Orlando, Fla. – At last year’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C., Microsoft gave partners a little taste of its Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. But at this year’s show, Microsoft announced an expanded CSP program with more enhancement such as the ability to cover additional markets (131 worldwide).
The expanding CSP program will also have additional cloud solutions such as CRM Online and Azure. Last year the CSP plan just had Office 365 and Intune.
In the Canadian market there are 23 channel partners who are operational with CSP along with five other Tier 2 partners; Montreal’s SherWeb and Toronto’s Ceryx. However, Microsoft Canada channel chief Jason Brommet told CDN that the subsidiary is close to sign 20 more that are in the pipeline.
“For FY 2016, we are going to turn on the rocket boosters. What’s really important is that more traditional type partners are advancing inside the CSP program such as ProServeIT,” Brommet said. ProServeIT just won the Partner of the Year award for Canada at Worldwide Partner Conference.
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Gus Harsfai, the president of Ceryx, told CDN that his business is all about partnerships and some of the larger alliance partners such as IBM and Dell are on board along with CDN Top 100 Solution Provider Compucom.
“We were one of the first ones last year with CSP. It’s a good program and one that is long overdue. This works better than the agent model,” Harsfai said.
As a Tier 2 CSP partner, Ceryx uses Cloud Control to enable new types of partners that target Microsoft corporate accounts. Cloud Control is a shared SaaS offering that’s a single pane of glass for Office 365 and on-premise workloads as well. It also lower costs with one-button migration from legacy programs up to Office 365, Harsfai added.
Microsoft worldwide channel chief Phil Sorgen, in an interview with CDN, said the appeal of CSP is the API integration. Sorgen said it gives solution providers the ability to create the apps on their own with our cloud. The new CSP plan will have more country APIs which, he said, will lead to more cloud services being developed.
Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite is also part of the CSP program.