The New Gold: How is the New MPN Affecting You?

As part of my responsibilities as COO of IBIS, I manage our competency requirements with Microsoft.  So, together with Andy Vabulas, the owner of IBIS and Bill Forsyth, the President, I was right in the thick of the recent changes to the Partner Network. 

We moved from something like 10 competencies to 3 (with one more planned before end of Q1) and also received our Manufacturing and Distribution industry badges.  I’m proud we can do this in a sustainable way, mostly because we are only a 65 person firm so having that kind of depth is a testament to the focus our team has on continuing education and development.

Here are my thoughts on the changes:

1. I believed that the “old” Gold was relatively meaningless, so I am happy to see the new “beefier” Gold requirements.  If we spend time with clients helping them understand the effort it takes to hit the requirement, we have a good chance of making it meaningful in the sales cycle.
2. I’m happy to see that MS is finally requiring certifications from the selling side of the channel.  I think seeing pre-sales and sales staff spend a little time in training and testing will help overall quality, at least with respect product knowledge.
3. I loved the inclusion of SureStep (pardon me, “methodology”) as part of the certification.  I’m a fan of SureStep (because I no longer have to maintain a custom written methodology) so getting this in the cert set is good for me.
4. I wish they had set the revenue commits higher AND created a better “Associate” or “Referral” program to better create an incentive for smaller and larger partners to work together.  Ideally, I would have like to see encouragement of LifeStyle partners to align with a reselling partner just like systems integrators buy from LARs. Today, instead, I am seeing large consolidators come into existence whose only role in the life is to create conglomerates of small partners.  Selfishly, I would have liked to see IBIS as one of these but perhaps allowing non-selling consolidators to, in essence, be a LAR is better than having large partners (who are trying to please clients) distracted by such a role.
5. The site transition, despite all the prep work they did, was really rough.  We got through it okay, but it took at extraordinary amount of my time to push everything through on deadline.
6. Lastly, I really, really wish they had kept the consulting certs simpler.

To the last point, for both CRM and ERP (using AX as an example) you have multiple cert tracks (application, configuration, installation).  MS required six separate people, used in no other competency, to pass the required exams in each track but did not require, say, 6 full blown MCTIPs, 2 in each area.  The latter, for me, would have been easier to manage and, in fact, what we did was just ask everyone to get their MCITP on the most recent version and then make certain we had all the various tracks covered.

In summary, for us it was a good, but time consuming change. It will be interesting to look back in a couple of years and see what unintended changes this creates in the partner channel.

Vertical focus only makes sense for Microsoft

Author:  Curtis Beebe

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Microsoft’s “verticalization” of their Dynamics channel makes all the sense in the world from a Microsoft channel management perspective.    The designation of vertical specialties gives Microsoft an objective approach to resolving channel conflict, assigning leads, and providing sales & marketing support.    At first glance, this is one of those “blinding flashes of the obvious” that will enable partners to sell better, reduce sales cycle time, reduce the cost of sales, and stay focused in a specific area of expertise.

 The problem is that it doesn’t work.  The first issue is that the Dynamics products, just like all of the Microsoft products, are horizontal by nature and design.  Sure there are some ISV’s that provide a bit of industry specialization, but ERP and CRM solutions are inherently NOT vertical solutions.  They are designed to provide processes and functionality across a range of business types.

 That brings us to the second problem.  Because they’ve been selling horizontal products, most partners have grown their businesses horizontally.   Some of the savvy partners have developed industry specific knowledge and terminology to help them sell, but the solutions remain fundamentally horizontal.   As a result of the horizontal approach, partners tend to look at their customer’s businesses based upon the business process groups that are being automated: process manufacturing, discrete manufacturing, professional services, wholesale distribution, depot management, etc.   

The big disconnect is that Microsoft is trying to define the customer’s business based upon SIC codes.   The SIC codes are focused on the type of product being manufactured, sold, or distributed, rather than the general business process group:  one business process could map to dozens of different SIC codes.  The result is that partners are trying to manipulate the lead distribution system by selecting all of the hot, unassigned SIC codes within their geographies rather than truly focusing their business.

This effort is doomed to become just lip service that partners pay to Microsoft in order to ensure they get their share of distributed leads.

Microsoft Changes BI Strategy

On January 23rd, Microsoft announced a change to its BI roadmap through discontinuing portions of Performance Point Server and downgrading other functionality into MOSS Enterprise.  Read my post on this subject at the IBIS ERP Blog.