solutions. We have also added a shorter 30-day reservation commitment option for added flexibility.
2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards:
We recently announced the winners and finalists of the 2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards, recognizing exceptional contributions and innovations from our global partners. The partners recognized with these awards demonstrate the monumental impact that Microsoft partners are delivering to customers. They also showcase outstanding successes and innovations across technologies and industries through business transformation and social impact.
Check out this year’s winners and finalists.
For more information on these announcements, watch the on-demand event sessions.
Join us for Microsoft Ignite in November
There are still more partner opportunities on the horizon! We are also inviting partners to join us in person this November when Microsoft Ignite arrives in Chicago! Click here to get added to the mailing list, and we will notify you when registration begins.
Additional session resources
- Session: Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program: The Road Ahead
- Session: Key Go-to-Market updates for the new fiscal year
- Session: Evolution of Co-Selling with Microsoft
- Session: Capturing the Marketplace Opportunity
- Session: Accelerate growth through partner incentives