Datacom has joined Intergen in gaining 1-Tier status in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program.

Tier 1 status is for partners looking to provide an end-to-end customer experience including customer support.

Under Tier 1, the partner has a direct relationship with Microsoft and has to have ‘high capability standards to provide a great customer experience'.

The program is designed to strengthen customer relationships and expand cloud sales opportunities by enabling partners to provide direct billing, sell combined offers and services and directly provision, manage and support products and services.

Microsoft New Zealand says it now has around 10 1-Tier CSP partners in New Zealand, including Softsource, which gained the status back in October 2014 and says it was one of the first in the world to do so, and Intergen.

Jonathan Ladd, Datacom chief executive, says the Tier 1 status is a key part of Datacom's strategy to be the leading cloud partner for the enterprise.

“There are not many credible options for organisations who see their future in a hybrid public and private cloud environment, and Datacom's growing public cloud skill set is allowing us to disrupt the market,” Ladd says.

“We see the future as very bright for Azure and will stand side by side Microsoft to enable new and innovative business models for our mutual customers.

Datacom has extensive experience working in Microsoft Azure, including migrating Zespri International's global SAP platform and other applications to the cloud in what was the world's largest production SAP migration to Azure. The company's work with Zespri won Datacom the Cloud Enterprise award at Microsoft's New Zealand partner awards.

The new status caps a good week for Datacom, which earlier this week was appointed to the New Zealand Government's Telecommunications-as-a-service supply panel.

Datacom was selected on the panel for services across security, communications, contact centres, and aggregation solutions.

Datacom says its appointment to the TaaS panel will complement the company's suite of government services, which includes data centers, infrastructure-as-a-service, desktop-as-a-service, office productivity and IT managed services.