The danger of the solution provider business is the tendency of some partners to fall into a "lifestyle" business model, said Hammerschmidt. "Microsoft isn't in the lifestyle [partner] model [business]," he said. "It is transformative. It forces the issue." Hammerschmidt said his cloud business is up with a double digit increase in managed services growth even as Nortec's overall business will be down about 10 percent as the company makes the move to cloud. 

The cloud business transformation has disrupted the entire company, he said.

"It disrupted the engineers, disrupted the sales force, disrupted the client, disrupted the partnership," he said. "Disrupted is a bit of an understatement."

Jeff Meyer, co-founder and CEO of InfraScience, an Alpharaetta, Ga., Microsoft 2014 Partner of the Year Award finalist for cloud in the small and medium business market segment, said the Microsoft partner program has been a spark plug helping drive his company's cloud business to as much as 50 percent of his sales.

"The Microsoft partner program is exceptional," he said. "I have never seen anything like it with any other organization we have worked with."

Meyer said he started the cloud transformation with Microsoft five years ago and every year InfraScience's sales have been up anywhere from 20 percent to as much as 60 percent. He said the cloud transformation has sparked sales in every segment of InfraScience's business with hybrid cloud environment integration.

"It has created a lot more services opportunities for us," he said.

Meyer's message to other partners: the cloud business is "here now, it is real, it is happening." He said one of the keys to his company's success with Microsoft is hitting aggressive sales targets. "As partners we have got scorecards too [in the form of sales targets]," he said. "We make commitments to Microsoft. That scorecard transforms you. You have got  to hit that goal if the partnership is important to you and you want to be successful."