Partners Can Offer Support Services …

Microsoft’s move in favor of the channel enables -partners to offer a completely different support experience to businesses than what they would get today by purchasing Microsoft directly, Intelisys' Pryfogle said.

Mark Szotkowski, president of sales for RapidScale, an Irvine, Calif.-based cloud service provider that targets the SMB market, said that unless the customer is a very large business paying for higher-level support, chances are good they won't receive support from Microsoft.

"The big part that Microsoft missed with Office 365 going retail is that someone has to support that, implement it and keep it running," he said. "The biggest opportunity we've seen in the channel recently is to step in and start selling Microsoft. Support-wise, you need experts. That's how [Microsoft] really meant to sell it."

NaviSite's Sandman agreed that the opportunity was large for partners interested in selling Office 365. "It's not often you get an opportunity to take a hyper-scale, multi-tenant platform like Office 365 and put your support offering around it and wrap it into a per-license fee," he said.