30 01732 759725 Mark Appleton Steve Grey MARKETPLACES With Copilot for Microsoft 365 now available to all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), after initially being rolled out to a limited number of large enterprises, Technology Reseller speaks to Mark Appleton, Chief Customer Officer at ALSO Cloud UK, and Head of Sales Steve Grey to find out what the cloud marketplace provider is doing to help MSPs grow their business with Microsoft Copilot takes it to more of a mass market than previously stated. And the base licence, rather than being enterprise SKUs-only was extended to any Microsoft SKU, making it available to all.” Finding their way It’s early days but Appleton says ALSO Cloud UK’s 100-plus resellers are already experimenting with the solution. “They’ve mainly been purchasing it for their own use to understand how it works and we're seeing that across the EU. We are the number one for Microsoft in terms of number of licences sold across Europe, and Copilot for Microsoft 365 has gone through a wide range of partners. They’re buying one or two licences and maybe their end users are buying one or two and doing the testing before they really roll it out into their organisation. But it’s only weeks since it was launched, so we're still in the infancy of understanding how the total market is going to react. “For MSPs, it’s having the confidence to be able to go and sell the product and demo it themselves. They'll be testing it themselves, as we have been doing, getting to know the best demos, the areas where it's of greatest benefit, getting those use cases. Microsoft likes to have storytelling as part of the sales pitch. We need to create those stories, which I think is what the MSPs are doing now.” AI Academy To help them, ALSO Cloud has launched a dedicated AI Academy committed to strengthening channel partners’ pre-sales, sales and technical teams, with a big focus on development and integration training. “It's not just around the sales part,” explains Appleton. “We have technical webinars as well so partners can really understand what is needed at the backend, in terms of privacy, cybersecurity, identity etc. There are different courses and different webinars that partners can go through to get a real grasp of what they need to discuss with their end customers.” Grey says the speed with which ALSO Cloud has been able to set up its AI Academy will give partners an immediate advantage with Copilot, highlighting potential pitfalls, as well as the opportunities for additional sales. “With Copilot, access to data is going to be the key piece – the security aspect of integrating Copilot with existing frameworks, of making sure that it's not reading other people's emails, that employees aren’t seeing confidential data from the CEO and so on. Taking Copilot out to a much wider audience of SMBs that have not necessarily been looked after from a security perspective, other than putting in multi-factor authentication and things like that, could present challenges for the less experienced MSPs, which is why training is so key.” He adds that partners who help unlock the productivity benefits of Copilot for customers while addressing data security risks and other pitfalls through training and services can look forward to more regular and closer contact with customers and less customer churn. Just the beginning Of course, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is just the start and while it offers knowledge workers great scope for productivity improvements there are other applications that will offer equal or greater benefits to people in more specialist roles. “In the future every Microsoft application will have an element of Copilot attached,” says Grey. “Power BI will be a big one, Azure too, GitHub for coding – the fact that it can edit code without you having to know every single coding language. You tell it what you want in English and it will write the code for you. You can ask it to add a button to a web page and it will write the code in five seconds. And, of course, it’s not just Microsoft applications. Any software will have some element of AI that does the legwork for you.” ALSO Cloud, which launched its cloud marketplace in the UK last year, has around 80 or 90 vendors on its platform. However, 90% of its sales across Europe come from just one of them – Microsoft. This gives you some idea why the company is so excited by the introduction of Microsoft Copilot, which, as Mark Appleton, Chief Customer Officer at ALSO Cloud UK, points out is not replacing anything but is additional new business. “It’s a huge opportunity for MSPs not only to sell Copilot, but everything else that potentially is needed to run Copilot, whether that’s around security and privacy or an upgrade on infrastructure. The opportunity is massive,” he says. “In the eyes of many, it's that next big thing that comes along every 10 years. Our CEO believes that Copilot is going to be a defining moment in the way that the iPhone was and the internet was. This is going to have that much of an impact.” The other reason why Copilot is set to have such as impact so quickly, according to Head of Sales Steve Grey, is that while every Microsoft application will at some point have an element of Copilot attached to it, Microsoft has chosen to start with a mass market application, Copilot for Microsoft 365, and make it available to all users. “There was initially talk of having a minimum of 300 seats before you could purchase Copilot for Microsoft 365, but at launch they cut that down to one, which The next big thing
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