MaryJo Foley’s piece on zdnet.com discusses changes to Microsoft’s Premier Support Plans.
Microsoft starts rolling out biggest changes in two decades to its Premier customer support program
Microsoft is rolling out big changes to its Premier Support plans and structure, which are meant to better support businesses adding cloud services to their mix.
August 25, 2017
Microsoft is undertaking a massive overhaul of its Premier Support organization — its services unit that provides businesses with issue resolution, planning assistance, infrastructure design guidance and IT education.
Up until recently, Microsoft Premier Support has been relying on 8,000 “world class support specialists” to provide these kinds of services for more than 11,000 enterprises worldwide, according to Microsoft’s Premier Support datasheet.
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Microsoft has begun gradually rolling out Unified Support as of July 1, 2017, the start of its fiscal 2018 in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Sweden and Mexico. The company plans to make the new plan available to all business customers globally by the end of its fiscal 2019, I’ve heard from my contacts.
Microsoft designed the Unified Support program to respond to more of its business customers adding cloud services to their product mix. Because of the influence of the cloud, Microsoft is changing the way it provides services in a world that’s more attuned to paying for consumption, purchasing via subscriptions and requiring 24X7 support.
Read the full article here
