Over past years, Microsoft have been heavily developing their cloud solutions such as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. Both provide a fantastic set of services that businesses can adopt to help move away from traditional on-premises based IT environments, modernise their employee experience and introduce improvements in business processes.
As a Managed Service Provider (MSP) we have always been enrolled in the Microsoft Partner Network. Through this we gained 12 gold and silver competencies which helped us to present our capabilities and expertise to our clients and prospects.
To bring their partner competencies in line with modern cloud technology, in early 2022 Microsoft announced their plans to retire the gold and silver competencies in favour of a new Solution Partner Designations. These have evolved to require MSPs to obtain a greater level of expertise to achieve accreditations within 3 core categories; Performance, Skilling and Customer Success. These categories demonstrate customer growth, employees achieving the necessary exam passes and continuing customer deployments.
There are 6 Solution Partner Designations in total which were launched in October 2022:
- Modern Work
- Infrastructure
- Data & AI
- Digital & App Innovation
- Business Applications
- Security
These 6 new designations are more challenging to achieve over the previous gold and silver competencies, but by achieving these it shows that MSPs have the necessary skills and experience to deliver Microsoft cloud solutions.
It was important for Sharp to work hard to obtain these designations and we focused our efforts primarily on Modern Work and Infrastructure which aligned to a large part of our core services for our clients in both Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure.
Our first designation, Modern Work was achieved towards the end of 2022 and has demonstrated our capability to help clients boost their productivity and make the shift to hybrid work by using Microsoft 365. The M365 platform forms the foundation for many of our clients core infrastructure, where we have moved email and files services, user and device management and of course all of the security elements to secure their environment.
Our second designation for Infrastructure was achieved in January this year and demonstrates our broad capability to help clients accelerate the migration of key infrastructure workloads to Microsoft Azure. Outside of Microsoft 365, many of our clients have applications and databases etc. which we have transitioned to the Azure platform. In addition, we have also utilised the Azure Virtual Desktop technology to provide securely published desktops and applications for our clients.
Our focus then moved to obtain our designations for our Business Applications & Development team so we’re very proud to announce that we achieved Data & AI this April 2023. This demonstrated our capability to help clients manage their data across multiple systems and to build analytics and AI solutions. Being able to build automation with Power Automate, help clients visualise data with Power BI and streamline business process with Power Apps is essential for Sharp IT Services to help our clients adopt the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Our next milestone is to achieve the Digital & App Innovation in the coming months. Watch this space.
