MICROSOFT
Choosing a Microsoft partner: what the badges do and don’t mean
5 min read
A Microsoft partner designation certifies a company’s performance and certification mix against Microsoft’s own thresholds, not the quality of the specific engineer who will work in your tenant, so the useful questions are about who does the work, what they hand over and what happens when something breaks.
Search for a Microsoft partner and you will get a page of badges. Solutions Partner designations, legacy Gold and Silver competencies, specialisations, programme memberships. They are not interchangeable and most buyers have no reason to know the difference.
We will be straightforward about our own position, because it makes the point. RedTreeSupport is a Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program member and reseller. We do not hold a Solutions Partner designation, and we are not going to imply one by writing the words in a smaller font.
Here is what the tiers actually certify, and what to ask instead.
What a designation measures
Microsoft's partner designations are scored against thresholds: certified individuals on staff, customers added, usage growth across the relevant workloads. They are a measure of a company's trading relationship with Microsoft and its aggregate certification count.
That is genuinely useful information. A partner with a Modern Work designation has demonstrably deployed Microsoft 365 at some scale and employs people who passed the exams. It tells you the company is real and has done this before.
What it doesn’t measure
It does not tell you who will be assigned to your project. Certification counts are organisation-wide, and a large partner's designation is carried by a team you may never meet.
It does not tell you how the work is handed over, whether you will be able to administer the result yourself, or what happens at 7pm on a Friday. And it does not distinguish between a partner who configures your tenant thoughtfully and one who applies the same template they applied to the last forty.
- Which named engineers will work in your tenant, and what else they are assigned to
- What you receive at the end: documentation, runbooks, admin access, or a dependency
- Whether the proposed design is yours or a template, and what in it is specific to you
- Who answers when something breaks outside the hours in the contract
The questions that separate partners
Ask what they would do first. A partner who opens with an assessment of your current tenant is thinking about your environment. One who opens with a product recommendation is thinking about a sale.
Ask what they would advise you not to do. Everyone has an answer to what you should buy. Far fewer will tell you that a feature you are excited about needs three other things in place first, or that the tier you are considering is more than you need.
Ask how a change gets made six months in. The answer describes the working relationship better than any part of the proposal does — whether there is a ticket queue, a named contact, a defined escalation path, or a phone number that someone might answer.
Reseller, implementer, or both
These are different roles and a partner may hold one or both. A reseller sells and manages your licences. An implementer designs and builds. Buying both from one company is convenient and common, and it is worth being aware that the same company then advises you on what to buy and profits from the answer.
That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to ask the partner to show their working when they recommend a tier change, and to be able to explain why a cheaper option would not serve you.
A short checklist
If you are shortlisting, these five answers will tell you more than the badge row on the homepage.
- Who, by name, does the work, and who covers them when they are unavailable
- What the first two weeks produce, in writing
- What you own at the end and what stays with the partner
- What is explicitly out of scope
- What the partner has recommended against recently, and why
Questions we get asked
Should we only work with a partner that holds a Solutions Partner designation?
It is a reasonable filter for large, complex programmes where you want the breadth a bigger organisation carries. For a mid-sized migration or a security rollout, the identity of the engineer assigned to you matters more than the organisation-wide certification count, so it is worth asking who that is before using the designation as a cutoff.
What is RedTreeSupport’s Microsoft partner status?
We are a Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program member and reseller. We do not hold a Solutions Partner designation and do not describe ourselves as one.
Can we buy licences from one partner and have another do the work?
Yes, and it is a common arrangement. It separates the advice from the licence margin, which some organisations prefer. It also means two relationships to manage, so it works best when the implementation partner is clear about what they need from the licensing side.