Microsoft Addresses Partners about the New Commerce Experience for CSP

On Wednesday 17th November 2021, Louise Ulrick - Commercial Licensing Specialist, provided Microsoft partners an update on New Commerce Experience (NCE) on the CSP Update webinar. New Commerce is evolving to streamline the customer experience; enabling partners to broaden their influence, and support customers’ needs via greater transparency with a better business outcome. Louise gave an overview of the changes to come into effect, and covered topics on ways to manage subscriptions, invoices and billing periods, pricing, adding and reducing licenses, and migration.

Following from the webinar by Louise Ulrick, I thought we could look at this a little closer and share some thoughts on what we should be doing to prepare as a community.

What I like about New Commerce is the re-birthing of the ownership; the end-to-end solution is with the partner. This allows the partner to create, add or improve their offering and solutions that they are delivering. There has been talks about this since the beginning of CSP – how NCE enhances and in many ways, gives ownership of the solution back to the partner.

The support for the partner still sits with the Indirect Provider such as Dicker Data, but the solution, T&C’s, and price all sit with the Indirect Reseller.

“Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change.”

Richard Branson

As with all changes that we experience, it’s important that we take the time to plan and understand the timing involved. To help our valued partners with this transition, the timeline below outlines some key dates and promotion incentives.

FY22 / FY23 timeline

As part of the NCE, we will be able to engage in some new features such as Pause, Cancel and Auto Renew. The diagram below explains what each of these features do and how it will help with the solution on offer.

So how do we ensure that we are part of the NCE? You need to decide if a tenant or subscription is eligible. There is a transition process, but once you decide whether a tenant or subscription is eligible, understanding the migration rules is key.

Migration Rules: 

1. Only one subscription can be migrated at a time
2. Only eligible subscriptions can be migrated. Ineligible subscriptions include: 
   • Subscriptions within their first month
   • Inactive subscriptions
   • Trial subscriptions
   • Subscriptions with promotions
   • Subscriptions with Add-Ons 
   • Subscriptions for Government, Education or Nonprofit
   • Subscriptions for retired offers

Finally, you can access a range of resources from Microsoft here. In addition, Dicker Data have launched a series of webinars over the last few months dedicated to answering questions and helping partners navigate the change. You can access a summary FAQ document from past sessions here, or register to our New Commerce Experience Ascend Program, providing useful resources on how to make NCE work for you. 

Final Thoughts

This is all about adoption. We all know adoption is a key component of what we do in Modern Workplace, and with New Commerce, it really is vital that we, as a community, adopt to this new way of seat based CSP. This may mean we have to re-consider how we align our selling process, and the T&C’s for our offers. I remember at the birth of CSP (or otherwise known as BPOS) many thought that BPOS was here to change the industry in a detrimental way – but in fact, there are some very positive outcomes of New Commerce if we are willing to look for them.