Cape Town, 14 Apr 2016
First Distribution, South Africa's leading distributor for data centre, enterprise and cloud solutions, today announced being awarded entry into the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Programme. The programme is designed to strengthen customer relationships and expand cloud sales opportunities by enabling partners to provide direct billing, sell combined offers and services, as well as directly provision, manage and support products and services.
Starting today, First Distribution owns the complete customer lifecycle, allowing it to easily sell Office 365 and Windows Intune subscriptions and helping customers take advantage of cloud services by owning the entire billing process and directly managing support.
"First Distribution has been cognisant of the impact of cloud for some time now, and of the growing industry trend towards cloud-based platforms and applications. This resulted in the formation of First for Cloud, Africa's original cloud services brokerage, in 2014 as a subsidiary of First Distribution," said Kevin Derman, First Distribution's General Manager for Cloud and Hosting.
"We are seeing a continual and growing interest in cloud technologies, and being awarded entry into the Cloud Solution Provider programme allows us to build stronger relationships with our partners, and provide them with the best cloud solutions to propel their businesses" he added.
"To meet the growing demand of our cloud-based solutions, we're thrilled to expand the capabilities for cloud partners under the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program," said Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp. "By joining the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Programme, partners will deepen customer relationships and expand business opportunities in the cloud."
First Distribution has a proven set of cloud capabilities, which now forms a core part of its business operations. Not only has it created the First for Cloud cloud services brokerage as stated above, but its Cloud and Hosted Solutions division is a multiple-award winner, having most recently won the Microsoft Cloud Solution Reseller (CSR) SPLA Distributor award in October last year - an area of business in which the distributor has specialised for over a decade.
It has shown a deep understanding of client hosting business, vendor licensing agreements, licence configuration, reporting and ensuring SAM compliancy of its business partners, while developing industry-first cloud enablement initiatives such as its current Cloud Catalyst Programme - created to enable business partner transition to cloud-based business operations.
First Distribution is constantly seeking to expand its cloud initiatives, making the opportunity to become a 2-Tier Distributor of Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider programme, and bring further added value to business partners' operations, one not to be missed.
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