We stand at an inflection point in the evolution of the cloud marketplace. Based on the feedback we commonly hear from customers: our many buying programs create an opportunity to simplify. To address the cloud market’s unique needs, we launched the new commerce experience in November 2019 with the goal of transforming Microsoft’s commerce model into a simplified, consistent purchasing experience that benefits partners and customers alike. Part of this multi-phase, long-term investment includes transformative changes to the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. The new commerce experience makes it easier to transact licenses and attach and manage your services in CSP. This increased ease of doing business combined with new tooling is saving costs for our partners while accelerating business growth and customer cloud adoption.

Get up to speed on what’s changing

Throughout 2022, we’ll continue to evolve CSP through a series of changes as the new commerce experience transformation continues.

• In January, new commerce experience seat-based offers in CSP became generally available for Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Windows 365. In support of these new commerce seat-based offers in CSP, two time-bound promotions were also introduced in January, for direct bill and indirect providers transacting in CSP. Though the promotional discount on annual term seat-based offers ended on March 31, the discount on monthly term offers continues through June. Learn more about this and other available promotions by visiting the promotions page in Partner Center. And check out the readiness collection to help you prepare to sell these new seat-based offers.
• As of March 10, new seat-based offer subscriptions can only be purchased through the new commerce experience in CSP. We’d like to thank our partners for their efforts leading up to this important milestone.
• The next milestone for seat-based offers is just around the corner. Beginning in July 2022, legacy subscriptions can only be renewed in the new commerce experience. We encourage you to start getting ready for this transition now to avoid being impacted by the removal of legacy CSP seat-based offer incentives on December 31, 2022.

As a part of the new commerce experience, we’re transforming partner incentives through the Microsoft Commerce Incentive (MCI) program, which serves as the foundation for all incentives in the new commerce experience. Make sure you’ve accepted the terms for MCI in Partner Center and get up to speed on the incentive and investment offers, and access these key MCI resources.

While we remain focused on rolling out the new commerce seat-based offers in CSP, we’re also finalizing the migration from legacy Azure offers to new commerce Azure offers in CSP (also called Azure Plan). Start taking advantage of the updated experience for Azure with these resources, as the new Azure offers have many tooling and feature enhancements that directly benefit both partners and customers.

• As of February 1, margins and incentives are no longer offered on legacy CSP for Azure, and all Azure customers must now be transitioned to the new commerce experience in CSP.
• In July, any customers remaining in the legacy Azure experience will be manually moved to new commerce.

Understand the benefits to partners and customers

Transformation of this magnitude is never easy. We value the time and energy you’ve devoted to evolving your Microsoft practice. This transformation is critical to meet the changing needs of our customers, and we’re continually working to support partners’ adoption of the changes and ensure partners are getting the maximum value from the opportunities new commerce is creating.

 The new commerce experience ensures that partners remain competitive in the cloud-first marketplace. New commerce is making it easier to transact and manage licenses through improved offer structures and new tooling. The standardization of offers, policies, and terms enables customers to have the same purchase experience, however they buy.

Partners benefit from operational efficiency and revenue predictability. The new commerce experience provides a durable and scalable business model in CSP.

• We’ve simplified the billing experience for partners to alleviate the added costs they currently take on to manage disparate billing experiences.
• Tooling and resources make it easier to track customer spend and recommend consolidated solutions.
• Partners can manage subscriptions in advance instead of having to perform manual changes at renewal.
• Automatic seat assignment makes for easier, more efficient subscription management for larger customers.
• Price-list integration with APIs makes it easier to automate pricing with sales and billing systems.

Flexible purchasing options optimize costs, secure revenue, and fit customer needs. By offering both flexible monthly term offers and long-term commitments, partners can offer customers a subscription that best meets their needs.

• Seat-based offers include a new monthly term option, which didn’t exist in legacy CSP. Monthly term offers, which renew each month, are offered at a premium price and allow customers to flex up or down monthly based on their needs.
• Partners can rely on more predictable recurring revenue by encouraging customers to commit to annual terms.
• Partners will benefit from the full return on the sales investment made in their customers by the removal of mid-term cancelations and seat-count reductions.
• Customers can also enjoy more and easier options for trying new products through free trials and add-ons sold separately in CSP while also being able to upgrade to Enterprise offers midterm for SMB offers.

Enhancements and Features

Our transformation journey will continue to evolve as we release new offers, enhancements, and features exclusive to the new commerce experience in CSP.

• In March we made available Coterminosity, which enables partners to align disparate subscription end dates for a customer, greatly simplifying the renewal process.
• The March release also brought to CSP new commerce the Home Use Program, which offers customer end users a discount for personal and family licenses.
• In the coming months we’ll offer Microsoft 365 multi-geo add-ons, which enable a customer’s users to tap into the nearest Microsoft datacenter and improve the user experience for our customers in CSP.

Over time, these enhancements and more will reinforce the new commerce experience’s benefits to partners and customers alike in the CSP program.

Migrating to NCE

As we push toward the July date for renewals to be available only through new commerce in CSP, it’s important that partners begin that work now. Ensuring our customers understand these changes is an important part of the new commerce migration. Please ensure you leverage the customer messaging guidance on MPC to help explain these changes and respond to any customer questions or concerns:

• The new commerce experience: Customer FAQs for CSP partners
• Customer messaging documentation for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners
• Customer Value: New commerce experience in the CSP program

In support of customer migrations to new commerce, we’ve made updates to resources in Partner Center to clarify SKU availability between Legacy CSP and new commerce in CSP. You can access a spreadsheet in the Pricing section of Partner Center to see Legacy and new commerce SKUs in one view by accessing the Cloud Reseller Matrix. The NCE Mapping tab of that spreadsheet is new and shows products that are not yet in NCE as “product not supported” in the column marked Modern ProductID/SKU. Note that most unavailable offers are outside of Commercial (Gov, Edu.) as that remains the focus of the launch. The legacy deprecated tab of that sheet shows which offers will be removed after March 10 from Legacy and not brought into new commerce.

Thank you again for all your efforts in preparing for new commerce. Look for even more changes in the coming months and visit the Partner Community forum for the latest announcements and resources related to the new commerce experience.

Next steps

Discover what you need to know about the new commerce experience and learn even more about the benefits to partners and customers with these resources:

Key policy, benefits, and milestones—new commerce seat-based offers
Customer messaging documentation for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners
Customer Value: New commerce experience in the CSP program
Coterminosity in CSP new commerce
Migrations to CSP new commerce

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Now available: seat-based offers in the new commerce experience
Let’s simplify the changes in the new commerce experience
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New commerce experience for seat-based offers in Cloud Solution Provider
Changes to Cloud Solution Provider you should know about

Tags: Azure, Business Applications