Whether you have gained or lost a customer, if they are using NCE Licensing you need to assess the anniversary date of the license and advise your customer accordingly before morning forward, there is a real risk of over provisioning licensing during this time, and someone ultimately gets held holding the baby if this happens.
If Dicker Data are the provider, download the subscription report and study the ‘revaluation period’, this is essentially the anniversary date of the licenses. If the provider isn’t Dicker Data, don’t move forward until you receive the equivalent report from whomever is the provider. The customer can request this from the incumbent partner and supply to you as well.
Once you have this, study the anniversary date of the licenses, and if they’re NCE, these licenses can’t be transferred from one partner to another, you guessed it…until the anniversary date.
So, should you order a whole lot of licenses for your new customer, but then find they’ve agreed to annual licenses with the incumbent partner, and the anniversary date is 6 months away, this could be a hard mistake to learn and a costly one. Even if the customer pays for both, it’s not a nice way to start a new relationship.
The anniversary date is king with NCE licensing! I can’t stress this enough, as you can’t make any immediate changes to licensing until the anniversary date other than to increase quantities or upgrade the license. You can always spend more but can only spend less on the anniversary date.
Business managers need to review and update processes to include steps to ensure that engineers, salespeople, and the person procuring the licenses understand that there can be costly ramifications for misunderstanding, I suggest making sure things are in place to trigger a check before procuring licenses.
There are no clear steps on how transferring a customer’s licensing between partners should be carried out, but it is definitely something that should be included in discussions with staff and with the customer.
The incumbent partner should always turn off the auto-renew button for licenses as soon as the customer advises they are moving to a new partner. If you don’t do this and the licenses all renew on the anniversary date, I suggest you won’t notice until the billing report turns up and your old customer promptly tells you no, by then 7 days has gone by and licenses are locked in for a new commitment period…ouch!
Also please note, as a provider Dicker Data can’t transfer a customer from one partner to another in the “backend”. Technically it may be possible, but Microsoft considers this uncompliant and due to this it won’t be done. Even if Dicker Data is the provider to both partners, this doesn’t matter and the normal process for adding a new customer to your account should take place.
By adding steps into your processes, this documentation could save everyone and help relationships with your staff and customers. If you get that moment of doubt when your finger is hovering over the mouse, ring or email your Dicker Data Partner Development Manager, or the Microsoft Sales Team, better to check then be sorry.
Be well and if in doubt, reach out.
Carol
