Indirect providers implementing subscription partial upgrades for NCE?

[Matt_H]

In the run up to NCE both Microsoft and our indirect provider told us we'd be able to do partial upgrades for licenses with 1yr commitments. (For example if you provide your customer with 10 Business Basic licenses, we were told we could upgrade 5 of them to Business Standard during the commitment period and leave the other 5 Business Basic.)

Our indirect provider is not allowing us to do that. It is only allowing full upgrades of all licenses in the subscription. They also aren't telling us when (or if) we'll be able to do partial upgrades.

What are other people experiencing with their indirect provider with regard to partial upgrades?

Are any providers allowing this currently?

[BennyRossaer · Accepted solution]

Hi Matt,

We are an Indirect Provider in Belgium and we've supported partial upgrades in our portal for a while now.  It's been available in Microsoft's API for some time.  
If you can't do it, you should talk to your Indirect Provider because the API capability is certainly available.

[Matt_H]

I don't suppose you also do business in the US?

If you did, we might look at switching.

Thanks for the information.

[JanoschUlmer]

@Matt_H : You can find a list of Indirect providers for your region here: Indirect Cloud Solution Provider (microsoft.com)

Note that you don't need to decide to only work with one provider, you can work with multiple in parallel, even within the same customer account - and so you can test out different providers as you like.

[Matt_H]

True. However moving customer subscriptions from one indirect provider to another was never easy and now with the NCE 1yr commitments (yes, I know there is a monthly option, but it is also 20% more expensive) it is even harder. We were perfectly happy with our indirect provider until the NCE changes. In some ways they were actually better than when we had been direct (surprisingly they provide better support than we received as a direct partner).

[JanoschUlmer]

Then this is really unfortunate - I think the ability to provide decent support is the main differentiator for providers - so if this provider does provide great support, but "only" lacks some implementation of NCE subscription management features, then I can understand the decision to go for a different provider is difficult.

[Curtis1]

We can only do "full upgrades of all licenses" using our portal. They told us we can open a support ticket to have a partial upgrade done manually.

[Matt_H]

We aren't even being given the "Open a support ticket" option.