Microsoft Readies Channel Partner Overhaul

Microsoft Monday will unveil plans to overhaul its channel partner program, including doing away with the current "gold," "certified" and "general register" designations in favor of ranking partners according to their competencies.

The company will also debut specific plans to help partners that work with its Dynamics ERP and CRM applications to focus more on vertical markets.

The changes are part of a broader series of channel program plans Microsoft is unveiling this week at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.

"Our partners' and our current customers' needs are changing," said Julie Bennani, general manager of the Microsoft Partner Network, in an interview last week. She said the changes are designed to help partners develop new skills and better differentiate themselves in the marketplace, "not just from a technology perspective, but from a business perspective."

Microsoft has some 640,000 channel partners and thousands of them (16,700 worldwide and 4,500 in the U.S.) are designated "Gold" partners. Microsoft wants to grow its partner base to over 1 million during the next two to three years, Bennani said.

The new tiers (which Microsoft is calling "landing places") under which Microsoft partners will be categorized will be "community," "subscriber," "competency" and "advanced competency," according to Bennani. That will replace the gold, certified and general register categories to which partners are now assigned.

Community resellers will largely be new partners starting out while subscribers will be partners with a narrowly focused practice targeting a specific customer audience. Microsoft will focus its branding activities on the competency and advanced competency tiers.

Microsoft has created 30 "solution competencies" that channel partners can become certified in. Core infrastructure competencies, for example, include virtualization, desktop platforms, and identity and security; while the business productivity competency includes business intelligence, content management and unified communications.

Channel partners also will be judged on their customer focus, customer satisfaction, lead generation and commitment to their specialization, Bennani said.

Microsoft will implement the new program over the next two years. In the first year the vendor will launch the new partner brands and reorganize practices into the new competency classifications. But gold-certified partners will retain that certification for the year. In the second year Microsoft will begin to assess partner qualifications and certify them for the new competencies.

The points model currently used to assign partners to tiers will be discontinued.

"Prior to these changes, it's been very hard for a customer to distinguish between one partner and another," said Tony DiBenedetto, CEO of Tribridge, a gold-certified partner that sells Microsoft software, including its Dynamics applications. He was confident the Tampa-based solution provider can meet Microsoft's new certification requirements, but he acknowledged: "I don't think everybody will feel that way."

As part of the broader channel partner program overhaul, Microsoft will be working to upgrade Dynamics ERP and CRM application resellers with more business and project management skills. "This is really the biggest change we've had in the channel program," said Jeff Edwards, director of partner strategy for the Dynamics applications.

Microsoft will be putting more emphasis on partners that focus more on vertical markets and generate more sales growth from new customers. The company is also looking to its Dynamics partners to provide core complex solutions to customers, such as the ability to integrate the Dynamics applications with the vendor's SharePoint and Outlook software, Edwards said.

"If you're going to have a strategy built around verticals as Microsoft does, then you've got to have a partner community that's got the same depth and focus," Tribridge's DiBenedetto said. Tribridge focuses on distribution, financial service, government and professional service markets.

Edwards said Microsoft will offering Dynamics partners that make the grade more marketing funds and assistance, particularly devoted to their vertical industry efforts, a broader range of training in pre-sales and sales methods, and new regional industry development managers to work with partners.

In March, at Microsoft's Convergence conference that focuses on the Dynamics applications, Microsoft executives said the company intended to devote more business development resources to Dynamics software resellers that have a vertical industry focus and bring in more new customers.

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