Changing your Microsoft partner: the subscriptions move, the tenant stays, nobody logs out

A reseller is the company that invoices you for Microsoft licences and, if it is any good, does something for the money. Microsoft calls the programme Cloud Solution Provider, or CSP, and it was designed from the start so that the customer owns the tenant and the partner only holds a billing relationship to it. That single design decision is why changing partners is not a project: the thing you would be afraid to move — the tenant with everything in it — never moves.

Why people change

Rarely the price: Microsoft sets the list price and it is the same everywhere; a partner can discount, and the good ones do on the quote, but the gap is small. People change because the invoice arrives from a company that has done nothing else since the last invoice: a licensing question goes unanswered for a week, a renewal comes as a surprise, a security setting nobody configured lets a phishing email through, an engineer has never been seen. Or because the company now has offices in three countries and the partner can invoice in one. The licence is the smallest part of what a Microsoft partner is for; when it is the only part, the partner is a payment processor.

How a transfer works, when your partner is a direct reseller

1. The new partner asks for the tenant ID and the list of subscriptions. Both are on the Microsoft 365 admin centre; nothing is exported, nothing is changed. We check what you have against what you use at the same time, because the transfer is the moment to drop the seats nobody holds.
2. The new partner creates the transfer request in Partner Center. Microsoft sends it to the current partner. It names the subscriptions and nothing else.
3. The current partner approves it. Microsoft’s partner agreement obliges it to; a partner that stalls is in breach and Microsoft support will complete the transfer on your instruction. In practice most approve within a day, because a customer who wants to leave is not a customer worth arguing with.
4. Billing switches. From that moment the subscriptions are invoiced by the new partner, in the currency of its entity in your country, with the terms and renewal dates they already had. Nothing is provisioned, nothing restarts.
5. The old partner’s access is removed. A partner usually holds delegated administration rights on the tenant. Those rights belong to the relationship, not to the tenant, and they go when it does. We check that they have gone.
6. The new partner’s access is agreed. None, per ticket and time-limited, or standing access for a managed service — your choice, least privilege, and reversible. The transfer does not require any.

When your partner is an indirect reseller

Most Microsoft resellers are not direct. A direct reseller holds the billing relationship with Microsoft itself and appears in Partner Center as the partner of record. An indirect reseller sells through a distributor — TD SYNNEX, Ingram Micro, Pax8, ALSO, Crayon and the like — and it is the distributor, not the reseller, that holds the subscriptions in Partner Center. The reseller you talk to is a layer on top. That changes who has to act, not whether the transfer can happen.

1. Find out which distributor sits behind the reseller. The admin centre shows you the reseller, not its provider. Ask the reseller; if it will not say, Microsoft support will tell the tenant’s global administrator. Every request we make names the distributor, so this is the first thing we establish.
2. The request goes to the distributor. The receiving side creates the transfer request in Partner Center exactly as before; it lands with the losing side’s distributor, because that is who holds the subscriptions. The reseller cannot approve or refuse it — it can only delay by not telling its distributor, which is why we send the request and the notice to both.
3. The distributor approves. The same partner agreement obliges it, and distributors are less sentimental about a departing customer than a small reseller is; approvals usually come within a day or two. A distributor that stalls is escalated to Microsoft support with your written instruction, and Microsoft completes the transfer.
4. If both sides share a distributor, it is simpler still. Your reseller and your new partner both under, say, TD SYNNEX in Canada: the distributor changes the reseller of record on the subscriptions in its own system, no Partner Center request at all, usually the same day.
5. Everything else is identical. Terms and renewal dates come across; the tenant, users, mail and files never move; the old reseller’s delegated access is removed with the relationship.

Where we sit in this: our European entity is a direct reseller, so in Europe and the United Kingdom we create the request ourselves. In Canada, Australia and the Middle East our entities sell through distributors, and there our distributor creates the request on our behalf; you see no difference. And when a transfer is not available for a particular line — a legacy subscription, some Azure agreements — there is always the second route: the same subscription is bought fresh from us and the old one is left to run to its renewal date, timed so that you never pay for both. We tell you which route applies to each line before anything is done.

What does not come with you, and what to do about it

• The old partner’s support contract, if you had one, ends with the relationship. Ours starts with it: written response times on business days, priced per month, cancel any month.
• Azure reservations and savings plans transfer with the Azure plan; a reservation bought under a different agreement type does not. We read the agreement before promising.
• Licences under an Enterprise Agreement, Open Value or an MPSA are Volume Licensing, not CSP. They stay where they are until they expire and are usually replaced with CSP subscriptions at that point; that is a different conversation with a different calendar.
• Anything the old partner built and owns — a portal, a backup product, a monitoring agent on its own contract. It is worth asking, before the transfer, what would stop working if the relationship ended tomorrow. The answer is usually nothing, and occasionally a backup.

When to do it

Any time. A transfer does not restart terms, so an annual subscription with four months left has four months left with the new partner. The renewal date is the moment to change what you buy — drop, add, move to a longer term — and the transfer is the moment to change who you buy it from; they can coincide, and they do not need to. A group with entities in several countries usually transfers country by country, each to the entity that invoices in the right currency, and keeps one tenant throughout.

What it costs

Nothing. There is no Microsoft fee for a transfer, no charge from us, and no change to the list price. What changes is the quote — our price sits at or under the list — and what the same money buys: implementation, migration, security work, engineers who answer, a licensing review at every renewal, and an invoice in your currency from an entity in your country. The transfer page sets it out channel by channel; the form there is the whole process from your side.

Asked before deciding

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