Suggested by HIram Machado – Completed
I would like to bring up some perspective about the Deployment Voucher Offer that I think it is important to have as Microsoft work on the T&Cs as well as a definition of customer eligibility. Since the guidelines mention Commercial customers, I wanted to suggest that it should include government customers too. Let me try to explain why. We have served several customers last year with the deployment vouchers, taking them from not having the licenses to full utilization of the acquired licenses (the primary example of that would be X customer - ~7,000 seats). And we continue on engaged with this customer working on advancing them even more with Azure workloads. Now, the following opportunities are in the pipeline for E5: • Y customer (19,000 users) • Z customer l (4,000 users) • L customer (800 users) These customers are in Brazil, and they are government agencies. The challenge is that they have a long and bureaucratic process for running an RFP, they are now in the process of making the license acquisitions, but it can take them months, and in some cases years to run another RFP for services. There had been cases where they have purchased licenses and never implemented anything until the licensing contract was already expired. The Deployment Offer had allowed us to jump in right after the acquisition of the licenses and ensure that these licenses were going to be deployed and utilized. Which in turn helps to justify the ROI of the investment they have made at Microsoft and improves Microsoft’s position at renewal time. The Microsoft Account Team we are working within Brazil includes Luciano Lourenço, Fábio Gaspar, and Andre Toledo. Please, feel free to reach out to them if you would like, they will probably have a lot more customers on the radar than the ones I am sharing with you. And the Deployment offer might actually be the justification these government organizations might find to make a license acquisition sooner rather than later. We are looking forward to hearing back from you!
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Hello Hiram, thank you very much for your feedback. We will share this with the program team and update here when we have more information to share.
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Thank you for this informative and insightful feedback about Public Sector customer eligibility for the M365 Deployment Offer. The program sponsors do understand how this program can benefit Public Sector customers and their FastTrack Ready Partners but did not include them when the program was rolled out at the beginning of this year. That said, we recently announced that some Public Sector customers are now eligible for the program, and this was updated in the FastTrack Terms & Conditions. This addition is a pilot program within the program currently approved only for Western Europe. If this pilot is successful, it could mean making this program available to more countries in the future. But in the short term, your customers would not be eligible. We will be sure to pass your along to the program owners for them to consider in the future.