You’ll probably be aware of the changes that Microsoft has made as it progresses to the next phase of the New Commerce Experience. Essentially, these changes aim to unify and simplify licensing across all Microsoft cloud solutions. They make it clearer and easier to understand the options and select the best fit for each individual customer.
The key change is that customers who currently have Microsoft 365 or Power platform solutions will now have a choice of committing to a minimum number of seats for a 12 month period or having a contract that allows them to flex seat numbers up or down at monthly intervals.
From a partner perspective, this will mean more accurate revenue forecasting. It will also mitigate the impacts that can come about as a result of all customers being on shorter subscription terms.
In addition, the New Commerce Experience will bring numerous benefits to CSP partners and end users that were not available previously, including:
► Monthly, one-year commitments and three-year commitments coming with favourable pricing for long-term commitments
► Communications credit
► Multi-geo add-ons – previously only an Enterprise Agreement benefit
► Home use benefits
► Feature announcements for Windows 365
► New features and tools to streamline subscription management and the transition of existing subscription to the New Commence Experience
► These benefits will be released over next year. After March 2022 all new features and benefits for Microsoft products will only be released under the NCE subscriptions. Subsequently, they will not be available to customers with ‘legacy’ CSP subscriptions.
While all these benefits are welcome, we fully expect partners will want to know more, and to dive deeper on certain aspects of the New Commence Experience. In particular, they will undoubtedly be anticipating the conversations that they’ll need to have with customers – especially around the new subscription commitments.
As a close partner of Microsoft, we have been aware that these changes were coming, and our team has been fully briefed on what they mean – both for partners and end-user customers. Our team is ready to support you in understanding the new pricing structure and approach to cloud user subscriptions – and to support you in managing customer transitions.
We’ve also given a lot of thought to how we can help partners articulate and communicate the changes for end customers. To this end, we have produced a set of easy-to-read documents and infographics on the changes, which we will happily make available to you.
We will also be running a series of webinars starting 25th August to provide more information about the changes. In these sessions we will outline what we see as being best practice on the New Commence Experience and explain how partners can work with customers to identify which of the available options is best-suited to them.
Register here today
Further details of these events – and more information on the New Commence Experience – can be found on our Yammer pages and social media.
And if you have any specific questions, or would like to know more about how TD SYNNEX can support you in advancing your Microsoft CSP business, please submit this quick form below and one of the CSP team will be in touch directly.
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