Lynda Mahabir

Engineering feedback: Difficult to get customers to rip and replace existing solution because combined with EXO, protection is viewed as inferior.

Delivery Feedback: EXO/MDO combination needs to be at par with competing solutions.  

Sales Feedback: 

Delivery and Sales feedback: Purview = lack of MSFT-led use cases for legal (vertical).

 

 

Feedback for Engineering: Policies can be added easily

Feedback from Sales: Sales/Marketing Problem- not enough exposure and product awareness being put out there.

Feedback for Engineering:  Emerging

For Engineering: No demand:  Legal customers are still on premise /Unfamiliar with the value

From Delivery: Unfamiliar with value

From Sales: Low/no demand:  Legal customers are still on premise. Unsure of the value and who to speak to about Viva- Possibly unsure about included workloads in M365 plan

We have not seen a single referral to us that had an incentive behind it in our 2 years with the program. We have only had one non-customer referral that actually responded to our reply and despite being told by FastTrack that the educational institution was indeed eligible for partner incentive (we asked because we knew they were not), we found out after executing the benefit that no incentive would be paid. For the referrals coming from existing customers, it is obvious that Microsoft Sales teams (or CSAs in particular) just point everything to FastTrack partner for free work even when situations are clearly not FastTrack eligible. Microsoft is burdening partners since their technical teams continue to be less and less useful. The FastTrack team seems to be co-conspirators in this operation and seem to not want to protect their partners any more than the balance of the Microsoft program. 

There is no discernible protection for a partner after you provide the benefit. If we execute a justification exercise for SCI, or migrating to Teams or Intune, we should be able to maintain the customer association for a period of time. We are being usurped by LARs as the Partner Center criteria for picking between contested associations is a mystery and decided by uneducated, non-Microsoft employees. Partner Support is terrible, staffed by a team that has no clue what they are doing or how partners need Partner Center.