Resellers will soon be able to buy Office 365 from distributors Ingram Micro and Rhipe and pay for the software on a monthly subscription.

If customers want to pay monthly for Office 365, the new 2-Tier Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) model is a better fit than Open licensing, which requires an annual commitment.

Distributors Ingram Micro and Rhipe (formerly NewLease) have been named as the first ‘2-Tier CSPs’, opening up the new monthly licensing model to a reseller base of 8,500 active partners at Ingram and 1,500 at Rhipe.

Their appointment follows the announcement last December of the first batch of ‘1-Tier CSPs’, OBS, CloudFirst, OzHosting, Ensyst, iiNet, Melbourne IT and Nimbal, which is a partnership of Kloud and XCentral.

Microsoft expects the majority of partners to buy Office 365 via the 2-Tier distributor arrangement, rather than 1-Tier. Philip Goldie, Microsoft Australia’s director of partner business and development, said that to be successful as a 1-Tier CSP, partners would need to be deploying at least 5,000 seats per year, “and that is probably a low water mark”.

SOURCE: crn.com.au