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Microsoft Cloud Partner Community Reaches 68K

Six months after claiming to have more cloud partners than Amazon Web Services, Google and Salesforce combined, Microsoft says partners continue to join on to its cloud effort at a good clip.

Microsoft worldwide channel chief Gavriella Schuster shared some Microsoft Partner Network metrics during a State of the Channel briefing this month.

"Currently, we have more than 68,000 cloud partners, which is a 33% increase year over year," Schuster said during the briefing. That figure is up slightly from the 64,000+ figure that Microsoft cited in July at its Microsoft Inspire conference. It implies the count would have been about 50,000 partners a year ago.

Those partners are selling Microsoft's cloud services, such as Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 through all of Microsoft's sales motions. All of that partner activity helped Microsoft reach a $20 billion annual run rate goal for cloud revenues in its first fiscal quarter of 2018.

Schuster also called attention to even faster growth within the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) business model for partners. CSP involves almost all of Microsoft's cloud products, but allows partners to bundle Microsoft's products with a partner's own, as well as third-party, services to present a single bill to the customer. In that type of customer engagement, the partner, rather than Microsoft, owns pricing, billing and first-line support.

According to Schuster, the number of partners transacting through CSP in the past 12 months has grown by 83%.

Asked for clarification in an email, a Microsoft spokesperson said the total number of partners transacting in CSP is now 45,000. That's up from 37,500 partners transacting through CSP as of July. An 83% increase suggests Microsoft had just under 25,000 partners transacting through CSP a year ago. That rate of increase, fast at the start of the year, and slower in the last six months, would be consistent with figures shared by Microsoft for U.S. CSP participation this fall of about a 33% increase.

Posted by Scott Bekker on January 29, 2018


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