News

Metalogix Launches Partner Program for SharePoint-to-Office-365 Migrations

• By Gladys Rama
• July 11, 2016

• Get more news from WPC 2016 here.

Metalogix, a top Microsoft ISV, is expanding its partner program in a bid to help systems integrators (SIs) move their on-premises SharePoint customers to Office 365.

The company launched its new Metalogix Advantage Partner Program (MAPP) on Monday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), taking place this week in Toronto.

Metalogix describes MAPP as a "certification and enablement program" for partners whose customers have mission-critical assets stored in Microsoft's cloud. The program supports three partner service areas: migration, management and security. The migration partner solutions, which are focused on SharePoint-to-Office-365 migrations, are available as of Monday, while the management and security offerings will launch later this year.

The MAPP migration offerings are designed to help partners establish a repeatable and highly efficient cloud migration practice, according to Joe Sullivan, director of alliances at Metalogix. The program was spun out of earlier work Metalogix did with Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), Redmond's in-house consulting unit. MCS had selected Metalogix to help migrate on-premises SharePoint customers, some with as much as 20TB of data, to Office 365.

"It's difficult to migrate this vast amount of content," Sullivan says. "As of a couple of years ago, if you hired [MCS] to migrate your content, they could only achieve speeds of 1GB to 2GB per hour." At that rate, Sullivan notes, migrating anywhere between 10TB and 20TB of data would have taken "years and years."

Instead, MCS built a solution on top of Metalogix's existing Content Matrix migration product that improved migration speeds by up to 30 times faster, according to Sullivan. The MAPP migration offerings are designed to give other partners the tools to build similar solutions for their own customers.

"The value of Microsoft's cloud is clearly evident to customers, and they realize that they need to get there. The goal of this program is to help them get there much more efficiently and effectively," Sullivan says.

Among the benefits to MAPP partners is access to Metalogix's "Business-in-a-Box," which the company describes as a starter kit for SIs to build an enterprise migration practice. Inside the "box" are sample code, PowerShell scripts, project plans and statements of work; whitepapers and best practices; and pre-migration assessment and analysis tools. Sullivan likens the Business-in-a-Box to a high-powered engine designed to get a partner and its customer to the cloud faster.

"All of these SIs have a mode of transportation where they can get their customers to the cloud. What we're really talking about is taking out the four-cylinder engine that's in this mode of transportation and transplanting it with Content Matrix, our product, to get better speed," he says. "So [think of it as] taking out a four-cylinder engine and putting in a 12-cylinder engine."

Other MAPP partner benefits include managed-partner status under the recently expanded Metalogix partner team. MAPP partners are also eligible to participate in the Metalogix Strategic Business Services (SBS) program, which pairs partners with customers based on the requirements of a particular project. MAPP enrollees also receive a greater level of support from Metalogix.

Sullivan says Metalogix is launching the MAPP program at WPC with at least a dozen partners enrolled, and hopes to have a total of 50 partners signed up in the program by year's end. That's a relatively small slice of Metalogix's overall partner base, which numbers between 300 and 350. There's a good reason for that exclusivity, Sullivan notes. MAPP is designed for partners with larger enterprise customers, which, compared to SMBs, typically have a great deal more SharePoint data to migrate to the cloud and face more complications getting there.

"These migrations can tend to be very complex," Sullivan says. "It's not every single SI in the world that can handle this type of migration. Plus, the partners we're dealing with, a lot of them come from an application development background where they have really, really strong coding expertise in the Microsoft world. So we're looking, definitively, to identify the best Microsoft partners. We're not looking to roll this out to 300 partners out of the gate. This isn't about scale. This is much more about quality than it is about quantity."

Sullivan says MAPP eligibility requirements include a minimum number of certifications and a minimum number of customer case studies. Interested partners can go the Metalogix MAPP page here.