MagicOrange is now available to be transacted via the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This exciting development means that customers can acquire our MagicOrange Prism solution using their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) credits or their existing Microsoft Enterprise agreement. Stephen Coull, Director & Head of Global Sales at MagicOrange explains what this news means to the company and its customers.
Why is Microsoft the right partner for MagicOrange?
From the inception of MagicOrange, we wanted to disrupt the market with a cloud-native SaaS application, which at the time, and specifically in the financial services industry, required stakeholders to possess an early adopter outlook. Choosing to partner with Microsoft to provide a best-in-class cloud-native application that could be deployed to clients around the globe has been a masterstroke, and with 200 data centres across 50 countries, Microsoft has empowered us to deliver the best experiences around enterprise security, scalability and flexibility like no other cloud provider.
Of course, any great partnership is based on the relationship you have with one another, and our relationship with Microsoft is a very strong and engaged one. Our strategy has been to leverage best-in-class solutions for our platform rather than develop proprietary solutions, hence the reason to embed Microsoft Power BI into MagicOrange, allowing customers to leverage the Gartner leading BI and analytics solution as a completely integrated part of their MagicOrange experience.
Our goal is to make Prism as user-friendly as possible, and that starts with getting an organisation's data into MagicOrange quickly and easily. The market is already familiar with the Microsoft suite, so we are providing tools and capabilities that have existing training and unlimited resources that are skilled in these tools. Rather than having to try and find limited and expensive skills for proprietary solutions, we are removing as many barriers to entry as we can to embed Prism to be a business tool rather than a technical tool.
Buy vs build is a big debate in SaaS. Do you build something yourself, partner with a provider or buy someone and bring it into your product?
We chose the partner route. Instead of building apps for extract, transform and load (ETL) to get data into the MagicOrange platform, we decided to leverage Microsoft technologies like Power Platform, Power Query, Azure Data Factory to make it easy for customers to ingest data, transform it and bring it into Prism.
Partnering with Microsoft enables us to focus on the areas where we excel – providing IT financial management and cost transparency, and the way we solve and calculate unit rates around costing and profitability – while they provide the tools and applications to aid us in doing this. It’s really the perfect partnership.
What are MACC credits and what are the benefits of acquiring the MagicOrange Prism solution using them?
MACC stands for ‘Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment’ credits. These credits are a part of the Azure Monetary Commitment (AMC) programme, which is designed to allow enterprise customers to prepay for Azure services at a discounted rate, based on their anticipated usage over a specific term.
The MACC credits allow organisations to better manage their Azure costs, save money through volume discounts and ensure predictable budgeting for their Azure usage.
Being responsible for the sales process and sales strategy at MagicOrange, I put a lot of importance on providing clients with options. Now prospective customers have three ways in which they can procure MagicOrange: they can buy the platform directly through MagicOrange, through one of our many global channel partners, or through Microsoft. This is an incredibly powerful endorsement due to the credibility of Microsoft globally.
Why is this a milestone for the company?
Everyone is familiar with the concept of stores, or app stores – most of us have a smartphone. So, whether it's the Apple App Store or Google Play on Android, we’ve all had an experience of browsing and buying an application. The same exists for enterprise products in the Azure Marketplace.
We had to go through a number of certifications and recommendations to make sure that our product is up to the Microsoft technical team's high standards. Not to mention the criteria needed to have Prism listed. Straightaway, it gives clients that are browsing through different solutions and applications a level of trust that this is an authentic application. Our product passed enterprise security, robustness, performance, integration and capability tests – and that's something we at the company are very proud of.
Get started today
MagicOrange supports organisations in multiple industries to establish an ITFM framework and achieve greater cost transparency. To learn more about specific industry use cases, please visit our success stories. Or to start your journey today, you can request a demo or find MagicOrange on the Microsoft Azure marketplace.
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