CloudPlus, a cloud-based provider of click-to-provision hosted services, has been named the newest authorized source of Microsoft Office 365 licenses for partners in Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.
Effective Thursday, CloudPlus, of Clearwater, Fla., will enable resellers to market, sell, provision, manage, support, and bill the Business, Business Essentials, and Business Premium editions of Office 365. Other Office 365 versions will be available through CloudPlus as well by the end of the month.
Microsoft divides its CSP channel into two groups. 1-Tier resellers, which tend to be bigger firms with sophisticated tools and processes, can purchase licensing for cloud products directly from Microsoft. 2-Tier resellers buy seats from 2-Tier distributors.
To become a 2-Tier distributor, vendors must have a proven, scalable infrastructure for enabling end-to-end ownership of customer relationships, from ordering and deployment to billing and support. As the newest addition to Microsoft’s 2-Tier distributor roster, CloudPlus joins a select group of companies that includes familiar names like Ingram Micro, Rackspace, and AppRiver.
According to company CEO Tony Francisco, supplying Office 365 licenses to its partners made poor strategic sense for CloudPlus back when its business focused on offering hosted Exchange services.
“Our business has grown from a service-focused agenda to a completely automated services platform, and because of that the timing is finally right to extend our portfolio throughout the Microsoft service stack,” Francisco said in a press statement.
CloudPlus, which was named VAR Dynamics until March, has been offering telecommunication services in partnership with Telarus Inc., of Sandy, Utah, since June, in an attempt to promote convergence between the historically separate IT and telco channels.
