WTG Partners Ready for Master’s Microsoft CSP Membership

Connectivity services distributor WTG, with Cal Net Technology Group, has announced its participation in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP).

In the partnership, WTG and Cal Net are able to provide the WTG agent community and their clients a suite of Microsoft cloud offerings, as well as the “expertise to make these offerings successful for businesses,” according to WTG. It enables partners to provide direct billing, and sell combined offers and services, as well as directly provision, manage and support products and services.{ad}

Vince Bradley, WTG’s CEO, tells Channel Partners that his company has more than 3,000 partners, and most of them could be impacted by the program participation.

“Certainly I would say VARs and MSPs, and most definitely a lot of our other partners that are interested in tapping their customer bases,” he said. “The reason is because this program makes it very easy to upsell Microsoft services because over 90 percent of customers have Microsoft.”

Customers can renew existing services with “as little as an email requesting that the partner record be changed over,” as opposed to signed paperwork by the customer, Bradley said.

“So since Microsoft 365 only has about 14 percent market penetration, that yields about 75 percent of customers that can be sold 365 and other services can be renewed,” he said.

The Microsoft program is offering an evergreen residual so that commissions will continue for the life of the customer, Bradley said.

“For example, if a customer is signed up or renewed this year, and locations were added next year, they would be at the same … residual commission,” he said. “And the older Microsoft programs typically paid more in the first year and less in the additional years, so this is a nice upgrade in that regard. And there are also new products and services as well.”

Cal Net is a provider of outsourced IT, cloud, security services and unified communications (UC) in the Southern California market, servicing organizations with 10-2,000 employees.

“We are incredibly excited to be handpicked as one of only a couple master agents in the CSP program by Microsoft,” Bradley said. “We are even more excited to be aligned with the No. 1 partner in the West the last three years running, Cal Net Technology Group. Microsoft was really smart in the way they approached this. Instead of trying to make master agents VARs, which would take plenty of time and adoption was questionable, they decided to align master agents with a top MSP or distributor.”

“We are honored to participate in this partnership with WTG to grow both of our businesses together as a Cloud Solution Provider,” said James Hwang, Cal Net’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, “With 20 years of experience in the IT industry, we pride ourselves in providing best in class service, support and cloud solutions, and we look forward to the opportunity to extend this level of service and support to the WTG agent community and their respective clients.”