Aussie partners to get Office 365 Open in eight weeks

Partners have been widely positive about the move to general availability of Office 365.

Australia was alone around the world in restricting the software-as-a-service to a single syndication partner, Telstra; the decision was met with some annoyance from many in Microsoft's local channel.

The overriding feeling from the channel about today's announcement of general availability of Office 365 is – finally.

Sean Murphy, principal of Sydney-based Nexus, summed up his feelings in one word: "Fantastic."

He said that for smaller customers, "Office 365 is going out like hotcakes".

"I have been waiting for this. I have no problems with Telstra per se but I don’t think running Office 365, which I think is a fantastic product, mandated to be sold through a telco, is the best way to go."

He said smaller partners would be able to better able to offer the "full benefits" of Office 365 by tailoring it to customers' needs, such as integration with Azure.

"Telstra are a very big company and they tend to productise things a bit, which I understand is a Telstra thing that is best for their business, but is not necessarily the best for customers."

Brennan IT national marketing manager Robin Marchant told CRN that the midmarket-focused player was currently planning its strategy to take Office 365 to market.

"I think it offers a great deal more opportunities. I think by offering multiple channels and providers, it will certainly open it [Office 365] up to the marketplace."

Marchant said Brennan had not seen much activity with Office 365. "Moving forward, it will change because the demand will change. You can see that's what will happen.

"By having the local providers and better partners, customers will get better support… [it] is a better way than Telstra, where customer service is not always the best or has a reputation of not being the best."

Alex Gambotto, managing director of The Missing Link, a Microsoft gold partner, told CRN: "We believe that most cloud infrastructure is the future because you can achieve much better economies of scale.

"We have done some Office 365 implementations. We are quite happy but it is definitely for a specific type of client. Some clients would prefer to house it themselves or have a provider like us provide them with Exchange on their server in our cloud, even though it is slightly more expensive."

Gambotto added that "one size doesn’t fit all" and that different clients might suit Office 365, on-premise or hosted Exchange. "It is more about the particular requirement of the customer rather that its size."

Today's announcement should mean more opportunities for most SMB and midmarket-focused resellers; not so for Melbourne-based Paradyne.

The cloud integrator is a key partner of both Microsoft and Telstra and has done more than 300 deployments to more than 750,000 users. 

Paradyne founder Loryan Strant said the new Open licence would create more competition. "If we were to stick with just Office 365, and nothing else, we would potentially be in trouble, but that is not going to happen for a variety of reasons.

"One, we have a very strong relationship with Telstra and we will continue bringing customers to Telstra and doing work with Telstra. We are not concerned because we do a hell of a lot more the Office 365 – people just don’t know it because Office 365 is our lead product."

He added that Paradyne has "just won a contract to deploy Office 365 for a government department in the Pacific, that we believe will be the largest deployment in that region".

One partner, however, that was keen to keep the status quo was Dean Calvert of Calvert Technologies.

"The benefit of continuing to work with Telstra is you can do it on a month by month basis through Telstra while go though Open, it is annual [billing].

Partners must weigh up "the administrative workload for the partner of managing it themselves versus going through Telstra".

If you factor the administrative costs that you have of doing the ordering, the invoicing, chasing the payment and managing all of that, I look at all that and ask, 'Is it work me having that extra workload for what show on paper as a few extra dollars?'."

"Even though you might be sacrificing a bit in raw profit [by going through Telstra], I question the benefit of managing it internally. For my money, I am sticking with Telstra."

The change also gives Ingram Micro its first chance to distribute Office 365.

When CRN asked Microsoft's Swan about distribution, he said Microsoft's three disties were Ingram, Synnex and Express Data.

Lee Welch, senior business manager, Software and Cloud Services at Ingram, told CRN: "We could not officially sell Office 365 in Australia [under the Telstra deal]. Around the rest of the world, we have been selling Office 365 for a number of years. It is great because we [now] can draw on our experience around the world.

Welch said it was "a big opportunity for the SMB channel".

"For the first time in Australia, partners can sell Office 365 under Open licence. Partners have been awaiting this for some time. There is some pent-up demand."

Ingram is launching the Office 365 licensing academy as well as running Office 365 demo and deploy workshops.