Are you ready for Microsoft’s big change? Microsoft is transforming the way it does business with its service provider partners. This means changes in the way it provides licenses, as it retires its long-standing Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Commerce Platform. In its place is the New Commerce Experience (NCE), a unified billing platform that encompasses Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Windows 365, and Power Platform.
Service providers worldwide should take prompt action to facilitate the migration of customers who are still utilizing CSP legacy subscriptions to NCE now, before the end of the voluntary transition at the first of the year or depending on their renewal dates. Microsoft is modifying its pay-as-you-go license structures. These changes will incorporate annual and multiyear committed pricing options and adjust to higher monthly pay-as-you-go rates. NCE is designed to simplify licensing, improve customer transactions, and empower resellers with tools for more effective subscription management.
Transition Challenges
Transitioning from the Microsoft CSP program to NCE can be a complex process for service providers. If you are not adequately prepared, your operations could experience issues with customer integration, support tickets, and business operations.
The transition may pose challenges for partners, particularly those with a high volume of subscriptions. Handling thousands of subscriptions can be challenging in terms of provisioning, billing, and reconciliation. Transitioning to NCE may limit your ability to upsell, cross-sell, or adjust rates.
If you do not leverage this voluntary transition period, Microsoft will select a plan for you and transfer your users. If you have existing API-based integrations with the CSP system, you will want to confirm that these integrations are fully operational for your customers under the NCE catalog and the new SKU management system. Any disparities can result in system failures.
Automating business processes
When managing complex business subscriptions and services, service providers strive to offer the same level of convenience, transparency, and flexibility that people expect in their daily lives. This includes management and monitoring the products sold, the status of licenses, domain information, and security scores.
Customers want real-time access to the status of their subscriptions and services. Just as individuals want to know when their Netflix subscription renews, businesses need visibility into the renewal status of their orders and subscriptions, especially when dealing with products and licenses.
Automating operations gives customers the capability to self-serve, whether it’s placing new orders, modifying existing ones, or accessing support resources. Your user interface should be accessible on any device or screen, ensuring that customers can interact with our services seamlessly. Users should be able to easily open support tickets or access a knowledge base for assistance.
An ideal solution is a platform that automates the entire process of ordering, provisioning, and billing for your NCE business, enabling you to create and manage products and services in a digital marketplace. This will ensure that you can support both self-service and assisted sales while providing the flexibility to integrate your customer relationship management (CRM) and billing systems. This integration allows you to bundle NCE products with other offerings, creating comprehensive solutions for your customers. Your platform should be capable of powering multinational operations by facilitating the creation of multiple marketplaces in different currencies, brandings and languages. This is CloudBlue – the monetization platform for your NCE business.
Let CloudBlue be your guide
The complexity of this transition underscores the importance of relying on a cloud monetization platform. Without an expert guide to help you navigate this transition, you would need to build your own integration which could translate into thousands of hours of development. Without a platform to automate updates, your product manager would have to update Microsoft API changes into new products, new features, and new business rules.
This is where CloudBlue can give you the insights, functionality, and automation to successfully manage your Microsoft business, especially during this transition to NCE:
- Expertise and Support: CloudBlue has expertise in managing transitions, keeping partners informed about updates, and assisting with the migration process.
- Automation and Integration: Streamline subscription management, billing, and reconciliation, reducing the need for manual intervention and ensuring seamless operations.
- Customization: Partners can customize upgrades and apply business logic to their Microsoft products and subscriptions without the need for extensive development efforts.
- Ready for Multinational Operations: CloudBlue helps partners manage multinational operations by offering support for multiple brands, operating countries, currencies, and languages. You are given a billing file that can be transferred to your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and provided with the necessary API to integrate into any order billing system.
Along with helping with this transition, CloudBlue’s technology can connect you to a go-to-ecosystem, enhancing your digital transformation into the subscription economy and helping accelerate your time to revenue by managing catalog, order fulfillment, subscription, and billing across multiple channels. We offer a cloud platform with out-of-the-box or customizable functionality that allows you to build and scale your subscription operations.
The countdown is on
Microsoft-led migrations begin in 2024. To avoid business disruptions, you should transfer your customers from Microsoft’s CSP system to NCE before the first of the year, or your renewal date. There is an exemption for non-profit, education, and government products, which will remain on the legacy system.
The primary goal of NCE is to simplify licensing and customer transactions in the Microsoft marketplace, allowing you as a partner to offer your customers greater flexibility in terms of subscriptions and seat counts. With CloudBlue’s help, this shift enables you to tailor solutions to your clients’ needs and provides you with new sales capabilities and operational efficiencies. By taking proactive steps to transition to NCE, you can position yourself for future growth and ensure a frictionless experience for your customers.
