Today at Microsoft Inspire, we shared some of the exciting updates we’ve made to the Business Applications ISV Connect program, all of which are designed to enable innovation and growth by making it easier for you to build and sell with Microsoft.
Beginning this fall, the ISV Connect program will offer enhanced benefits that are designed to help you reach new customers through our marketplace, tap into Microsoft’s marketing engines, co-sell with our world-class sales teams, and leverage the full strength of the Microsoft cloud.
Easier to build with the Business Applications platform
Three percent revenue sharing aligned with Marketplace transact fees
Starting in October, we will significantly reduce our revenue sharing fees for ISV Connect, down from 10 percent and 20 percent to 3 percent, bringing them in line with our new Commercial Marketplace fees. In addition, we will introduce our first set of commerce-enabled business application offers, allowing your customers to purchase directly through Microsoft on AppSource, all for the same three percent fee. You’ll be able to extend and scale your customer reach, from lead generation through to purchase, on our Commercial Marketplace.
New License Management and Dev/Test environments
Our new ISV App License Management capability is available now to help ISVs manage end customer licensing. With this new benefit, you can manage licenses from the Office 365 admin center and enforce them through the platform to prevent non-compliance, all while gaining access to valuable information about customer usage and providing your customers a consistent experience.
“Because Microsoft is providing license management infrastructure for us to build on through ISV Connect, we are able to deliver a more comprehensive solution to our telecommunications customers and jump even further ahead of our competition. We’ve been able to roll out dozens of new features in the time that it would have taken us to build a custom license management system on our own.”—Frank McDermott, CEO and Co-founder, Carma
We are now offering discounted Microsoft Dynamics 365 non-production environments at significantly reduced cost to help you build your applications on our platform. These discounted licenses are available as part of our technical benefits for application development, testing, and demo scenarios and can help you cut your costs. You can even unlock them for free when you achieve specified revenue-sharing thresholds in the program.
Easier to sell with Microsoft to grow your business
Simplified go-to-market benefits offered at reduced rates
In addition, we are simplifying our go-to-market benefits, enabling you to accrue benefits faster at reduced thresholds. You start with a base set of benefits when you enroll in ISV Connect—and you receive more benefits as you register more deals and your business grows. At any time, you can purchase additional advanced benefits to support your unique business needs.
We have also revised our benefits to focus on what you have said you need most: self-guided training to help you create content and marketing campaigns, partner-to-partner networking opportunities, geo expansion support, event management, and lead generation campaigns.
Seller quota retirement and select incentives
As our global sales organization continues to grow, we will provide even more incentives to our sales teams engaging with partners in the ISV Connect program. Sellers will retire their quota when co-selling your solutions with your revenue-sharing fees, driving increased co-selling activity. We’re also adding incentives for larger deals on select apps in our marketplace to drive even more co-sell momentum.
“Sitecore has been a Microsoft partner for 20 years, and Azure has been foundational in allowing us to deliver a rich digital experience platform for our customers. We have an ambitious growth plan to significantly grow our revenue over the next two years. To do that, we need to be able to solve bigger problems for our customers, and Dynamics 365 helps us do that in a very industry-specific way. Being able to partner with Dynamics 365 sellers is going to be key to achieving our goals.”—Chris Berglund, Microsoft Alliance Director, Sitecore
Since launching the ISV Connect program, we’ve seen strong growth in the ecosystem, with more than 740 ISVs enrolled and more than 1,740 apps certified on AppSource. We hope these enhancements to the ISV Connect program continue to fuel this momentum and deliver even greater value to our Business Applications ISV partners.
