Cloud drives Microsoft Partner Network rejig

Cloud Essentials and Cloud Accelerate scrapped as standalone benefits and included in all Competencies instead

Microsoft has insisted that all its partners should sell products or services that are at least partially cloud based and has tweaked its partner network (MPN) to reflect this.

Currently, cloud training tool Cloud Essentials and incentive Cloud Accelerate are separate programmes outside of MPN, but that is set to change from next January.

The vendor announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston that in order to reflect its transition to a devices and services firm, both the programmes will be built in as standard with all Competencies.

But combining the content of the cloud programmes into existing Competencies would not diminish their worth to partners, the vendor claimed.

Julie Benanni, Microsoft's general manager for MPN, said: "To capitalise on this customer opportunity and compete effectively, every Microsoft partner must be able to sell and deliver solutions that are fully or partially cloud based.

"Given that, we are making a number of updates to the Microsoft Partner Network that ensure all partners are cloud capable."

Microsoft has been pushing the cloud to partners for the past five years but ratcheted up the cloudy rhetoric at this year's WPC.

It claims a quarter of its enterprise customers now use cloud-based Office 365 – a business with an annual run rate of more than $1bn (£671m) which it said is set to become one of the fastest-growing businesses in its history.

On top of that, it said it has seen 40 per cent growth in its enterprise cloud business, as well as its Azure cloud platform outgrowing the overall cloud market by more than 150 percentage points.