The Onyx Story
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. When they joined 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.