Impact of Microsoft taking over Enterprise Account renewals starts to 'bite' The sweeping changes Microsoft is making to its licensing incentives for large service providers is taking hold. Shares in London Stock Exchange listed Bytes Technology Group (BTG) sank more than 25 percent Wednesday morning after the Microsoft reseller confirmed profits are being dented by customers delaying buying decisions …
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The middlemen will have done whatever work was needed to set up the deal. Once that's in place Microsoft doesn't need them. It's hard to differentiate between the two who's the parasite and who's being parasitised.
Of course we know who's really being parasitised - the users.
As I recall these guys used to be the ones who could figure out MS licensing. Ever since 365 even they gave up trying to understand it so really what is the point now. Now MS dosen't know its own licensing agreements or even what products it sells anymore so why pay someone to not tell you when you can not be told for free?
Get with the program! Marjorie Taylor Greene has made it clear that there was no such thing as the Gestapo - it's the Gazpacho police as you well know.
In France they had the Vichyssoise gendarmes during the collaboration years of WW2 (other chilled soups are available).
Currently working with a client who has been back and forth to their "value-added reseller" for about 3 months, asking for advice about porting some of their long-held MS licenses to cloud and MSPs.
VAR keeps saying they can't do what they want to, and then send links to Microsoft documents which literally say the exact opposite.
Eventually after enough escalation, query got through to someone at the VAR actually capable of reading and logically parsing English sentences, and it got sorted.
From what I can tell, zero value added. They'd undoubtedly have been better off dealing directly with Microsoft.
Longer term they're planning to ditch as much Microsoft stuff as they can, but that's another story...
I’ve been vendor side my whole career, working with partners including Bytes. The channel are an absolutely essential for a number of reasons, primarily to help create an overall solution, bringing together multiple software and hardware offerings from different vendors. Bytes are absolute whizzes at consolidating and reducing software licensing, engaging with customers of all sizes particularly the smaller ones vendors would not prioritise - think the 80/20 rule vendor deals with the big customers and channel takes the rest, actually channel tends to provide value to all customers. It’s really disappointing when the vendors then squeezes the channel, reducing rebate, margins, other incentives usually just due to greed, essentially alienating the very partners that helped build the vendor business. We’re seeing this everywhere from NotApp, Dull, IBuM, VMwoe, M$ and even especially cloud providers.. where healthy margins to incentivise growth were the norm at 20-40 points that is being shifted back to vendor land to hide stagnation and flat numbers.. many an exec can’t under stand the value of channel and sees their engagement as a cost or lost margin. Business shrinking by 25pc? Quick move to a subs model, cut out the channel, now it looks like we’re at least flat or up on overall revenue. Cloud is worse with margins around 12 points squeezed down to 3 or rebates just refused with whole partner manager teams being let go. Hard times ahead sorry chaps, all to keep that growth engine going.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
