Microsoft announced the retirement of Microsoft competencies and the introduction of Solution Partner Designations.
This means phoning up your next new client and quoting to be a ‘Gold Microsoft partner’, now means zilch and now it’s all about being a solutions partner hence my catchy title… (enough said about that the better).
Moving forward competencies have been replaced by 6 Solution Partner Designations which cover the Microsoft stack and are broken into the following categories.
- Business Applications
- Data & AI
- Digital & App Innovation
- Infrastructure (Azure)
- Modern Work
- Security
When Microsoft retired competencies as of October 2022, risual were successful in getting 5 out of 6 – which we’re pretty impressed with, and further demonstrates risuals long term commitment to Microsoft! The following designations were achieved as part of the new process:
- Data & AI
- Digital & App Innovation
- Infrastructure (Azure)
- Modern Work
- Security
Solution partner designations demonstrate risuals broad technical competence, backed up with performance from clients, skilling, and client success. This means for 5 out of 6 categories, risual holds the relevant skills, registered deployments via PAL and CPOR, and grown active usage or adoption (to me or you) in various clients over the last 12 months. Moving forward this is how Microsoft will benchmark their partners; and in turn so will our clients.
In addition, those partners wishing to showcase even deeper expertise, can take on Specializations (Previously known as Advanced Specializations, and as another side note – risual holds 10 of them by the way ?), which again demonstrates an even deeper level of experience within various workloads. For example, this includes Windows & SQL migrations, or Azure Virtual Desktop etc.
Specializations not only need an independent audit (again based on skills, client deployments and applying best practice) but also continual growth in leveraging and adopting cloud technology for our clients – meaning we physically must evidence client levels of adoption. In other words, we’ve done it time and time before, and your in safe hands!
Now this is all good and well but what does this mean for our clients? A benefit of Specializations is that it allows us to tap into various funding programs to help our clients adopt and move to the cloud quicker and having some of the effort supplemented by Microsoft.
It’s in this bracket we talk about the Azure Modernise and Migration Program (or AMMP as its commonly referred to). As part of this program, and unique to those as part of the Azure Expert MSP program, and certain specializations (you got it, risual are in both of those brackets ?), risual has access to pre-approved funding to help clients move from on premises to Azure, leverage better VDI instances and many more user cases.
Now in terms of programs to leverage, it’s not all Azure related, we also have access to Microsoft Managed Security Solutions Provider workshops (we know it’s a mouthful), which are pre-approved engagements we can run as part of your Microsoft 365 entitlement – I must state that not every organisation is eligible, but a quick check via our Microsoft Partner Team, will show what eligibility you have, should this be of interest as these can be run free of charge.
For more information, please get in touch and I hope the above has helped in demystifying the Microsoft landscape, and how you could be leveraging the Microsoft Partner Eco-System better.
