There’s a moment in almost every conversation with a Microsoft CSP provider where they say something that breaks your heart a little. They’ll talk about going up against a large LSP reseller and they’ll sort of shrug and say, well, we probably can’t win that one. As if the game is already over. As if being a big LSP automatically means they are a more credible transactional partner.
We built Onyx because we know that’s wrong. Not theoretically. Not based on a market analysis. We know it because we were the big LSP, and we saw what was actually happening behind the curtain.
We Know Where the Bodies Are Buried
Before Onyx existed, Neil, Chris and Stew helped build SoftwareOne into the largest Microsoft transactional partner in the world. They joined when the company had around 80 employees to found its business in the UK. Over the next four years, they scaled operations in 80 countries, 20 a year, with Neil essentially living on a plane and building what became a $35 billion Microsoft business from the ground up.
That background isn’t something we mention to impress people. We mention it because it’s the entire reason Onyx exists.
“There’s no other tool out there being built by people that built the largest Microsoft business in the world. Yes, there are other people building tools that help partners grow their Microsoft business. Some provide analytics, some help drive automation, but they don’t really know what the partner wants. They don’t know the problems they’re trying to solve. We’ve seen every war story in the world and we’ve lived them. We know where all the bodies are buried.”
When you’ve done it at that scale — practice expansion, global rollouts, margin management, customer value-realization and billions of dollars in CSP revenue — you don’t just understand the theory. You understand why deals fall apart at the eleventh hour. You understand what a partner’s pricing model actually looks like when it goes wrong. You understand what it costs, operationally, to run a profitable, sustainable and customer-first Microsoft business at $50 million, $200 million, $10 billion+ in revenue.
We built Onyx to take all of that knowledge — every lesson, every mistake, every hard-won edge — and give it to the partners who deserve to win but haven’t had access to it.
The Shift Nobody Was Prepared For
Here’s what’s actually happening in the Microsoft channel right now, whether people are talking about it openly or not.
The Enterprise Agreement, the old way of doing things, is giving way to CSP. Microsoft are minimizing the appeal of EAs to customers and partners and CSP is the new hero motion for 90% of customers. The Cloud Solution Provider program is more flexible, delivers more customer value and is fundamentally better suited to how businesses consume Microsoft products today. That shift is accelerating.
The large LSPs built their empires on the EA. For years, that knowledge was their moat. But as the world moves to CSP, that moat is drying up and they haven’t adapted. Their licensing teams are getting thinner and expertise in the market is scarce. Their advice and service is getting worse. And critically, they were never really set up to do the thing that actually creates value in a CSP world: Microsoft services. Teams migrations. Driving Azure consumption. Enabling Microsoft technology. Driving value-realization. Replacing CrowdStrike with Defender or turning off Okta and deploying Entra.
“The LSPs have specialist teams to do EA-to-CSP transitions but it takes time and the manual effort of commercial experts who understand the dark-artistry. But their advice is getting worse and worse. There’s been a brain drain. The real Microsoft partners — the ones actually helping customers to adopt, innovate and get value from the technology through the services they deliver — they are the ones with the right to win.”
The MSPs, the real Microsoft partners, are already doing the services work. They’re closer to their customers. They understand the environments. They care about outcomes, not just contract renewals. The problem wasn’t their capability. The problem was that they didn’t have the infrastructure to compete: the licensing speed, the pricing confidence, the deal management, the renewal workflows. They were showing up to a gunfight with a pocket knife — not because they weren’t skilled, but because nobody had ever given them the right tools.
We built Onyx to change that.
What the Platform Actually Does
Onyx isn’t a single product. It’s an end-to-end operating system for running a Microsoft CSP practice.
Deal Hub is where we’ve seen partners have their first real “we can win this” moment. EA-to-CSP migrations and renewals that used to take large reseller teams weeks of manual work can be turned around in hours. Full automation of the entire sales cycle.
Support Hub means your team never gets caught flat-footed on a licensing question again. Instead of slow, expensive escalations, wasted time looking for uncertain answers — or worse, guessing — partners get fast, accurate answers on-demand that make them look like the specialists they are.
“As soon as we’re in that first deal with a partner, that’s the magical ‘Ah Ha’ moment. They’re like, oh wow, we’ve done it. We’ve won a new customer we never thought we could win. It’s paid for the platform.”
Expansion Hub is the upsell and cross-sell engine. Using data to surface the right opportunities at the right time for every customer in a partner’s portfolio, backed by actual data.
But here’s the piece that makes Onyx genuinely different from anything else in this space: the platform is only half of what you get.
You Don’t Just Get Software. You Get the Team.
Every Onyx partner gets program management built into the onboarding. And after that, almost every partner chooses to keep it, because they quickly realise that a tool without coaching is just a faster way to make the same mistakes.
“A platform is just the tool. But whoever’s using it, unless they’re actually being coached on all the deals going in there, how to win the deals, how to price them, how to talk to the customer, getting on a call and talking through the options, they’re still not going to be great at it. You’re giving them the bait, but you’re not teaching them to fish. You’ve got to do both. That’s the secret sauce.”
The people we bring into those program management roles are not generalists. They’re expert practitioners who’ve built Microsoft practices at scale, closed hundreds of millions of dollars of CSP deals across geographies and deal sizes, across every flavour of complexity you can imagine.
Onyx changes that equation. Through the platform, partners get access to a team that built multibillion-dollar CSP businesses, expanded practices across 80 countries, and navigated every version of Microsoft’s program and incentive structure that’s ever existed.
“These partners are getting access to amazing people they could never hire themselves, to coach them and help them do deals as an extension of their team. That’s a huge advantage. And as the space gets more crowded, that’s where we’ll win. We’ll just show up so much better.”
The Part That Makes Microsoft Happy Too
One thing we’re deliberate about at Onyx: we’re 100% partner-focused and in total alignment with Microsoft and the metrics they measure their partners by.
What we’ve found is that the best way to help a partner win is to empower them to add value to their customers. And making a customer healthier on Microsoft doesn’t mean discounting. It means right-sizing. It means identifying the Zoom seats, the CrowdStrike licenses, the redundant SaaS tools sitting connected to a Microsoft tenant, and building a migration path that turns off the third-party noise and consolidates onto Microsoft services the customer is already paying for. It means ensuring customers are getting maximum value from the Microsoft technology they own.
The customer saves money which they can re-invest into innovation. The partner gets services revenue to drive the innovation. Microsoft gets broader adoption of their stack. Everybody wins.
“Microsoft can’t have that conversation directly. It would look like they’re snooping. But as a Microsoft partner, you’re doing it as a service, and the customer wants you to. They say, yeah, look at it, tell me where I can save money. The partner can go further than Microsoft can. That’s genuinely useful for everyone.”
Our solution is also fully Co-Op eligible, which means Microsoft rebates can be used to fund the platform. Grow your CSP revenue, earn more rebates, use those rebates to pay for Onyx. The flywheel works and drives cost-neutralization of our solution.
“More revenue means more rebates, and those rebates pay for the platform. It’s like, there’s your flywheel. It pays for itself.”
Why Now Is the Right Time
The market is still early but the shift is happening right now. Our first job is education — we have to help partners understand the opportunity before we help them capture it. There’s the perception that CSP is a race to the bottom, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Deals aren’t won on price, they’re won on value and process. The partners that understand this will scale fast and lead customers into the EA-to-CSP shift. The partners who don’t will spend the next decade catching up.
“For most MSPs today, CSP engagements are reactive. It’s not a motion they lead with or business they actively target, but if they spot an opportunity they’ll engage. In reality, CSP is a trojan horse that opens the door to wider services opportunities — as well as being a lucrative revenue stream in its own right — if the process is structured properly.”
Partners who choose Onyx aren’t just buying a platform. They’re buying access to the only team in this market that has actually built what they’re trying to build, at the largest scale it’s ever been done.
We didn’t build Onyx because we spotted a gap in the market.
We built it because after spending years building the biggest Microsoft partner in the world, we came back to the channel and saw partners who deserved to win — and codified our experience into a single solution to provide everything we wished we’d had.