The Master VAR's growing role in the Microsoft Dynamics channel

Editor's note: Guus Krabbenborg's tenth annual Business Report from WPC is available now! You can view the 2013 table of contents for the WPC 2013 Business Report and download the 2012 report here.

Microsoft's goal with the introduction of her new MPN partner program a few years ago was to raise the bar. The company wanted to do more business with a smaller number of Microsoft Dynamics partners. From that moment on, that select group of partners got more attention and more resources to grow faster.

Due to these steps, a considerable portion of the partner channel ended up under Microsoft's radar. They were not managed by the Microsoft Partner Account Managers (PAMs) and had, at best, contact with a given tele-PAM. But usually there wasn't any form of support at all. We're talking about the small(er) partners here, of course, the ones who generally provide only a small contribution to Microsoft's turnover. But, all told, it did comprise many of these small(er) partners. And this group continued providing substantial sales volume.

The lack of attention did not really help these partners' sales. The obvious result was that Microsoft stood to lose a lot of ground at the lower end of the market. To stop this loss, Microsoft thought up the "Master VAR" concept. This was actually a confusing name, one that might better have been called a "Value Added Distributor." The initial thought was that larger VAR's could operate as a sort of umbrella for smaller partners. In some countries, like the US, the Master VAR role has been implemented this way. In other countries, like many in western Europe, this role was given to distributors from the Microsoft classic channel ...