Microsoft’s latest initiative, New Commerce Experience (NCE) is changing the way cloud solution providers (CSP) and partners transact and work with their customers. A step ahead, RackNap is prepared to power up Microsoft 365 NCE transactions and provide support for any changes when they come about.
Here’s everything you need to know about Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience as a business leader.
What is Microsoft NCE?
Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience (NCE) is a ‘per seat’ model for its cloud products’ subscriptions such as Microsoft 365, Windows 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform. It is Microsoft’s newest evolution of its Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. It is designed to help CSP partners with more transparency and control over their purchasing process.
In 2019, Microsoft began rolling out changes with NCE for the Azure program. Soon, in 2021, the company expanded these offerings to seat-based offers as well. These plans are based on fixed commitment terms of 1-3 years and current monthly options.
NCE has been made generally available (GA) from 10th January 2022 onwards, and purchasing through it will be made mandatory from 1st October 2022.
What does this mean for the business?
Understanding the changes:
Microsoft is helping its partners create more customer-oriented solutions. Here are the changes to Microsoft’s NCE:
- Subscriptions: They have introduced new monthly committed term offers that give 20% of the price premium for customers who need flexibility in both seat count and commitment term. For Dynamics 365, there are 3-year commit term options available.
- Cancellations: All NCE offers will share a common cancellation policy of up to 7 days that can be used by Partners to reverse new seat commitments. This includes disabling Auto-Renewal when planning ahead for your committed term-end.
- Add-Ons: Add-ons will be offered to the customers that will be distinct from the base offers till the dependencies are satisfied.
- Promotions: Microsoft will apply eligible promotions to customer orders automatically. Customers can check if the promotion they want is valid before purchase, which should make things more convenient for them!
- Upgrades: The options for upgrading your subscription are simple. You can either go all the way up to a higher paid SKU or just pick specific seats that interest you most in order of how much they cost per month – just that you cannot go down from a higher-paid SKU to a lower-paid SKU.
Understanding the impact:
In short, a lot.
The period of your transition to NCE should be considered critical. This is because these changes and promotions will have a significant financial impact on businesses.
Under the NCE, once a partner or customer purchases a subscription, he or she will have a total of 7 days to make changes to the terms they agree upon. This duration includes any weekends and holidays. Hence, customers are required to stick with the partners they got the subscription from, while partners are needed to stick with the distributors they purchased from.
It is of utmost importance that cloud service providers choose their distributors wisely during the licensing process because they could get stuck with an agreement without much flexibility to move. A good distributor can ensure partners purchase services that are tailored for their business. This will not just depend on finding the cheapest option but making sure that partners are getting those value-added benefits from their partnership with distributors!
Understanding the benefit:
The introduction of Microsoft 365 solutions to the Microsoft NCE has added more benefits for the partners. Hence, moving to Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience will allow partners to get more standardized features, multiple term options, easy licensing, better pricing, and policies. This will help them offer their customers a greater variety of solutions, and more managed services, and enable new sales capabilities via value-adding, selling, and upselling.
RackNap is NCE ready to help you prepare
RackNap, a cloud billing and provisioning platform, is ready to help Microsoft partners in navigating through the NCE transaction. It will make the transition to NCE easy by handling the entire subscription lifecycle of Microsoft cloud customers end to end – from provisioning to managing to supporting customer subscriptions. Microsoft partners can use it to grab more opportunities to increase revenue.
RackNap is making sure to keep its processes updated to match Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience updates. RackNap will provide the following NCE features to its partners and service providers:
- The 7 days cancellation window: New policies that allow customers to cancel or downgrade seats, and change term-length or billing options in 7 days has been implemented within our automation platform to make things easier on you.
- Automatic subscription renewals based on different term offers: Microsoft NCE has brought new billing terms for its customers, such as a 1-month term, a 12-month term, a 36-month term, or a 72-month term. RackNap keeps a record of various billing options your customers have subscribed to and renews automatically after the term completion of the subscription.
- Management NCE pricing: With RackNap, you can easily update the price based on your business model. It also allows you to offer a 20% premium discount if your customers choose an annual subscription over a monthly subscription.
- Add-ons as individual subscriptions: If you buy add-ons as a base product, then it will be counted as a separate product. Hence, you get the feature to buy add-ons separately from base subscriptions.
- More revenue opportunities: Seamlessly integrate new features with your existing product lines to provide better customer experience.
- Real-time billing analytics: We help you to take a more proactive approach with your products and services, so that they are always giving the best value for what’s being used.
How can we help you with your business? Let’s talk about what our team of experts can do to maximize the value of your products and services.
For more information or demo, contact us directly on [email protected] or drop us a comment below.
Read Next: How RackNap can help Microsoft CSPs to adopt Microsoft NCE quickly?
