New Microsoft requirements for direct bill partners.
Hassle-free business growth with ALSO
Move from CSP direct to indirect with ALSO
Being a direct (Tier 1) partner has its benefits, but with changes announced by Microsoft, you also face higher costs, e.g., 13 500 EUR annual support policy. You must meet the turnover threshold of 300 000 USD. As a CSP provider, we can help you to save costs when you become an indirect reseller with ALSO.
Desktop-as-a-Service
We’re here to help you grow
At ALSO we help grow and scale your cloud business. Whether you need technical, development,sales, or marketing support, we’re here for you. We make your transition from direct to indirect partner easy and seamless, so you and your customers don’t even notice the change and can rather focus on what matters most – serving your customers.
Benefits of the ALSO Cloud Marketplace
ALSO Cloud Marketplace (ACMP) is our digital ecosystem bringing together vendors, resellers, and end customers. ACMP is more than a shop system. It’s a management platform for all software licenses. Our marketplace covers your needs as an IT reseller, allowing you to both host your own services but also provide a large number of products and services to your customers. Our ACMP is easy to handle. On the platform, add your own services and create individual offers and bundles. Integrate the marketplace with reseller ERP systems to automate your invoicing.
The most popular ACMP services are
Easy Billing
Quick reporting
Effortless provision
24/7 Support
Instant Offers
Business Intelligence Tools
Simple API
NCE renewal tool
White-labelling
Services on offer:
Key features:
Service Providers
Marketing-as-a-Service
Independent Software Vendors
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Device Management
Platform-as-a-Service
Financial Services
Software-as-a-Service
Hardware & Software
ACMP offers over 100 vendors and around 1000 products and services, making the management platform a business opportunity for you as a reseller. With ACMP you can rapidly establish and expand your cloud offering, allowing for a more stable source of recurring revenue for your business.
Top 5 benefits of becoming an indirect partner and partnering with ALSO
1. A premier platform
ALSO offers a provisioning platform (ALSO Cloud Marketplace) free of charge. You no longer need to take care of the development or maintenance of your own platform, marketplace, or shop system..
2. No additional costs
You don’t need to pay 16 500 EUR per year for support services, because ALSO already has the best possible support contract with Microsoft. In case you would like to keep your direct support line with Microsoft, you have the possibility to do that.
3. Optimized billing
No more unclear invoices from Microsoft that drive you crazy, but clear insights per customer per product what has been sold
4. Automation
Decrease process costs by automating your processes. ACMP offers a user-friendly API that helps you to be more efficient / save costs
5. BI-based management information and reporting
32 reports ranging from Azure plan insights, to security reports and security scores, seat changes, and many more.
Become an indirect reseller with ALSO
1
Join Microsoft Partner Network (if you have not already done so)
If you decide to move from a direct bill business to an indirect reseller business, there are several steps you will need to take. Additional information can be found at this Microsoft page.
2
Sign in as global admin and click on “Become an indirect reseller”
3
Review your partner details and enroll
4
When your enrolment is approved, sign in, and accept the indirect reseller agreement.
Explore the resources
Explore the resources
Why Partner with ALSO?
Cloud Solution Provider Guidebook
Monetise your Cloud Business with ALSO Cloud Marketplace
Why and how to become an indirect Microsoft CSP partner?
The ALSO Cloud Marketplace explained in less than 3 minutes
The Microsoft Cloud Solutions (CSP) Program explained in less than two minutes
NCE upgrade tool
The Shortest Path to Cloud Profitability?
It’s Surprisingly Indirect
Your customers bought Microsoft Security. Who's watching it at 3am?
The gap
Where do you stand?
Microsoft’s current requirements for direct bill partners
Support Requirement
Direct bill partners must have a Microsoft Support Plan. Whether Advanced Support for Partners or Premier Support, you’re losing €13.500 every year.
Revenue Requirement
If you haven’t made at least 300K (USD) in the previous 12 months in the CSP program, you’re ineligible for the direct bill program. And perpetual software sales don’t count towards your calculated revenue.
Managed Service Requirement
To remain in the program, direct bill partners must provide at least one managed service, IP service or custom solution and offer a scalable marketplace.
JOIN THE SOC WEBINAR
Your customers’ Need This!
Not sure how to add managed security to your portfolio?
Choose your SOC provider
What a SOC service
Add a 24/7 Security Operations Centre to your portfolio through ALSO, with vetted providers, one contract, and one invoice. No hiring, no tooling, no night shifts.
Available to all ALSO partners. No minimum commitment.
you're already sitting on
Your customers have licences. Defender is deployed. Sentinel is collecting logs. On paper, they're protected.
In practice, alerts arrive at 2am on a Sunday and nobody triages them until Monday. Features they're paying for were never switched on. Nobody is hunting for the threats that don't trigger an alert at all.
That gap is not a licensing problem, and it isn't one your customers can close by buying more products. It takes people, watching, continuously. That's exactly what most SMB and mid-market customers can't justify hiring for, and what most Microsoft partners can't justify building.
So, the work either doesn't get done, or it lands on you.
actually adds
A managed SOC sits on top of the Microsoft Security stack your customers already own, and turns it into something that's monitored and acted on.
Continuous monitoring
Analysts watching signals from Defender, Entra ID and Sentinel around the clock, not just during your support hours.
Real response, not just alerts
Threats contained and remediated as they happen, day or night, instead of queuing up for someone to look at in the morning.
Configuration that earns its licence fee
Providers make sure the security features your customers already pay for are properly deployed and tuned. It's a fast, visible win in the first weeks of any engagement.
Proactive threat hunting
Looking for what the automated rules miss, rather than waiting for something to trip.
Evidence for auditors and regulators
Documented detection, response and incident reporting your customers can put in front of a regulator or a cyber insurer.
Continuous monitoring is quietly becoming a compliance requirement rather than a nice to have. Depending on your customer's sector, some of this may already apply.
| Framework | Who it applies to | Why a SOC matters |
|---|---|---|
| NIS2 | Essential and important entities across most EU sectors | Incident detection and handling obligations, with tight reporting deadlines that are hard to hit without 24/7 eyes |
| DORA | Banking and financial services | ICT risk management, monitoring, and incident classification and reporting |
| TISAX | Automotive supply chain | Information security assessment covering detection and response maturity |
| ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and 27002:2022 | Any organisation seeking certification | Monitoring and logging controls that need to be operated, not just documented |
Continuous monitoring is quietly becoming a compliance requirement rather than a nice to have. Depending on your customer's sector, some of this may already apply.
Live Webinar
Cybersecurity in 2027: what MSPs can expect
Cybersecurity is one of the biggest growth opportunities for MSPs. SMBs are facing rising cyber attacks, tighter regulations, and AI is making it faster and easier to launch attacks at scale. This webinar covers the top attacks seen in 2026, how to best support and protect your customers, how AI is changing cybersecurity from both the attacker and defender viewpoint, and Chorus's cybersecurity predictions for 2027.
Date: 24 November 2026
Time: 10:00 – 11:00 CET
Speaker : Mark Jones and Antony Polson
Language: English
We're building a shortlist of vetted providers so you can match the service to the customer, rather than forcing every customer into the same offering.
Microsoft native detection and response across identities, endpoints, cloud, email, applications and infrastructure, with two service tiers: MDR for customers starting out, MXDR for broader coverage. A strong fit for SMB and mid-market customers building on the Microsoft stack.
Chorus Cyber
24x7x365 Advanced CSOC
More providers joining soon. We're onboarding additional SOC partners with different specialisms, tiering, and regional coverage. Tell us what you need, and we'll flag it when a match goes live.
- Provider 2, coming soon
- Provider 3, coming soon
- Provider 4, coming soon
- Provider 5, coming soon
Compare providers
Every SOC provider will tell you they do detection and response. These are the criteria that actually separate them, and the ones your customers will ask about once the conversation gets serious.
| Criterion | What to look for | Chorus Cyber | Provider 2 | Provider 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Service model and tiers | Whether there's an entry option and a step up, or a single offering | MDR and MXDR | ||
| 24/7/365 coverage | Genuinely continuous, not business hours plus on call | |||
| Microsoft native coverage | Works with what your customer already licenses | |||
| Third party integration | Microsoft doesn't fully cover every area yet, network security in particular | |||
| Custom Sentinel playbooks and runbooks | Whether they'll build for a customer's specific scenarios or only run standard rules | |||
| Threat hunting | Proactive searching, not just alert triage | |||
| MTTD and MTTR | Published detection and response times you can hold them to | |||
| Sentinel and Log Analytics cost optimisation | Ingestion costs can quietly dwarf the service fee | |||
| Penetration testing | Available as part of the engagement or as an add on | |||
| Regulatory incident reporting | Whether reports are produced, and how fast | |||
| Managed or co-managed | Whether your team stays in the loop or hands over entirely | |||
| Best for | Customer size and profile | SMB and mid-market |
on what matters
New to ALSO?
Whether you're looking to expand into AI, cloud, cybersecurity or other growth areas, success depends on more than access to technology. It requires the right ecosystem, expertise, services and platforms to turn opportunities into profitable business.
As Europe's technology provider, ALSO helps partners identify opportunities, adopt new technologies and build scalable business models through a unique combination of Supply, Solutions and Services. We help you navigate change, reduce complexity and create sustainable growth.
Expert guidance on Microsoft licensing and bundles
With ALSO, you get:
Access to training, GTM assets, and pre-sales support
Scalable services to accelerate your cloud business
Microsoft Security coverage
Which parts of the stack each provider actually monitors. This is the detail that decides whether a customer's existing licences are fully used, or half idle.
| Microsoft service | Chorus Cyber | Provider 2 | Provider 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entra ID | |||
| Defender for Endpoint | |||
| Defender for Identity | |||
| Defender for Cloud | |||
| Defender for Cloud Apps | |||
| Defender for IoT | |||
| Entra ID | |||
| Purview DLP | |||
| Insider Risk Management |
Which option fits your customer?
Just getting started
Customers with Microsoft 365 Business Premium or E3, no dedicated security staff, and endpoints and identities as the priority. Entry-level MDR gives them monitored detection and response on the two attack surfaces that matter most, without a jump in licensing.
Ready for broader protection
Customers who've grown into cloud workloads, email-borne threats and SaaS applications. MXDR extends coverage across identities, endpoints, cloud, email, applications and infrastructure, correlating signals rather than watching each product separately.
Needing advanced coverage
Customers under regulatory pressure, handling sensitive data, or operating across multiple regions. Enterprise-grade services add proactive threat hunting, custom response workflows and reporting built for audits.
Not sure where a customer lands? Run the questions below, or ask a security specialist and we'll size it with you.
Decision-maker questions
Ten questions that get you from "we should probably do something about security" to a specific provider's recommendation. Use them in a discovery call.
| Ask your customer | Points towards |
|---|---|
| Are you building security natively on Microsoft only solutions? | [Provider TBC] |
| Do you handle sensitive or regulated data? | [Provider TBC] |
| Are you on Microsoft 365 Business Premium or E3? | [Provider TBC] |
| Are you on Microsoft 365 E5, or the Defender and Purview suites? | [Provider TBC], covering every security area your plan already includes |
| Do you have an Azure subscription, and are you using Microsoft Sentinel? | [Provider TBC] |
| Are you subject to NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001, GDPR, PCI DSS or IEC 62443? | [Provider TBC] |
| How many employees do you have? | [Provider TBC] |
| Do you operate across multiple countries or regions? | [Provider TBC] |
| Do you want a fully managed service, or to stay hands on alongside the provider? | [Provider TBC] |
| Would you want regular posture reviews and improvement recommendations? | [Provider TBC] |
Why buy through ALSO?
One marketplace, one invoice
Microsoft licenses and managed security on the same platform and the same bill. No separate vendor contracts to negotiate, no reconciliation.
A choice of providers, not a single option
Match the service to the customer instead of the other way round and keep the customer when their needs change.
Security specialists in your sales cycle
Our team joins your customer conversations, helps scope the requirement, and answers the technical questions you'd otherwise have to chase a vendor for.
Microsoft expertise behind you
We know the licensing, the stack and where the coverage gaps are, so you can position the service against what your customer already owns.
A natural next step from licenses you've already sold
Every Microsoft Security customer in your base is a candidate. The conversation starts with what they've already bought.
How it works
Sell Microsoft Security
Start from the licenses your customer already has or lead with them.
Recurring revenue, not a one-off project
Managed services bill monthly and renew by default. It's margin that compounds instead of resetting every quarter.
Add a SOC service
Pick the provider and tier that fits, through the ALSO Cloud Marketplace.
Activate the customer
Onboarding runs with the provider. Typical setup is measured in days, not months.
The provider delivers 24/7 monitoring
They run the SOC. You keep the customer relationship.
Grow recurring revenue
Monthly billing, with a natural upsell path from MDR to broader coverage as the customer grows.
[Ask us to check a specific customer's licensing].
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