One of the top Microsoft Gold partners in the UK
When you’re looking for a Microsoft Gold partner organisation to provide a service, how typically do you differentiate businesses within a specific industry from one-another? In some areas where the field of speciality is quite narrow, it can be easy. Reviews, referrals, testimonials, but what about IT? The subject is so broad and in many cases requires specific experience or understanding to be able to ascertain if an ‘IT’ company actually provides the services you need. Then stepping beyond that, how do you know they’re any good? Many IT providers offer a broad range of services. They may be strong in certain areas and weak in others, but which is not obvious.
You may see IT services providers stating that they’re Microsoft ‘Silver’ or ‘Gold’ partners, but what does that actually mean? Well in itself it’s vague, but drill further in and you can learn a lot more about the skills that provider has.
Microsoft have 18 competencies they measure their partners against. Depending upon certified technical individuals within the business, and their performance against defined targets, partners could be either Silver or Gold certified against one or several of these 18.
If a partner states they are ‘Silver’ or ‘Gold’ that only tells you they have at least 1 competency at that level, but not which, so it doesn’t narrow your understanding of the skills they have.
Take a look here at the list of competencies and what each of them defines here: Competency partners (microsoft.com)
Infinity Group have 11 Microsoft competencies. 5 Gold and 6 Silver.
We view this as an immense achievement by our team, who strive to acquire the key skills they need to deliver and support cutting-edge solutions to our clients, empowering them to achieve more. Each one of these has been won through commitment and dedication to training programmes, focussing on delivering the right licensing and solutions to our clients.
They showcase the areas that we as an IT provider no only specialise in, but also have proven expertise in delivering.
Lets take a quick look at what each of them means:
Application Development – Gold
This shows that we can design, develop and monitor cloud and web-based applications in Azure or Microsoft 365 by virtue of having a number of staff that hold specific Microsoft certifications.
Cloud Business Applications – Silver
An extremely important area for us and our Business Applications team, demonstrating that we have the capability to configure and deploy Dynamics 365 to meet requirements across sales, marketing, customer service and field service areas. Further, holding the SMB version of this competency, as we do, also demonstrates our capabilities in delivering Business Central, a complete business management system for small to medium organisations.
Cloud Platform – Gold
Here we are demonstrating we can deploy, migrate and maintain applications or services in Microsoft Azure. It also demonstrates our proven track record of achieving these activities as part of the measurement is the volume of revenue our customers consume within the Azure platform.
Cloud Productivity – Gold
This is one of our real core areas. Holding this demonstrates that we have the skills required to deliver solutions in Microsoft 365 using Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online and Teams. It also evidences our success rate at delivering by measuring active users against those workloads. Organisations with this competency have at least 4,000 monthly active users in their client portfolio.
Collaboration & Content – Gold
This demonstrates our ability to provide collaboration and communication solutions within the Microsoft 365 stack, across tools such as Teams, Sharepoint Online and OneDrive, for enterprise clients in addition to SMBs.
Solutions we offer in this area span both data and voice.
Small & Mid-Market Cloud Solutions – Gold
We have held this at gold level for 7 years now. Covering a broad range of skills in the Microsoft 365 cloud across productivity, collaboration and security for smaller organisations, it highlights our ability to migrate businesses into the Microsoft cloud efficiently and successfully.
Data Analytics – Silver
This showcases our capabilities in business intelligence with PowerBI, through which we can offer solutions in data transformation, modelling and visualisation.
Enterprise Mobility Management – Silver
An important element for good security management in Microsoft 365, demonstrating that we can plan, deploy and manage mobility services to keep data and devices secure across all device types and operating systems, wherever they are.
Messaging – Silver
This one is important for the correct configuration and management of email services in Microsoft 365, demonstrating that we have the skills required to configure, monitor and troubleshoot services in addition to managing compliance and threat protection.
Project & Portfolio Management – Silver
This demonstrates that we are able to design, build and deploy project management solutions through the Power Platform or using Project on the Web.
Security – Silver
Now more important than ever, this recognises our expertise and that we have the skills necessary to delivery security and compliance solutions in Microsoft 365.
If you are looking for Managed Service Provider with the full capability to support all IT Network, IT Infrastructure needs or want to find out more about which Microsoft application is best suited to your business needs, please contact us.
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