Microsoft Office 365 Open, MSP Billing Make Debut

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Micrososoft’s channel chief Jon Roskill delivered the news in an open letter to partners here. In it he notes that “Your feedback was instrumental to adding Open and FPP licensing subscriptions to Office 365, and the benefits of these selling models for partners are clear.”

Roskill ticks those off quickly — top-line revenue and margin on the resale and earning partner incentives — the ones that are most important to the resale side of the market.

Giving the MSPs what they want

On the MSP side “you sell and service customers in the ways that so many of you are accustomed to doing,” he wrote. It answers a longstanding issue some MSPs had with the set up of the Office 365 model which only allowed Microsoft to bill customers directly or “syndication” partners to bill customers directly. For MSPs that were accustomed to bundling services together, selling them, and presenting customers with a single bill, Microsoft’s original billing structure for 365 just didn’t work.

Incentives

With the launch, Microsoft is offering some incentives including the Use it! program that gives partners who sign up for Cloud Essentials 25 seats of Office 365 to deploy internally along with access to delegated administration to better manage end customers, Roskill said. Also offered are marketing campaigns and collateral as well as training and help with understanding the always byzantine-style of Microsoft software licensing.

As noted in Talkin’ Cloud Microsoft’s online version of Office goes up against competitive offers from Google in the form of Apps and Docs, and Google has made life easier for partners, allowing them to bill their own customers. As some VARs and MSPs have pointed out to me, however, you can’t build a business off the slim margins offered in Google’s model. But that is probably true of many cloud-based applications.