How to become a Microsoft Azure Expert MSP

ANS CTO Andy Barrow takes us through the process of how it joined a limited list of partners to garner the exclusive label

ANS has added its name to a limited list of companies worldwide that have been named a Microsoft Azure Expert MSP.

The Manchester-based firm joins the likes of Claranet, Cloud Direct and Rackspace on the list of 45 partners listed on the Microsoft website.

CTO Andy Barrow explained that it took significant time and investment to achieve the goal of becoming an accredited Azure Expert MSP, and that it is best explained as an accreditation that brings partners into a programme.

He walked CRN through the steps involved in the process.

The prerequisites

To be eligible for the scheme, a partner needs to have covered a set of prerequisites, before progressing to the auditing stage.

A partner needs to be an active Gold cloud competency partner, generate at least $100,000 (£76,000) in Azure revenue a month, have a cloud solution provider contract in place, have at least 15 employees who are Microsoft cloud certified, as well as customer references regarding the service they receive from the partner.

Barrow said the customer references and the evidence that has to be provided to support the application are what distinguish the Expert accreditation form Microsoft's other cloud competencies.

"You've got to have a particular way of demonstrating the number of customers that you've built up, so you can't do this unless you have customers that are doing sizeable managed services with you on Azure," he explained.

"The idea behind it is that this is customer-based evidence that we manage Azure for them day in and day out and it's managed to the highest security standards."

The audit

Once partners have passed the prerequisites, they undergo the auditing process.

Barrow said that ANS had a core team of four to six people working on the accreditation full-time over six months, but that most departments in the company gave input on the project at some point, from the service management division to solution architecture to its security and governance units.

"During the on-site audit you are working through a rigorous process where you are proving to the Microsoft auditor that you have met all the requirements," Barrow stated.

He said that ANS' audit took two days and involved about 16 hours' worth of presentations, which involved a "paper trail" of documents outlining how it deployed, managed and built solutions for customers, along with how it handled technical escalations, and that documentation had to be in a particular format.

The hurdles

Barrow admitted that Microsoft does have a number of hoops to jump through in order to become an Azure Expert MSP, and that ANS has invested significantly in the process.

Partners require their own bespoke digital management portals, as well as their own cloud management platform to take part in the process. ANS already had these in place, so it wasn't too much of an extra burden, according to Barrow.

We've put significant investment into doing this," he said.

"You can't just do this in your spare time; it is a business function you are investing in, so you have to take people out of their day job and build a team to make sure that you are doing the processes according to the Expert guidelines.

"Microsoft expects an incredibly high standard - which may be higher than you are currently undertaking.

"You might have to redesign the process you already have, or if you're already doing the process to the standard that Microsoft wants, you have to evidence them in the way that it wants."

Differentiation is key

The advantage of being named a Microsoft Azure Expert MSP is the distinction it provides, according to Barrow.

"In the Microsoft ecosystem it is incredibly difficult to differentiate because there are so many thousands of partners in the UK, which makes it hard to go into customers and stand out because you all have the same qualification," the CTO explained.

"The Expert MSP programme highlights the elite, so you can go to a customer and show them that you are building and managing Azure environments to the highest standard, which have been audited individually on-site by Microsoft.

"The differentiation is around being able to articulate to the customer that you are at the industry's highest possible standard."

The accreditation plays into ANS' continued move away from hardware into cloud services.

In its recent H1 results, managed services contributed 58 per cent to its £25.2m revenue. Though the MSP did not disclose a figure, it reported that its cloud services margin increased 296 per cent compared with its 2018 H1.

Barrow hopes that the Azure Expert accreditation will maximise its ability to win more deals in the cloud space.

"When working strategically with a vendor we always want to operate at the highest possible level with them," he explained.

"We want to work with Microsoft in this space to get to the highest level possible, at any cost. We want to demonstrate that we don't want to be in the cloud market half and half, we wanted something that would put us at the top."