News
Dynamics CRM Online Partners Get Direct Billing Option
- By Gladys Rama
- February 02, 2015
On Monday, Microsoft made Dynamics CRM Online available under Open Licensing, an option that gives partners greater control over the billing and bundling of the cloud services they sell to customers.
Partners selling under the Open Licensing program purchase licenses for Microsoft's cloud products according to their customers' requirements, and then bill those customers directly. They are also able to bundle those Microsoft products with other services, combining them in a single invoice. Before Open Licensing, partners only billed their customers for add-on services; the billing for the actual Microsoft products came from Microsoft itself.
Microsoft already has Open Licensing available for its Azure, Power BI, Office 365 and Intune products. At last year's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), the company announced its plan to eventually add Dynamics CRM Online to that list.
Monday's announcement "presents a huge opportunity for Microsoft distributors and resellers and our CRM partners to differentiate themselves and grow their business," said Neil Holloway, corporate vice president of sales and operations for the Microsoft Business Solutions Group, in a blog post.
"For resellers and partners -- you now have a great opportunity to go beyond just operational IT and move up the value chain in a business by engaging with your customers on their business processes. For our CRM partners, CRM Online in Open means the potential for more customers in the SMB space to sell important services and IT for CRM Online," said Gavriella Schuster, general manager of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group, in a separate post.
Schuster also announced that the new Cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM) competency, which Microsoft also first announced at WPC 2014, will launch on the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) on March 2.
The upcoming competency will be the fourth in a wave of recent cloud competency additions to the MPN. Microsoft launched three other cloud competencies in September -- Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions (for SMB partners selling Office 365), Cloud Productivity (for those selling Office 365 to enterprises) and Cloud Platform (for partners selling Azure).
More information about the new Cloud CRM competency is available here. There is no cost to enroll as a silver partner for those who qualify, while those who qualify for the gold level will receive a discount, Schuster said.