Microsoft has delayed three deadlines related to Cloud Solution Provider partners selling subscriptions through the vendor’s New Commerce Experience to public sector customers and migrating existing subscriptions on to NCE.
The first revised deadline CSP partners need to keep in mind is that they need to buy new subscriptions for public sector customers on NCE starting Aug. 1, the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant said in an online post Monday. The original deadline was May 1.
Public sector customers include those in education, nonprofit and on Microsoft’s Government Community Cloud.
[RELATED: Microsoft To Allow Partner-To-Partner NCE Subscription Transfers This Quarter]
Microsoft Public Sector NCE Updates
CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment.ADVERTISEMENT
Corey Kirkendoll, president and CEO of Plano, Texas-based Microsoft partner 5K Technical Services—a member of CRN’s 2024 MSP 500—told CRN that he has not had an issue with bringing nonprofit customers onto NCE.
Kirkendoll credited that to constant communication with his customers around not just changes in Microsoft pricing but changes in technology overall, such as cybersecurity threats and new artificial intelligence offerings.
“That question only gets hard for the MSPs that don’t spend time and talk to their customers,” he said. “Because we actively stay in front of them and let them understand and know that prices change … it has been an easy conversation going forward. It’s different when you haven’t said anything, haven’t seen them or anything and now you have got to send them a bill … It puts you into a defensive mode that you don’t need to be into. Then you are not really being that trusted adviser.”
More NCE Deadline Changes
The second deadline Microsoft has changed is for a mass migration led by the vendor putting public sector subscriptions on NCE. That migration will happen Sept. 1 at the earliest “and will continue with all offers renewing throughout calendar years 2024 and 2025,” according to Microsoft’s announcement Monday. The original deadline was July 1.
“We encourage partners to prioritize migrating their customers from legacy to new commerce,” the vendor said in the post.
Finally, the end of incentives for pre-NCE, legacy subscriptions is now set for March 31. The original end date was Dec. 31.
NCE license-based public sector product SKUs became available to partners on March 1, albeit with some errors in the price list preventing some early sales.
Microsoft began enforcing NCE-only sales of commercial subscriptions for productivity applications and Dynamics 365 in March 2022.