How Microsoft Partners and CSPs Can Use IURs to Increase Cloud Profitability

For many direct and indirect CSP partners in the Microsoft network, the main goal is to stand out from competitors by providing excellent customer service and unique products and services. Doing so profitably, however, can be difficult.

There is a significant investment required in tracking – sales, customer tickets for incident management, remote monitoring and management tools, billing automation, and even customer portals as marketplaces for self-service. All these tools and systems require significant investments and these costs are borne by partners.

However, by properly leveraging one of the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem’s built-in benefits: your Internal Use Rights (IURs) costs can be significantly reduced.

How to Leverage Your IURs

Microsoft rewarded its partners with free licenses to Microsoft products and services for internal usage. These services and products can be worth more than $100,000 for partners for their distinguished record in training internal resources, demonstrating sales expertise, and receiving customer testimonials for their effort.

Microsoft has now changed the name of IUR to Product Benefits. Now partners could continue to leverage the benefits of IUR, such as on-premise licenses, cloud service subscriptions, and Azure credits. They can renew the benefits they are currently using and new benefits packages that can be customized to meet their unique business needs.

The chart below shows a summary of some of the IUR grants. Microsoft partners receive Core Benefits as part of the partnership level or status and then additional license grants depending on the specific Competency.

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Core Benefits

Benefit	Silver Grant	Gold Grant
Microsoft Office 365 E3	25	100
Power BI Pro	25	100
Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Customer Engagement	15	60
Microsoft Azure	US$100 per month
Enterprise Mobility Suite	25	100
MSDN Subscriptions	5	10

In addition to the above core benefits, Partners with Specific competencies in the Cloud receive additional license grants.

Cloud Platform

Benefit	Silver Grant	Gold Grant
Microsoft Azure	US$ 6,000 / year	US$ 12,000 / year
Visual Studio Enterprise Subscription	5	25

Cloud Productivity

Benefit	Silver Grant	Gold Grant
Microsoft Office 365 E5 Seats	25	100
Skype for Business PSTN Conferencing	25	100
Enterprise Mobility Suite	25	100
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online – Portal	1	1

The benefits range from Messaging to Productivity Services. However, the one main application IUR is for the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan.

The Customer Engagement Plan for Dynamics 365 includes applications such as

1) Sales

2) Customer Service

3) Marketing and Campaign Management

4) Project Service Automation

5) Field Service

With the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Plan, it is possible to run all your end customer-facing transactions and management in one system along with Invoicing and Billing for Cloud Services, with Work 365.

How Work 365 Helps Microsoft MSPs and CSPs

Work 365 supports the management of various service-type scenarios including Subscription-based and One-time billing scenarios.

Our latest update, Work 365 Version 4.0 supports License and Item-based subscriptions, Usage-based, Service type, Time-based and On-time purchase subscription management and billing automation.

With these services and subscription types, Partners are able to manage billing and sales scenarios by involving any combination of services.

a) License type subscription allows partners to manage quantities across any provider and product type. This type of subscription is usually a product service like Microsoft 365 licenses or Dynamics 365 licenses that are provisioned or even self-provisioned for ISVs using Work 365.

b) A service type subscription is not provisioned and like a license type subscription has a quantity and price that can be bundled.

c) Usage type subscription is used for Azure billing scenarios where consumption for products is tracked and billed to the end client.

d) Time-based subscriptions, users can create time entries for billing. These time entries would result in the regular invoice on a billing contract having invoice lines based on time.

All these Services and Subscription types capture details like Change Logs and Usage Details within Work 365 to enable subscription billing automation. A Billing Contract in Work 365 can include one or more of any of these types of subscriptions for the end customer.

Additionally, with the Self-Service Portal, end customers can directly manage their license quantities, monitor usage for Azure, assign licenses and view their invoice history.

For Microsoft Direct Partners – Work 365 support a two-way synchronization with the Partner Center that keeps all the Licenses and Changes Logs in place within Work 365

Work 365 Features for Cloud Profitability

Work 365 includes enhanced dashboards with a consolidated view of business insights and action items. Graphical insights into your Cloud and Service operations give you a quick view of general telemetrics with an alert and call to action related to your business.

Also, reports are available for overall business profitability as well as for individual products or services you are selling.

Product profitability reports can tell you how individual products or services are performing along with details about your customer-specific profitability.

These profitability reports, factor in discounts at the billing contract level and use the software cost and sales price to determine GP.