What are some of the pain points with NCE you have been hearing from partners?

It came to market as flexible and perhaps it was not perceived or received that way in the marketplace. There were some business challenges that partners needed to take on; some partners didn’t have the ability to adjust contracts midterm. So they needed to go back and get some new agreements signed with their customers.

It’s hard for Microsoft to predict some of these challenges as they serve all partner types around the world. But Pax8 has been fighting behind the scenes on partners’ behalf and I expect relief soon.

How big a distraction has NCE been for partners that would rather be focused on increasing sales rather than dealing with licensing issues?

There are some silver linings to this as well. As the revenue is flowing through our [Pax8] marketplace, there is no doubt that it is a good thing for our partners that customers can’t stop that contract and decrease those license counts. But it has been a little bit of a distraction and it has slowed down new tenant acquisition.

I think if there was a program to be released in October the best thing it could do is to ease some of that friction and ease some of that risk and burden.