Partner earned credit: an overview of how it works in the new commerce experience in CSP
Appropriate roles: User management admin | Admin agent | Billing admin | Sales agent
Partner earned credit in the new commerce experience in CSP is a business model that accomplishes simplified uniform Azure pricing. It does so across Microsoft's Go-to-Market vehicles, while nurturing a partner ecosystem that provides value-added managed services. Partner-earned credit also helps eliminate any competition on margins.
Pricing can be challenging for many customers and partners, especially when you consider the thousands of services in Azure and multiple options to buy. In the new commerce experience for Azure, we've aligned to single global pricing principles applicable to all motions we transact. You can offer Azure at the published prices. Doing so provides greater transparency to their customers and builds trust.
The digital transformation needs of our customers are changing the nature of value that partners offer. Many customers look to partners to provide services above and beyond the transaction. Such services can help them smooth out their cloud journey and help them consume Azure services efficiently. These services are ongoing. They include Azure estate monitoring, policy and governance management, set up and configuration fine-tuning, technical support, and various other services.
These services require a partner to be both familiar with the customer's Azure environment and have continuous and appropriate governance and control of the underlying resources they manage. Billing partners who provide this 24 X 7 cloud-operations management activity will become eligible for a Partner earned credit for services managed on the customers' Azure estate governed and controlled by the partner.
Benefits of the partner earned credit for partners and customers
Customers can outsource their Azure infrastructure management and billing to their trusted partner, enabling them to focus on their core business.
Customers work with a partner who invests in managed services on Azure that help drive cost efficiencies and operational efficiencies involved in consuming Azure.
Partners are rewarded because they provide a robust managed services portfolio on Azure for their customers.
Intimate association and management of Customer's Azure projects will bring new opportunities to partner and help drive consumption growth.
Manage, automate, and optimize
As customers transition to cloud computing platforms, they're not just faced with managing a new set of technologies. They must also find a new way to approach the management and operation of their digital estate. While the cloud can bring greater business value and agility, it can also bring new concerns, including lack of proper security and cost control.
Your customers look to you to help them get the most from their business hosted in Azure. With managed services, you can regularly provide your customers with white-glove service. Some of the day-to-day operations and support you might provide includes:
Cloud operations and management services: Customers look to Microsoft partners to reduce costs in Azure while reproducing the isolation, security policies, and audit models they have today. They also expect partners to have access to mature tools for identifying workload suitability and the one-time deployment and ongoing operational costs of Azure. In addition, customers need support for automation and orchestration, patching updates, configuration management, backup and disaster recovery, and identity management.
Cloud monitoring and technical support: In a cloud consumption world, the tools and requirements have evolved, but the concern for finding the right resource for managing IT infrastructure hasn't changed. Most organizations simply don't have the time, resources, or dedicated staff required to monitor every aspect of IT. It's there that you, as the trusted partner, add the most value. Azure offers many built-in monitoring capabilities. Organizations need partners who provide more, deeper monitoring tooling. They also need partners who can triage false positives from real alerts, and who can proactively act upon alerts before any measurable loss in performance.
Included in monitoring and technical support
System health monitoring: Complete monitoring of VMs, CPU utilization, memory usage, storage IOPs, and OS performance. Includes monitoring of application performance and operation health, and dashboards and reports on system health.
Log analytics and alerting: Every client, device, and user accessing a network produces data that is logged. Analyzing logs can offer deeper insight into performance, security, resource consumption, and other meaningful metrics.
Database monitoring: A view into customer's database that helps partners ensure high availability of database servers. The process involves keeping logs of size, connection time and users of databases, analyzing use trends, and using data to proactively remediate issues.
App performance monitoring: End-to-end tracking of all aspects of an application (or webpage). App monitoring involves watching every part—from shopping carts to registration pages—of a customer's apps for performance issues to provide the best user experience possible.
Learn more about how to expand your managed services portfolio with Azure.
These services entail an appropriate level of access for partners into the customer's Azure environment, and our commerce system will measure the access details to calculate the partner earned credit.
Note
Customers have the option to remove any access given to the partners. Partners should not coerce customers to assign them appropriate access for the sole purpose of earning partner earned credit from Microsoft - failure to adhere to this requirement might make the partner ineligible to earn partner earned credit.