As I mentioned in a previous post, AdvancedMD has been a Microsoft Certified Partner since 2003 and a Gold Certified Partner since 2006. Both programs are available to any company that works with Microsoft, and both are fairly inexpensive (in the $1,500 range, including sales tax).
All you really have to do to be a Certified Partner is write a check, but the benefits are significant. A small company with 25 employees could get a five-fold ROI on Small Business Server and Office alone.
Becoming a Gold Certified Partner takes more work, in the form of “points” that you accrue through “competencies”, customer references, certified products, etc. It isn’t as difficult as it may seem. First of all, Microsoft really wants you to be a Gold Certified Partner, so they’ll cheat for you from time to time in the form of “promotions” that give you competencies for free, or that relax the requirements. There’s still plenty of work to do, but it isn’t out of reach for most companies that really use Microsoft’s products and services.
Here’s an example of a competency that we’ve held for the past few years:
The three little guys with checkmarks behind them represent three AdvancedMD employees that are Microsoft Certified Partners with a qualifying certification (MCSD, MCSE, etc.). (Getting a few of your developers and IT staff certified is almost a must for Gold certification.) The CD represents a “Tested Product”. In our case, AdvancedMD was tested to work well with SQL Server.
For us, getting our application tested against SQL Server every two years (as required to maintain the ISV competency) is the greatest cost to remain Gold certified—probably a week, on average, of a couple of developers’ time.
The benefits in software licenses, though, far outweigh the costs: We get 135 licenses for each of nearly every software package you would need in a business office (including Windows, Office, MapPoint, Project, etc.), and 35 licenses for Visual Studio for Developers (including a license for Team Foundation Server for each location). I haven’t taken the time to get a precise inventory of the software that we use, but I would guess we’re over $250K, with potential for another $100K or more if our staff knew what was available to them. Not bad for $1,500 a year!
We get a lot of other benefits besides software licenses. You can find those on the Partner website, linked below.
Two sites that every Microsoft shop should know very well:
Partner Program Website
This site demonstrates just how serious Microsoft is about working with its partners. I would imagine that they spend more on this site than AdvancedMD’s annual gross revenue.
Of particular interest is the Partner Program Value and Benefits page. It includes the oddly elusive Software Licensing for Certified and Gold Certified Partners page…for some reason it always takes me a long time to find this page when I need it. It lists all of the free (for training, demo, and internal use) software you get as a partner.
MSDN
Aside from comprehensive developer-oriented documentation, this is where you can download all of the software that you are entitled to as a Certified Partner.
The screenshot to the right will give you an idea of the huge variety of downloads available, just under Operating Systems. My nostalgic side desperately wants to download MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. (But where is Windows ME? Hmm…)
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