I am really excited that today, Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President of One Commercial Partner, announced the Azure Expert Managed Service Provider program and unveiled our very first set of Azure Expert MSPs! These expert partners have proven real world proficiency and skills, for datacenter lift-and-shift, born-in-cloud new applications, and everything in-between. This new program will make it incredibly easy for you to discover and engage highly-capable MSPs in your region for your cloud projects and migrations. 

I consistently hear from customers that what matters most when selecting a managed service partner is demonstration of real-world experience, whether the partner is assessing, migrating, building, deploying, optimizing or efficiently managing business solutions on Azure. When you have the right partner by your side, I am confident you will be able to deliver your desired business outcomes and keep pace with all of the innovation that the cloud enables.

Azure Expert MSPs complete a rigorous audit by an independent third party, and also provide multiple customer references of Azure managed services projects delivered over the last 12 months. Furthermore, to retain the badge, these expert partners need to continue to meet pre-requisites annually and complete a progress audit every year. As Azure evolves, so will the expectations of our Azure Expert MSPs. This framework is built so that you can trust that the MSPs who’ve earned the badge are continuously working to remain true Azure experts.

Let me take a moment to thank our MSP partners – they have invested in people, process, operations and technology to build and harness deep Azure knowledge and service capabilities. They have demonstrated ability to deliver consistent, repeatable, high-fidelity managed services on Azure, proven automation in service workflows and innovation in monitoring and life-cycle operations of complex customer environments. They’ve trained their staff on Azure and have partnered closely with us in engineering as part of design sessions and focus groups. I look forward to celebrating these amazing partners and this key milestone together at Microsoft Inspire 2018 next week!

Finally, thanks to you, our customers – your feedback has been the inspiration for this initiative! We hope that you will now find it easier to identify Azure Expert MSPs. As you work with Azure Expert MSP partners, please continue to share your feedback so that we can continue enhancing your experiences on Azure! We look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks,
Corey