Skerply — MSP Partner Onboarding Guide

Welcome to the Skerply Partner Programme. This guide walks an Azure Managed Service Provider (MSP) through becoming a Skerply reseller, deploying Skerply into your managed customers' subscriptions, and supporting them through the savings-share billing model.

V1 scope. Skerply V1 ships as a per-subscription Managed Application. A central partner portal that aggregates the view across all your managed customers is on the V2 roadmap (Phase 5+); the V1 architecture supports multi-subscription from day one to make that portal a non-breaking addition. See the multi-subscription model below.

Contents

1. Why partner with us
2. Programme tiers and pricing
3. Joining the programme
4. Deploying Skerply into a customer subscription
5. Co-branded materials
6. Billing and revenue share
7. Supporting your customers
8. The multi-subscription model — V1 vs V2
9. Partner-tier FAQ

Why partner with us

Skerply is not a competitor to your managed services. It surfaces opportunities; your team decides which to action and earns the FinOps remediation hours.

Programme tiers and pricing

The Partner tier exists in exchange for you bringing Skerply to your managed book. Partners receive:

• Discounted per-customer pricing,
• A reduced savings-share percentage (more delta stays with you and your customer),
• Co-branded marketing assets,
• Quarterly product roadmap briefings,
• First access to V2 partner-portal features.

See ADR-020 in PLAN.md for the go-to-market rationale.

Joining the programme

1. Confirm eligibility. You must be an active Azure MSP or hold equivalent Azure Partner credentials. Membership in the Microsoft Cloud Partner Programme (Azure solutions partner designation) is recommended but not strictly required for the pilot.
2. Sign the partner addendum. Contact the Skerply team through the contact route given when you receive your invite. The addendum covers branding, pricing, support escalation, and the partner-portal beta terms.
3. Receive your partner identifier. This is a string passed at deployment time (see Deployment) and used to attribute each customer subscription to your account for billing and the future partner portal.
4. Onboard your team. Each partner team gets:
   • a designated technical point of contact at Skerply,
   • access to the partner Teams channel for technical questions,
   • the partner asset bundle (see Co-branded materials).

There is no per-engineer licence fee — your whole team can deploy and support customers using their own Entra ID accounts.

Deploying Skerply into a customer subscription

Deployment is the same Managed Application flow as the Direct tier, with the partner identifier supplied as a parameter so the resulting subscription is attributed to you for billing.

Prerequisites for the customer

Deployment steps (typical CSP-managed flow)

1. From the Azure Portal → Marketplace, search for Skerply and select the Partner plan. (If you cannot see the Partner plan, your partner identifier hasn't been provisioned yet — contact your Skerply point of contact.)
2. Choose the target subscription (the customer's) and the resource group the Managed Application will live in.
3. Choose the region. Skerply only supports regions where Azure OpenAI is reliably available — the wizard enforces this list (ADR list in PLAN.md).
4. Enter your partner identifier in the Partner attribution field. This field is hidden on the Direct plan.
5. Confirm. The deployment takes ~10 minutes.
6. Pre-flight check. The first launch of the dashboard runs the customer-side checks: Cost Management Reader, Graph consent, OpenAI quota. If anything fails, the wizard shows the exact remediation command — see Customer help — Getting started.
7. First scan. Single-Analyst recommendations begin appearing within the first scan cycle. Debate-pipeline recommendations begin appearing as soon as the cost-cap guards permit (which is essentially immediately at default values).

Recommended deployment pattern

For each customer, document in your runbook:

• the subscription ID,
• the deployment resource group,
• the assigned Cost Management Reader principal (the Managed Application's system-assigned MI),
• the Graph admin who consented,
• the recipient group(s) configured in Settings → Recipients.

This makes auditing and re-baselining (rare, audited operations) straightforward.

Co-branded materials

The partner asset bundle includes:

• Customer-facing one-pager (PDF + editable PowerPoint) — explains the offering, what is read, what is written (nothing), savings-share model.
• Technical brief (PDF) for the customer's platform team — covers the Managed Application architecture, permissions, data residency.
• Email templates — pilot invitation, post-deployment day-1 / day-7 / day-30 check-ins.
• Slide deck — 12-slide customer presentation.
• Logo lockup — partner + Skerply co-branded mark, with usage guidelines.

All assets are available in a publisher-tenant shared folder linked from the partner Teams channel. Please do not redistribute outside your client engagements. The usage guidelines cover trademark, colourway, and minimum sizing.

Billing and revenue share

The customer is billed monthly via Azure Marketplace. The bill has two components, both detailed in Customer help — Billing and data privacy:

1. Per-customer subscription fee — the Partner-tier amount ($70 / customer / month at the time of writing — confirm against your addendum).
2. Savings-share — partner-discounted percentage of the realised monthly savings (delta = baseline − settled-actual, clamped to ≥ 0).

The publisher remits the partner's share monthly via the route specified in your addendum (typically Microsoft Partner Center payout for CSP-aligned partners, otherwise direct).

A reconciliation CSV is available in the partner portal (V1: emailed monthly; V2: in-portal): one row per customer with baseline_usd, actual_usd, delta_usd, share_percentage, partner_remit_usd, publisher_remit_usd.

Supporting your customers

You are the first-line support contact for your managed customers; Skerply publisher support is your second-line.

What you handle

• Onboarding pre-flight failures and Azure role-assignment guidance.
• Walking the customer through their first set of recommendations and the "How we decided" recap.
• Helping the customer set up the Skerply: policy-hint tags appropriately for their environment (see Customer help — Tags).
• Configuring recipient groups and the debate-pipeline cost caps in Settings.
• DLQ inspection and replay for email or debate failures.

What we handle

• Product bugs (recommendation calculation errors, dashboard regressions, schema-validation failures).
• Pricing-API integration issues (Retail Prices outages).
• LLM-related issues (circuit-breaker investigations, quota guidance escalation to Azure).
• Marketplace billing disputes that originate from the publisher side.
• The V2 partner portal roadmap.

Escalation channels

The multi-subscription model — V1 vs V2

A meaningful share of mid-market customers has 2–5 subscriptions. The V1 model handles this with one Managed Application deployment per subscription. There is no cross-subscription view in V1, but the architecture preserves all the data needed to build one without a breaking change:

• Each deployment carries the same partner_id attribution at the Marketplace billing layer.
• Each deployment writes its scan history, recommendations, and audit log inside its own subscription's SQL DB — and posts a small monthly summary (already required for billing) to the publisher's metering endpoint.

V2 (Phase 5+) will add a partner portal that authenticates the partner against Entra ID multi-tenant, pulls the monthly summary set across all attributed deployments, and renders a single multi-customer view: open recommendations, realised savings, scan-failure status, debate-cost burn-rate. The portal is read-only across customers; per-customer drill-down still requires authenticating into that customer's dashboard.

Risks tracked: see PLAN.md Section 18 — "Multi-subscription customers" and "MSP partner portal".

Partner-tier FAQ

Can I white-label Skerply?

No. Skerply is co-branded — the partner logo appears alongside the Skerply mark in the dashboard header (configurable in Settings → Branding) and in scheduled report emails. The product name and trust messaging (read-only, data sovereignty) is not removable, by design — the trust posture is the product.

What happens if a partner relationship ends?

The customer's deployments are reassigned to the Direct tier at the next monthly billing cycle. Per-customer pricing and savings-share rate change to Direct-tier rates from that cycle onward. The customer's Skerply deployment continues uninterrupted.

Can I see the LLM debate transcripts?

Yes — your engineers, when accessing the customer's dashboard with their Entra ID account (assuming the customer granted access), can click Show full debate on any recommendation. The transcript is stored for 90 days in the customer's SQL DB. It is never sent to the publisher or to the partner outside the customer's tenant.

Are partner engineers' actions audited?

Yes. Every recommendation state change, every cap adjustment, and every recipient change is recorded in the customer's audit_log table with the acting principal's Entra ID. Both you and the customer can export the audit log from Settings.

Can I run a proof-of-value before going to Marketplace billing?

Yes. The partner team can issue a 30-day evaluation entitlement that disables Marketplace billing for one customer subscription. Contact your Skerply point of contact to request this; it is intended for short proofs-of-value with a named customer, not for sustained free use.