The New Microsoft Partner Program & Solution Designation Requirements

In August we announced that changes to the Microsoft Partner program were imminent and with the retirement of Gold and Silver competencies, a number score & Solution Designation would be how Microsoft will track performance, offer rebates and incentives and refer leads going forward.  

In the latest Australian Partner Community call, the Microsoft team discussed that customers are more frequently coming to Microsoft for references to partners and they needed a more objective measure to qualify partners. Solution Designation was designed to support this as well as the evolving business landscape. You can read more from Microsoft on the new program here. 

With the program officially in place now, it is critical that partners keep track on the requirements of each Solution Designation as we have seen these elements shift.  

We recommend that all Partners ensure they are reviewing the Partner Centre assets here. These assets are useful for building individual plans to ensure you are up to date in all 3 categories. 

UPDATED! 3 Categories to achieve your Solution Designation: 

Performance

(Net customer adds) 

• Points are awarded for the number of eligible customers added in the trailing 12 months. (Lost customers are subtracted from new customers.) 
• Each of the six solution areas (for example, Security) has a customer growth threshold for partners to reach. 
• Each of the six solution areas has its own eligibility criteria for new customers. 
• The eligible customers are customers new to the partner. This can be a customer new to using Microsoft products or a customer using Microsoft products that moves to a new partner. The customer must be associated with the partner to be included in the metric. 

Skilling

(Measures capabilities and skills acquired as the number of people in a partner organsiation who are certified.)

(New!) There are two metrics in the skilling category: 

• Intermediate certifications measure your organisation's progress towards having an adequate number of people with intermediate certifications in specified solution areas. (In some of the six solution areas, only intermediate certifications are available.) 
• Advanced certifications measure your organisation's progress towards having an adequate number of people with advanced certifications in specified solution areas. 

As solution areas evolve and change, required certifications are expected to change as well. For the latest required certifications keep track of the assets here. 

Customer Success

(The customer success category measures your organsiation's ability to enable growth in the use of Microsoft products, or in the expansion of Microsoft's services and workloads used by customers.)

There are two metrics in the customer success category, usage growth and deployments. 

• Usage growth measures the growth in usage of Microsoft's products by your customers in the past year. Each solution area has its own thresholds, weight, and qualifying criteria for which customers earn you points in this metric. To learn about the details of criteria for this metric, refer to the detailed requirements for each solution area. 
• Deployments measures your ability to expand the deployment of Microsoft workloads and products within a specified solution area across your customer portfolio. To learn more about the criteria for this metric, refer to the detailed requirements for each solution area. 

Next Steps 

Partners who meet the requirements for the new solutions partner designation will receive the designation automatically. For partners who don’t meet the criteria, you have time until your next membership anniversary after October 3, 2022, to earn a minimum of 70 points across Performance, Skilling and Customer Success. Attaining solutions partner designation will earn Microsoft Solutions partner badge and benefits such as product licenses, advisory hours, and marketing. 

If you are yet to take action, don’t forget you can explore your Partner capability score here, which can help you prepare for the changes and offer more details into the requirements.