7. 5 stages of fee-based grief for Microsoft partners
When? All year
How much will Microsoft’s massive 1 January 2025 Enterprise Agreement fee shake-up cost its largest partners?
We were given a partial answer to that back in February when Insight revealed it expects its gross profits this year to be dented to the tune of $70m by Microsoft’s move (alongside a similar fee slash at Google Enterprise).
Microsoft aggressively slashed the money its LSP partners can make from selling Enterprise Agreements at the start of this year.
It is instead pushing partners more towards the midmarket and SMB, in May announcing big changes to its Cloud Solution Provider programme.
Insight this month said it expects to continue to feel the after-effects of the move in its current Q3, before the situation is “largely normalised” in Q4.
The NASDAQ-listed giant isn’t the only partner affected, with Microsoft’s fee shake-up name-checked in a recent profit warning from Bytes Technology Group – and even said to be a major factor behind SoftwareOne and Crayon’s union.
“I think you’ve seen different partners go through the stages of grief on this – we’ve had the full range from denial to anger,” Softcat CEO Graham Charlton told IT Channel Oxygen in May.
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