>> Hello everyone! Thanks for
joining me today in a conversation
about Azure Government and our
Cloud Solution Provider Program,
also known as CSP.
Today we will cover a set of
resources and overview of the program
as well as a demo of our portal and
capabilities that you can take advantage of.
Let's level set up and talk a little
bit about what Azure Government is.
If you're here, that means that
you're probably interested in learning
about our CSP program as well as Azure Government.
But what does Azure Government really mean?
To start with, we have Azure which is
a commercial instance and then we have Azure Government,
which is specific for our state,
local, and federal agencies.
Now, both of these Clouds are completely separate,
so you need to understand that no data commingles,
they are completely secure,
protected by different compliance standards.
So that's something that really provides
an Edge when you're dealing with government customers.
Now the CSP Program,
which is something that we'll cover
throughout this overview,
is something that is
specific to the Azure Government Cloud.
Yes, we have a commercial counterpart,
but in the Azure Government area,
this program is what you're looking for.
Let's talk about what CSP enables partners to do.
First, you need to be able to create solutions,
provide billing and provide support for your customers.
You become the first line of defense,
and that's something that's very important.
Microsoft is always there to back you up.
But as a CSP,
you provide the first line of defense for your customer.
Now you can manage your subscriptions for them,
add additional things on top.
The customer may call you one day and say,
hey, I no longer want to do this.
So, they have the ability to cancel at any time.
So, you can build
an ongoing customer relationship
and build services on top.
Azure is only one of
the products that can be solved through CSP,
but there's many more that will be joining our line of
products going through this particular channel.
Let's go a little bit deeper and
understand the customer needs.
You may know the traditional way of doing business with
Microsoft via an enterprise agreement,
but CSP is a new channel in which you can transact.
Now, as a customer,
you may be looking for an end-to-end relationship
and many services.
Somebody like a systems integrator
can provide that for you.
Additionally as a customer,
you don't want to spend time
dealing with different contracts,
with different products all splatter around the plane
you can use CSP as a single way to transact.
Azure is one of the products located
there today but many more are to come.
If you are ISV,
CSP is also a very good channel for you.
CSP enables you to create
single tenant solutions where all of your data,
all of your assets and vital machines can be
segmented at a customer by customer basis.
This allows you to show in a single pane of glass,
all of your billing consolidated,
all of your reporting and you can share that with
your customers and have
an effective way of managing them.
Lastly, partnership is one of the main goals.
Here you establish a
continual relationship with your customer.
It's not a simple transactional operation,
but you can really upsell,
provide additional services and go from there.
This does not take away from an EA.
Keep in mind that if a customer has the capacity to
deliver their own IT or if this is for internal usage,
an enterprise agreement is a very good way to go.
Additional things to keep in mind is if you're
an ISV working with a multi-tenant solution,
EA continues to be a very good option for you.
What are some of the sweet spots of the CSP program?
One thing that you need to understand is
each one of these will give you value,
both as a partner and as a customer.
So we talked about strong partnerships.
Now we're going to talk about customers that are influx,
they get different products at different times,
have different needs, they
need that pay-as-you-go capability.
They don't want to be tied to
a commitment in a particular time frame,
they want to be able to move in and out.
Think of your cellphone bill.
When you travel you have one need,
when you're local you have another one.
A fully managed set of
capabilities where as a partner you
have that one-stop shop
for all your needs and all your customers.
And lastly, you have workloads across the enterprise.
We're not talking about
a particular solution that only focuses on cloud,
you're talking about building
a long lasting practice that starts with cloud,
and goes into delivering a service on top of that.
What are your options though of becoming a CSP?
You have two. To both precure it,
as well as become one. Let's talk about them.
So there is one that is called the direct
partner and one which is called an indirect provider.
Both of them have benefits and needs that you as
a customer or partner may be more inclined to take.
Let's begin with the indirect or indirect provider model.
There you will see that you have a big CSP,
a corporation that is only focused on
reselling the infrastructure part of it.
If we talk about Azure,
you will see somebody only transacting Azure
and relying on an indirect reseller to do the rest.
If you are a small company or
a small entity and you require to have lots of speed,
come to market fast,
leverage the capabilities for billing
and support that a big enterprise has,
the indirect path is for you.
Yes, there will be a heating margin because you will
have to share that between the provider and the reseller,
but all the benefits that that big provider brings,
are the things that you need to keep in mind.
Now if you're a partner that has
a build practice that includes their billing,
their support maybe the direct path is for you.
In a direct model,
you're responsible for your customer,
you are responsible for the end-to-end relationship,
and as I said, billing and support are key.
Having these two models in place,
you have a flexibility to either build a practice,
or become an indirect reseller
joined by an indirect provider,
and move forward and faster to market.
This does not exclude you from becoming a direct partner,
you can grow and as your business grows,
you can switch and eventually
become a direct partner yourself.
So we've talked about the ins and outs of the program,
what it is, who can apply,
but let's really see what it takes.
To do that, we're going to do an overview
of a portal as well of the application process.
So let's take a look online and see
what resources you have at your disposal to move forward.
So what you're seeing right now on your screen
is our Azure Government CSP application process.
This is a website that we've created for you to walk you
through the application process end to end.
You will see that you can find all relevant links,
and all necessary information that you
will require to become a Government CSP.
The way to get to this page, is aka.ms/azuregovcsp.
There are several other resources
that you can take advantage of,
one of them is our Azure Government application desk.
What this does is,
allows you to get validated as
a Azure Government candidate.
What does that mean?
So anyone that goes into
the Azure Government Cloud needs to be validated
as an entity or a partner
that has legitimate access to that cloud.
What you're seeing right here in the screen,
is our application form.
Every partner as well as
every customer that wants to go into
this cloud would be required
to fill out this application form.
This ensures that they are vetted and they're
a valid government entity or
a partner that can enter the program.
It's a fairly simple online application.
As you can see, it requires
some basic information about your organization.
Once you have completed the form,
you will be able to move forward and receive
an email granting you
access into the Azure Government Cloud.
This gives you an identity and
a tenant within the Azure Government Cloud,
and from there on, you can move forward and
begin the CSP application process.
What you're seeing on your screen now
is our Partner Center.
Partner Center is that single pane
of glass that we referred to earlier,
as the management plane for the CSP partners.
If you're a customer, this is not
something that you will ever interact with,
but your partner will
definitely leverage it to manage you.
Several partners have also opted to use
our APIs and build on top of this.
So as a partner,
if you want to extend this into
your day-to-day business, feel free to do so.
We have extensive documentation
that you can leverage to do so.
Now going back to our Partner Center,
this is our main dashboard.
Here you can see your ongoing billing,
some quick links and tasks as creating new customers.
I will gather that most of you will
spend their time in our pricing and
offer section which is located under
the sales tab and our customers tab,
which allows you to create the net new customers as well
as manage those that are already existing.
Focusing on the pricing and offers,
you will see an overview of
all the different Azures skews,
as well as our Azure pricing calculator.
Now why these are relevant for you is
because every time you need to respond to
a customer with a pricing or a proposal,
this is where most of your time will be spent.
Current price list is located here.
This will show you all of the different skews as
mentioned, the pricing calculator,
which is this link allows you
to create estimates that all of
your customers can leverage to get
an idea of what their environment may cost.
Let's go into our Billing tab.
The Billing tab is one area
where you can manage your customer spend.
You will be able to see on a monthly basis how much
every subscription is spending as
well as establish soft limits for them.
For example, at an 80 percent,
they can get an email saying you're reaching
your established limit of
expenditure for this particular month.
This is what this overview looks like,
as well as our APIs for extensibility.
There are some that you can leverage to extend
this and get daily readings of the usage.
Let's go quickly to our customers tab.
As I showed you before,
in the customer's area you will see all of your customers
and all of the different areas that they have used.
Now if I click on add a customer,
this will allow me to create a net new customer.
You can notice that from
a control perspective I can only select United States,
of course because this is focused on the US Government.
I will create a new company for this purpose,
I will call it CSP demo and give it a domain.
This domain becomes its little piece of
existence within the Azure Government Cloud.
This will be a sub-tenant of your own as a partner.
So I've named it CSP demo two,
domain is already in use.
So when you see this particular message here in red,
that means that the domain is not available.
Let's go for something more generic as CSP demo 99.
Looks like it's available. So I can easily move
forward and then continue with the customer creation.
I'll add the address of my customer
and all these fields will be validated,
so keep in mind that you cannot enter a random address.
Addresses are taken off to a surveys and eventually if
you do not have a right one or does
not match an existing one,
it will potentially give you some grief.
And I'll move along to the subscriptions.
Here and you will see the Azure Government subscription.
Since today as I said,
we have Azure Government and CSP, in the future,
we will see the additional subscriptions as well
as services that you can select for all your customers.
Office will be joining us as well as
CRM Online just as in our commercial counterpart.
So keep that in mind as you're acquiring new customers.
Finally, we review the information that we've entered.
You will see an overview of
everything of the information that you captured,
you can go back and update it.
When you click submit,
this will commence the tenant creation process.
You will see that only in a matter of
seconds a new tenant will be created and
I'll be provided with an
administrator account that I can give on to
my customer and they can
begin spinning workloads in the cloud.
So the confirmation page that you see right now,
is basically that my tenant has been created.
Here is my admin account, a temporary password,
make sure to change that when you log in for
the first time and from there on you can
continue to use Azure either as a customer or
the CSP portal as
a partner to continue to support your customers.
You have seen that only in a matter of
minutes I've been able to create
a customer from zero to a full-blown tenant.
Let's take the next step and login into
these customers tenants and see what that looks like.
The first time of login,
you will see that you are requested
to change these temporary password,
so make a note of the new password that you have used.
Keep in mind I am using
the customer's account that was just created.
As I login, you will see that they have
full access to the Azure portal.
They can see their dashboard,
they can begin creating virtual machines and from there
on they're ready to move workloads to the cloud.
As you have seen, we've gone over
a lot of resources with you today.
We started with how to become a CSP,
all the way into a quick overview
of key features of Partner Center.
That's not where it ends,
there's a rich set of APIs that you can
leverage to extend its functionality.
So to do that,
we'll share more resources with you.
There's a rich set of links that you can leverage,
click on every single one of them,
review the information and
make sure to build your practice as a CSP.
Again, thank you for joining us and we will be
looking out for your application for a CSP in government.
Thanks.