MCAPS Start for Partners 2024: What We Know So Far, Noteworthy

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Microsoft is celebrating the kickoff of their new fiscal year with "MCAPS Start for Partners", a digital event designed to include partners in the Microsoft go-to-market strategy early in the fiscal year and encourage collaboration to drive collective success.

So, what have you missed?

Refreshed Microsoft partner benefits

Earlier this year, Microsoft launched three new benefit offerings (see below). We now know that 20 new product licenses will be incorporated into many of those benefit packages in the coming months, including Microsoft Copilot, Defender for Endpoint, and GitHub.

As always, we expect that more information on these benefits will be announced shortly.

Refreshed Microsoft partner benefits overview

A core focus on skilling

Microsoft has already trained over 818,000 AI learners on Microsoft Azure, Copilot, and Fabric. This week, they've announced 12 more in-person AI Partner Training Days next year, including alignment to the Microsoft AI Tour customer events.

Clearly, AI is going nowhere and Microsoft acknowledges that its partner community hold the pathway to growth.

Microsoft partner skilling and AI training focus

Designations & Specialisations

We expect to see further development around both designations and specialisations, allowing partners to showcase their expertise and commitment to Microsoft solutions.

Microsoft partner designations and specialisations

Incentives

Arguably one of the things partners care about the most, Microsoft announced that they will create additional partner incentives aligned to their core strategic priorities, as well as where they're seeing the biggest customer need, such as Copilot and security.

When it comes to security incentives, we're about to see $90M in incremental investments in FY25. We're also seeing the continuation of the Threat Protection assessment and the return of the Data Security assessment.

There's a further continuation of Azure Migrate and Modernize with Defender for Cloud Attach, which rewards Microsoft Partners 15% for delivering secure migration projects and Microsoft Sentinel Migrate and Modernize.

For CSP, there's an increased incentive for migrating to Business Premium, E3 and E5, with partners eligible to earn up to $120K for Microsoft 365 E3 workloads per customer. And increased investments within CSP for ME5 and are boosting our strategic cybersecurity investments.