Partner Program Gets Major Redesign

A major redesign of Microsoft’s partner program aims to bring all of the company’s 750,000 partners under a single program while differentiating partners by size, expertise, and business model. By broadening the criteria for partnership, the new program removes many of the barriers that kept some previous programs comfortably small and exclusive, but it compensates for this broad approach by segmenting partners more carefully by competency. To ensure that partners have time to adjust, and that the rules can be fine-tuned, Microsoft will take more than a year to roll out the new program.

The redesign, the biggest change to Microsoft’s partner program since it began in 1993, will bring an end to many specific partner programs that have sprung up over the last decade, and consolidates Microsoft’s existing partner programs, such as its 35,000-member Certified Partner program, with the 4,500 channel partners who came along with Microsoft’s acquisitions of Great Plains and Navision.