SHI Starts Bid for Microsoft FastTrack Funding Share
SHI went public Thursday with a customer education program designed to position the Microsoft partner for a share of the Microsoft FastTrack Adoption Offer budget.
SHI, based in Somerset, N.J., is one of about a dozen U.S. Licensing Solution Providers (LSPs), the only Microsoft partners able to transact licensing agreements with enterprise customers.
Microsoft introduced FastTrack in its 2015 fiscal year and renewed it for FY16, which began July 1. The FastTrack offer is closely affiliated with the Microsoft Onboarding Center, an internally-staffed center for getting customers started with and using cloud products, such as Office 365.
"In essence, customers that purchase at least 150 eligible O365 licenses, and in that two-month window, can work with a Certified Microsoft Partner to manage their deployment of O365 workloads, and in doing so can offset the total cost of moving to an O365 environment," wrote Jim Sheridan, SHI senior project manager, in a post on The SHI Blog. "Once the customer and partner complete the due diligence of the deployment, the partner will submit a funding claim to Microsoft to partially offset the costs of the organization's O365 adoption -- a process that could save organizations five figures off the total expense, for example."
SHI is playing up a few new elements of FastTrack this year, including the ability to have Microsoft conduct the data migrations and a round of bridge funding that allows customers who bought their seats between July 1 and Aug. 31 to leverage the benefit rather. Last year, eligibility began Sept. 1.
For more detail of Microsoft's changes to FastTrack and other incentives for FY16, see "Microsoft Expanding In-House Cloud Deployments."
Posted by Scott Bekker on August 20, 2015