When Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) was given a full launch by Microsoft the firm started to add more of its products into the mix, but sales of Office 365 have always been the main source of revenues from CSP. This could be set to change.
This program is designed to enable Microsoft's partners to manage the whole of their customer lifecycle for Microsoft Cloud on a direct basis. During a recent broadcast of the podcast called The Ultimate Guide to Partnering created by Vince Menzione, a former channel executive at Microsoft, the software firm's cloud partner sales manager for the US, William Lewallen, emphasised that Office 365 represents a huge part of CSP - more than 80 percent of it to be precise. Menzione has been inviting a number of top Microsoft program managers to appear on this podcast, making it a valuable way of finding out the company's plans concerning program roadmaps and metrics.
During his appearance, Lewallen pointed out that the 80 percent CSP revenue percentage that Office 365 accounts for represents a drop of 20 percent from the past. This is because the CSP pie as a whole is expanding as it becomes the preferred cloud service sales method for Microsoft. Lewallen stated:
"Over the last 18 months, the (CSP) business has grown over 30 percent each month. We're talking about a business that's many orders of magnitude larger today than it was 18 months ago."
Although he added that this expansion was leading to products outside of Office 365 beginning to play a role within CSP, he did not go into any details as to which ones it might be. Among the possibilities are Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, Dynamics 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security and Azure. Lewallen did joke during the podcast that the variety offered by this group of products meant that almost the entire desktop could be licensed to the data centre via CSP.
Furthermore, he gave a clear indication that those 6,000 users of CSP who are United States-based could anticipate an increase in the products that are offered via it by 2018. It appears that cloud services for government will be first to be rolled out, which likely means Azure followed by Dynamics 365 and Office 365 as the schedule. It will not simply be the indirect providers of CSP – such as SherWeb, Tech Data and Ingram Micro – that are offering services not provided by Microsoft to be resold by their partners with the Microsoft ones, according to Lewallen:
"In time, people who go through our direct program will be able to go into our Partner Centre, and eventually you'll be able to actually order third-party applications through that experience as well."
We will be interested to see how Microsoft develops its CSP program. If you want to see how the SharePoint products we build can assist you, contact WM Reply now.