By Charlotte Yarkoni, Chief Operating Officer of Cloud and AI at Microsoft
The Microsoft Cloud opportunity is stronger than ever with over 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies using Azure, over 145 million daily active users on Microsoft Teams, and over 250,000 organizations using Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to run and transform their businesses—partners are realizing limitless potential. And partners are critical to helping businesses in every industry respond and adapt to the challenges of the world today.
We are investing in our partner ecosystem to help partners do business with us. Starting July 1, we lowered our marketplace transaction fee from 20 percent to 3 percent. This reduced transaction fee demonstrates our commitment to the success of partners creating value on our platform—and helps partners keep more of their margin to invest in their growth. This announcement made at Microsoft Inspire, among others, reinforces our commitment to helping partners get to market faster, build apps for every customer need, and scale through our channels.
An unmatched opportunity to build apps for every customer need
Microsoft relies on the deep expertise of our partners to develop the solutions our customers need most, and it is our top priority to provide the platform, tools, and resources our partners need to be successful with the Microsoft Cloud.
“Using the Microsoft Cloud was a critical business choice for Icertis in terms of delivering customer value through innovation. All of the value of Azure—from AI to blockchain to compute to storage—threaded together with the common data model of Dynamics 365 and then Teams for collaboration enables us to provide deep industry-specific solutions that advance our mission to be the global leader in contract intelligence.”
—Monish Darda, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Icertis
New build-with and go-to-market benefits for Microsoft 365
There is an untapped opportunity to build productivity and collaborative applications in the new hybrid-work reality. With the incredible reach of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva—Microsoft is investing in helping independent software vendors (ISVs) accelerate their success with new benefits. Benefits include access to Microsoft technology, one-on-one consults with Microsoft experts to help design and build collaborative applications and employee experience solutions, marketing resources to scale to new customers, and support to achieve co-sell status to increase visibility with our 15,000 plus Microsoft field sellers.
Get benefits to build Microsoft 365 apps.
Simplifying the Business Applications ISV Connect program
The Business Applications ISV Connect program helps ISVs take advantage of the growing demand for line-of-business applications leveraging Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. At Microsoft Inspire, we announced simplification and enhancements to the program—most notably, we are reducing the revenue sharing fees required to receive benefits and aligning to the newly announced standardized 3 percent transaction fee with the commercial marketplace. This simplified program will enable ISVs to accrue benefits faster all while continuing to reach customers at scale through Microsoft AppSource and leverage the value of Microsoft’s marketing and selling engines.
Join the Business Applications ISV Connect program.
Build fast and future-proof your business with Azure
Azure has the tools and services to support partners in driving application innovation for their customers whether that is modernizing existing applications, building cloud-native intelligent applications, or streamlining the development process with DevOps.
And with hybrid-work places becoming the new reality, more organizations every day are using Azure Virtual Desktop to modernize their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment and stream apps to their employees and contractors with existing license entitlements. With the new monthly per-user access pricing option, organizations can use Azure Virtual Desktop to deliver apps from the cloud as a SaaS solution to customers. This promotion provides access to Azure Virtual Desktop for no charge until December 31, 2021, to help partners test and scale remote app streaming solutions with their customers.
Get started as an Azure partner.
Acquire customers once and grow your footprint worldwide
Nearly every company on the planet does business with Microsoft and the commercial marketplace (inclusive of Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace) is the central engine for partners to reach and connect with customers. Forrester found that ISVs that sell with Microsoft experienced up to a 400 percent1,2,3 increase in deal sizes and saw an increase of up to 250 percent1,2 in leads.
Reducing transaction fees—from 20 percent to 3 percent
We are excited to announce that we are reducing marketplace fees for transactable offers from an industry-standard 20 percent to 3 percent for all transactions starting this month—simple and predictable.
In addition to the transaction fee reduction, we are expanding the payment instruments available in Microsoft AppSource later this year. This means customers will have the flexibility to purchase using credit cards or invoices, and ISVs can offer custom pricing using private plans. And customers will be able to buy applications right within Microsoft Teams—giving ISVs instant access to the 145 million daily active Microsoft Teams users. Plus, ISVs can offer private pricing to customers to secure larger deals, and Teams IT can purchase and install ISV apps seamlessly from one single location inside Teams admin center.
Watch the video below about how Canadian-based ISV, UnlimitedViz—the makers of tyGraph—took their business to new heights and scaled to over six countries by selling through the commercial marketplace.
Publish to the commercial marketplace.
Provide access to the largest distribution channel
Our commercial marketplace is more than just a digital storefront. Publishing to the marketplace is the single path to co-selling—whether that is directly through the storefront, through our channel of 90,000 resellers, or with our global sales force of over 15,000 sellers.
New, better together partner-to-partner opportunities
With over 90,000 Cloud Solution Providers, this is a massive channel for our ISVs to instantly scale their application to new customers. At Microsoft Inspire, we announced the preview of new capabilities to help ISVs activate this channel. ISVs will be able to create new private offers to resellers (Cloud Solution Providers) and extend the margin to resellers—incentivizing resellers to sell their applications.
“With all of the needs and requirements placed on our customers today, they’re looking for our partner community to show up together as one force.”
—Mike Fouts, Vice President, Americas Partner Sales, Citrix
Through the channel, ISVs can grow their business by expanding into new markets, without requiring a local presence, and acquire new customers through Cloud Solution Providers. Cloud Solution Providers can expand their catalog with new ISV solutions from the commercial marketplace and bundle their value-added services to provide customers end-to-end solutions to solve their business challenges. This creates stronger, better together, partner-to-partner opportunities to help our partners grow their business.
This opportunity is in private preview and will be generally available for all our ISVs and Cloud Solution Providers later this year.
Get the details in this session.
The year ahead
Microsoft Inspire is about celebrating the role of partners and our shared success, we hope you check out the 2021 digital event. Be sure to tune into the keynote and key sessions hosted by my colleagues and friends. Most notably: Microsoft Cloud for ISVs—unlock your opportunity with Toby Bowers, General Manager for Business Applications and Casey McGee, VP for ISV sales and drive revenue with the most partner-focused commercial marketplace with Tanuj Bansal, General Manager for Azure Marketing, and Jake Zborowski, General Manager for the Commercial Marketplace.
We’re dedicated to supporting partners in realizing their potential with the Microsoft Cloud—we cannot wait for the year ahead.
Key resources
- Get started and become a partner.
- Business Applications ISV Connect Program.
- Get benefits to build with Microsoft 365.
- Become a reseller.
Azure. Invent with purpose.
1Source: “The Revenue And Growth Opportunities For Microsoft Azure Partners,” a commissioned Total Economic ImpactTM study conducted by Forrester Consulting, July 2020.
2Source: “The Partner Opportunity For Creating Microsoft Teams Applications,” a commissioned Total Economic ImpactTM study conducted by Forrester Consulting, May 2021.
3Source: “The Partner Opportunity For Microsoft Business Applications ISVs,” a commissioned Total Economic ImpactTM study conducted by Forrester Consulting, June 2020.