Microsoft Discovers MSPs. Again.
This time it’s because the tech industry goliath has realized it needs MSPs to grow cloud growth with SMBs, and there are reasons to believe it might stick.
Last week’s post, in which I shared a prediction by Syncro CEO Michael George that Microsoft will more or less own the future of managed services, failed to note an at least potentially complicating wrinkle: a lot of managed service providers don’t much like Microsoft.
Or at least they didn’t the last time I wrote about that topic. That was admittedly a while ago, but I’m fairly confident the same complaints apply today. Unless you’re big enough to drive lots of cloud and AI consumption for Microsoft, you probably don’t love Microsoft’s partner program, are weary of constant rule changes like the Cloud Solution Provider program revisions going into effect this Wednesday, don’t hear from Microsoft’s people too often, and don’t see a lot of evidence Microsoft cares about your opinion on any of this one way or the other.
There might—just might—be reason to hope that picture’s on the verge of brightening a little, however, based on interviews last week with both of the vendors involved in an announcement I referred to briefly in that earlier post. Microsoft has apparently awakened to just how badly it needs MSPs.
That announcement, which looks even more significant now than it did a week ago, was the launch of #IntuneForMSPs, an initiative within Microsoft to get more MSPs using its Intune management tool, something it very much needs to retain and add cloud revenue.
The issue is that many Microsoft 365 subscribers are paying for functionality they don’t know they have or don’t know how to use, and many more would consider upgrading to a Business Premium, E3, or E5 license if they had a clue what to do with them. Fixing that is a priority for Microsoft.
“It helps provide stickiness,” observes Will Ominsky, vice president of MSP sales at Microsoft cloud management vendor Nerdio, “and it helps Microsoft sell higher licenses.”
Intune is the tool of choice for activating unused M365 features, but it’s also a single-tenant product. That’s no problem at businesses large enough to have an in-house IT department but a huge issue at SMBs supported by MSPs. Rolling out Microsoft 365 components is hard enough within one tenant, observes Christian Nagele (pictured), chief strategy officer at Microsoft 365 policy management vendor inforcer, which you’ve read about here recently.
“If you’re an MSP doing it for over 100 tenants, it’s impossible without a multi-tenant capability,” he says, “and delivering multi-tenancy exclusively for MSPs is quite difficult.”
Which is why Microsoft, via #IntuneForMSPs, has officially named inforcer and Nerdio its go-to partners for Intune multi-tenancy. That’s obviously a great development for those two vendors, which provide Intune multi-tenancy in their products and now have an industry giant actively encouraging MSPs to buy those solutions. It might, however, be a great development for MSPs as well. Intune multi-tenancy wouldn’t matter much to Microsoft if MSPs didn’t matter as well, and MSPs suddenly matter a lot to Microsoft.
“I’ve been in the game quite a long time, and we’ve all probably seen Microsoft seek to engage closer with various sections of the market through MSPs, but this time we’ve got a ringside seat to the level of their intent, and the intent is real,” Nagele says. “The sponsors of this program internally are incredibly senior.”
They’re pushing the people beneath them, moreover, to understand MSPs better and act on what they learn.
“We’ve got our first session coming up in a couple of weeks where we’re putting together a small group of Intune specialists in the MSP space to give senior folks on the Intune product side really good insight into how MSPs engage and interact with Intune,” Nagele says. “Microsoft are serious about delivering for MSPs, and they’re serious about listening and serious about taking action, which is pretty exciting.”
To be clear, what Microsoft is truly serious about is selling software. MSPs are just a means to that end. But if that leads to more than just Intune product tweaks and lasts for more than just a few months, it’s still probably a promising change.
How to get what inforcer and Nerdio have
Official endorsement of their products by a company that nearly every MSP on the planet partners with is reason enough for inforcer and Nerdio to feel good about being Microsoft’s first #IntuneForMSPs partners. There are others as well though.
“We now have more access to more people at Microsoft,” says Nerdio’s Ominsky, adding that the same goes for people at marketplace operators like Pax8, Sherweb, Ingram Micro, and TD SYNNEX that do a lot of Microsoft business. inforcer, for its part, was recently admitted to the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association.
“There are only 160 ISVs in that program, and I think there’s only one other MSP-focused vendor in there,” Nagele says.
Of course, it helps if you’re a vendor with dreams of enjoying similar privileges to be in the right place with the right product at just the moment Microsoft needs what you know how to do. But it helps as well to put a lot of time into proving to Microsoft just how committed you are to partnering with them, as Nerdio’s been doing since its inception.
“I think back to the very early days,” Ominsky says. “It wasn’t us taking and asking for things. We were giving, and giving a lot.”
The company’s been faithfully attending Microsoft’s Ignite conference for developers and IT professionals conference ever since, and as far as Nerdio is aware, it’s the only vendor of its kind transacting on the newly renamed Microsoft Marketplace. There’s a lesson in there, according to Ominsky, for anyone else hoping to earn Nerdio’s most-favored-vendor status.
“Make it a partnership where you can do more together, because that’s how you win,” he says.