Focus on Specialization

Other partners have long specialized in one or two areas and don’t have issues with the new program. Nor do they object to the fact that Microsoft uses telemetry it gathers to determine partner capability scores.

“I think it makes it equitable,” said Jeffrey Goldstein, managing director of Queue Associates, a New York-based Microsoft Dynamics partner. “It’s not arbitrary in terms of how they rank a partner. Everybody’s judged by the same criteria and there’s no bias in the in the scoring.”

Others were more skeptical about the scoring.

“I don’t always trust Microsoft’s logic for how those scores and other things are developed,” True IT’s Paulson said.

Nevertheless, Paulson said he has been hoping Microsoft would move to a model like this.

“I think it’ll be a good move for partners that have a lot of specialties,” Paulson said. “In our case with our Dynamics specialty, it’s nice to be able to highlight that, because just saying you’re a Microsoft gold partner doesn’t really distinguish in the marketplace, what your true specialties are.”