Microsoft partners play a critical role across all stages of a customer’s lifecycle, including advising, selling, building and managing solutions that meet customer needs. We are committed to transforming the go-to-market experience to better serve partners and our joint customers, while making it easier for partners to work with Microsoft to leverage our incentives and investments.
We are currently on a multi-stage, multi-year journey to deliver a simplified engagement experience that maximizes partner earning opportunity and creates new value for customers and partners:
- The first stage of this journey began in March 2019 with the launch of Microsoft Azure incentives for new commerce for the enterprise purchase motion and later the addition of incentives for the breadth purchasing motion in October 2019.
- In the second stage of the journey, in October 2020, we brought together Azure incentives with the Microsoft Commerce Incentives (MCI) programs to provide a single destination for partners providing Azure managed and value-add services to our customers.
- In this third phase of our journey, we are delivering a new experience in Partner Center for the Microsoft Commerce Incentives Program. In fiscal year 2022, we are releasing new incentive and investment offers leveraging this enhanced partner experience.
Key earning opportunities for fiscal year 2022 include:
- Continued incentives for Azure on the new commerce experience as incentives for the previous Azure offer are phased out on February 1st, 2022.
- Earning opportunities for Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 breadth motions on the new commerce experience.
- Rewards for Cloud Solution Provider partners for customer acquisition efforts for Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365.
- Usage-based incentives for partners who increase consumption on Power Platform.
- Additional activity-based incentives for partners who drive customer workshops for Modern Work and Security solutions.
In future phases, we will continue to add, enhance, expand, and migrate new and existing incentive opportunities into the Microsoft Commerce Incentives program.
Simplifying and streamlining the partner experience will take time as incentive opportunities move under the Microsoft Commerce Incentives program.
Our journey towards simplification does not end with combining incentive opportunities under the Microsoft Commerce Incentives program. We’re also investing in a new partner experience – within Partner Center – to create a centralized destination for partners to earn incentives across purchasing motions and stages of the customer lifecycle. As we develop this consolidated partner experience, we are focused on three design principles:
- Streamline how we deliver incentives, investments, and activities through a connected Partner Center experience.
- Enable partners to deliver more value with customer focused earning opportunities.
- Provide transparency and predictability for earning opportunities across available incentive engagements.
We are excited about the possibilities these new earning opportunities and Partner Center capabilities will create throughout our partner ecosystem to help customers realize the value of their cloud investments.
Visit the Microsoft partner website for the fiscal year 22 incentive program guides and other additional resources about our incentive programs and to learn more about how we can collaborate to help customers realize the value of their cloud investments.