In-Depth
Microsoft's 'Most Competent' Partners of 2015
Which Microsoft partners have racked up the most competencies in 2015? We scour the Pinpoint partner directory to find out.
- By Gladys Rama
- July 20, 2015
It's been about five years since Microsoft scrapped its old partner program for the much more specialty-focused Microsoft Partner Network (MPN). With its competency system, the MPN is designed to provide a more detailed picture of each partner's proficiency level compared to the previous partner program, which differentiated simply between Gold Certified and Certified partners. In terms of raw numbers, the companies in this year's "most competent" list -- the vast majority of which have gold competencies in the double digits -- display some of deepest subject-matter expertise among Microsoft partners.
Obviously, a partner's actual skill can't be measured by just tallying up the number of competencies it has. A glance through this year's Microsoft Partner of the Year winners can attest to that: Of the roughly 150 companies that Microsoft honored at the 2015 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), only 14 have enough competencies to make it onto RCP's list. The rest average just three gold and three silver competencies. Despite that, they've each been singled out by Microsoft as "demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions."
So we offer the following list of the "most competent" partners with this caveat: The number of competencies a partner has is by no means the only way to measure its overall expertise -- but it sure is an important one.
Methodology
To compile this year's list, we pored through all 125 country directories in the Microsoft Pinpoint Web site between late May and early June, searching for the partners with the highest number of competencies. Partner rankings were determined by a point system, with partners receiving two points for each gold competency and one point for each silver competency. In cases where two or more partners had identical scores, companies with more gold competencies were ranked higher. Companies that had identical configurations of gold and silver competencies were ranked the same.