Dissolving Partnerships

I’ve been an independent consultant for almost 20 years and through most of this time, my company (Prologika) has been a Microsoft consultancy partner with Gold Data Analytics and Gold Data Platform competencies. Speaking of which, I’d like to thank all the wonderful people who have helped Prologika attain and maintain these competencies over the years by taking rigorous certification exams. I couldn’t have done it without you!

My simple definition of a consultant is an external expert whose services improve the client’s situation. Therefore, the most important criterion for measuring the consultant’s effectiveness is how much “lift” the client gets.

Effectiveness is rarely tangible because it’s difficult to measure. However, in the past, the second component (besides certifications) for maintaining the Microsoft partnership was providing customer references to Microsoft. I don’t think Microsoft ever called the customers but if they did, a simple question would have been “On the scale from to 1 to 10, how do you measure the Prologika’s intervention to improve the objective they were hired to do?” Or, “would you rehire or recommend Prologika?” That’s it, no fancy scores are necessary. Most often, the client is either happy or unhappy, although shades of gray might exist.

Fast forwarding to Microsoft modern partnership requirements and things have changed starting the beginning of this year where Microsoft introduced new criteria for measuring the effectiveness of their partners expressed as a “partner capability score” – “a holistic measurement framework which evaluates the partner on categories of performance, skilling and customer success”. Before we get to it, I find it sad that as a woke company positioned to defend minorities (see the Microsoft’s wokeness report), Microsoft has gone to great lengths to destroy its small-biz partner ecosystem over the years, including:

1. Favoring large “managed” partners.
2. Replacing the Microsoft Software Assurance consulting credits, where the client had the discretion how to spend and allocate, with revenue-centric Microsoft-managed funds which are almost impossible to get approved for, such as ECIF and PIE.
3. Replacing a designated Microsoft Partner Network point of contact with offshore outsourced service.
4. All the promises given and broken through years. Too many to mention here but it looks to me that every now and then some manager comes which a checklist of all great things Microsoft will do for partners and then all if forgotten or suffers a natural death.
5. Removing the Silver partner level.

Let’s now look at the new partner capability score for Data & AI, which spans three categories: performance, skilling, and customer success.

• Performance – the partner must add up to 3 new customers every year. Apparently, Microsoft favors expansion of the customer base (more revenue) as opposed to doing recurring business to existing customers, which to me is by far a much better testimonial for effective services. But wait, there is a fine text explaining that not all customers are equal. “This is the number of unique customer tenants contributing at least $1000 ACR (Azure Consumed Revenue) in one of the last 2 months.” There we go. The emphasis is on selling more aggressively to customers.
• Skilling – No surprises here. Microsoft wants a certain number of certified individuals. This is the only commonality with the old partner criteria.
• Customer success – It quickly becomes evident that Microsoft equates “customer success” with revenue. Here we have two paths: number of deployments that depend on advanced Azure services represented in ACR (meaning expensive) and usage growth expressed as ACR growth across the customer base over the past 12 months.

There you have it. Microsoft now views partners as extension to their sales force that are pressured to sell and generate revenue to Microsoft. The more the partner sells, the better partner you are. Therefore, expect increased pressure from Microsoft partners to sell expensive products you probably don’t need, such as Power BI Premium or Fabric in the data analytics space.

The Microsoft VP who came up with this should have been fired on the spot. Gee, with all this focus on revenue, you might think that the partner gets some decent revenue cut, but that’s not the case. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not making money from selling software and when I recommend a tool it’s always for the client’s best interest and my recommendation is usually very cost effective.

Given that my business values differ from the new Microsoft partnership values, I’m not planning to pursue further competency in the Microsoft partnership ecosystem. I’ll keep the hard earned and now retired Gold partner logo to remind me of what’s important. I’ll continue working with and recommending Microsoft products when it makes sense, such as when they are better from the competition, but without any strings attached.