Fortinet & Microsoft Azure’s Multiparty Private Offers Empower Partners

Microsoft’s Multiparty Private Offers enable partners to collaborate, create custom offers and sell directly to customers, revolutionizing engagements. Vince Hwang from Fortinet discusses how partners with support from Fortinet and Microsoft can leverage private offers to secure and accelerate migrations and reduce cloud commitments. 1. What advantages do partners gain from Micrososft MPOs? I think the most important thing for partners to realize is that many customers out there have entered agreements with all the different cloud providers, with Microsoft being one of them. MPOs is a way for them to access and help customers burn down and reduce those committed spend. On Microsoft, it's commonly referred to as a MAC. What that is is customers are entering these agreements. They're trying to cut and optimize their costs in cloud. For partners, it gives them a couple of advantages. If they're part of the MPO program and they're helping customers burn down these MAC agreements, they're going to be able to access dollars that are already committed and available without having to go through another budgetary conversation with a customer. So that's going to accelerate the deal. 2. What benefits can Azure customers realize by purchasing Fortinet solutions through Partners on the Marketplace? So the one thing that we do at Fortinet that no other vendor out there does is we offered a completely flexible broad catalog a program called our Fortiflex program on Azure. What that does is it gives the customers the ability to shift those Mac dollars, those committed dollars on Microsoft into our FortiFlex program. What they get out of that is a bucket of points. With those points, they can then spend it on anything that we offer through our catalog to secure their Azure deployment. As a customer, I can shift the value of my underspent commitment into the FortiFlex program and I get to extend the lifeline of those dollars for almost up to three years. In this way, a customer who has $2 million to spend in the next 24 hours before their deadline can actually get up to three more years of lifeline on that $2 million to spend over time on Fortinet solutions that they'll actually use to secure their Azure environment. As a result, by having Fortinet as part of the MPO option, not only will we help our customers immediately burn down that committed spend, but they're going to get the maximum amount of value and flexibility out of this program because we continue to add products and capabilities into the FortiFlex catalog. So as customers have this, they can continue to expand their Fortinet solutions, options and availability for them to best use those dollars in their Azure environment. 3. Can you elaborate on how selling through MPOs helps partners reduce customer commitments on Azure? I think in addition to the obvious that we just talked about in terms burning down the commitment through the MPO program and reducing private offers. The other advantage for partners is it gives them a tremendous opportunity to also increase their stickiness with a customer and help the customers through this migration process. As part of the MPO program, customers get access to what's called cloud migration dollars through Microsoft. These are based upon not a per customer basis, but on a per project basis. For every new migration a partner helps a customer through, they can apply to get access to dollars to fund that migration. It basically pays for their consulting time or their hours and they increase this, you know, basically the bottom line. And these can be in a small, medium, large, but because depending on the size of total ACR value of that opportunity, it can be as small as $15 ,000 to much as $50 ,000 per engagement. And partners who are part of the IPO program also have additional funding and support sponsorship from Microsoft, such as things like Azure credits for them to also help them fund and fuel some of their own programs. Or they can use those credits to help sweeten the pot, so to speak, for customers who help entice customers to sign on with them as part of an overall expanded offering as well. That's a lot of great opportunities.