Page 2 of 6
I think you specifically mentioned "cloud" and "solutions" incentives.
We've focused that incremental money in on those two areas. With cloud, we've increased what we've done with the Microsoft Online Services Partner Advisor program and that's moved from a program where, depending on which element you were in, it was 18 points, we've now increased that so you can get up to 23 points with the accelerators in year one [of a subscription contract].
One of the other things we did that I think is very important, we had, unintentionally, created some channel conflict in that we sell to large corporations through enterprise agreements. I think one of the brilliant things we did was we created a cloud EA [Enterprise Agreement] where our field [sales], our LARs [Large Account Resellers], everyone can just continue to sell the way they sell today and include Office 365, Azure, and [Dynamics] CRM [Online] into their EA.
The problem we created, though, we also spun up this channel Advisor program and the Advisors have been, in some cases, very big SIs [systems integrators]. And, in some cases, they are also working in these large accounts. So we had both sides sometimes pitching Office 365, which is good. But then when it was time to sell, we were creating a bit of channel conflict there.
So what we've done for this next year in accounts like that, where they're covered by an EA, we're going to continue selling through an EA, but Advisors will get paid and we want them to focus their activity on activation and deployment. So they will get paid as those seats that get sold get activated. It's great because it's driving that alignment with a set of partners [whose] competency is really on selling and the other set of partners that really have the deep competency on activation. And we're really looking to bring those two together and really accelerate going into the next year the activation of Office 365 in large accounts.
There's a couple of other stats that I thought were really exciting. We've seen the classic channel dimensions, reach and frequency, grow substantially. We [have] over 7,000 partners selling [Office 365] on a frequency of more than once a month. And that to me is really material. The numbers we're starting to see in our cloud offerings are becoming very impactful for the channel. That's Office 365 specifically. It would be broader if we folded in some other [cloud products]. The enthusiasm around these products is exciting to see.
NEXT: Evolution Of The Office 365 Open Program
