Original reporting by John Moore and Spencer Smith, published 12 July 2019 on SearchITChannel (TechTarget). This article summarises and expands on that coverage.
Microsoft Unveils Azure Lighthouse and the Azure Migration Program
On the eve of Microsoft Inspire 2019 — the company’s annual partner conference, held 14–18 July in Las Vegas — Microsoft revealed a cluster of channel-focused announcements. Two stood out for Azure partners: Azure Lighthouse, a new multi-tenant management plane, and the Azure Migration Program (AMP), a structured framework to help customers accelerate workload migration to the cloud.
Azure Lighthouse: A Single Control Plane Across Customer Tenants
Azure Lighthouse was designed to give Microsoft partners — particularly Managed Service Providers (MSPs) — a unified interface for viewing and managing Azure environments across multiple customer tenants without having to switch contexts repeatedly. Microsoft described it as providing a “single control plane” for cross-customer operations.
Rory McCaw, president of enterprise advisory services at Green House Data — an Azure Expert MSP based in Cheyenne, Wyoming — described the appeal: Lighthouse offers a single platform that provides access into multiple tenants, directly addressing a long-standing complexity in managing Azure at scale for partners with large customer bases.
JD Helms, president of CloudJumper (a cloud workspace vendor and Gold-level Microsoft partner), characterised Azure Lighthouse as an attempt to simplify what he called the “powerful, yet extremely complex” Azure management portal. While welcoming the direction, Helms noted that at launch it was “still limited in scope and functionality.” He also observed that Lighthouse validates market demand for simplified Azure management consoles — a space CloudJumper addresses with its own Cloud Workspace Management Suite, which it positions as a single-pane-of-glass console across Azure services.
According to Microsoft, Azure Lighthouse was scheduled to become available to Azure partners in July 2019.
Azure Migration Program (AMP): Structured Support for Cloud Adoption
AMP was announced as a programme to guide customers through Azure migration using a combination of Microsoft experts, specialised migration partners, tools, and financial incentives. Key components include:
- Azure Migrate — a tool for centrally planning and tracking migration projects.
- Expert guidance — access to Microsoft specialists and vetted migration partners.
- Cost-reduction offers — funding mechanisms to lower the financial barrier to migration.
McCaw noted that Microsoft has historically offered various funding programmes, but that AMP signalled a more deliberate push to drive large-scale workload migration to Azure. The timing was strategically relevant: Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 were both approaching or had reached end of support. Microsoft was offering three years of automated Extended Security Updates to SQL Server 2008 customers who rehosted their workloads to Azure — a strong incentive to migrate rather than remain on-premises.
AMP also tied into VMware on Azure, according to McCaw. The programme was intended to ease the path for enterprise customers running on-premises VMware hypervisor environments to transition to Azure-based VMware deployments — particularly relevant for older Windows Server and SQL Server workloads.
Robin Brandl, vice president of strategic alliances at CloudJumper, said AMP “simplifies the migration process for specific workloads and provides an alternative to traditional lift-and-shift deployments” — a point worth noting for partners advising customers who need more than a simple rehost.
Additional Announcements: Teams, Dynamics 365, and New Competencies
Beyond Azure, Microsoft’s pre-Inspire announcements covered a broad range of partner ecosystem updates:
- Microsoft Teams extensions: New partner integrations supporting contact centres, compliance recording, and cloud solutions providers.
- Dynamics 365 updates: Vertical market integrations targeting the automotive and financial services industries, plus the latest version of the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator.
- New Microsoft competency: A security competency was added to the partner programme.
- Five new Azure advanced specialisations:
- Windows Server and SQL Server Migration to Microsoft Azure
- Linux and Open Source Databases Migration to Microsoft Azure
- Data Warehouse Migration to Microsoft Azure
- Modernisation of Web Applications in Microsoft Azure
- Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure
2nd Watch Launches AWS Migration Onboarding Accelerator
In adjacent channel news from the same week, Seattle-based public cloud MSP 2nd Watch announced its AMS Onboarding Accelerator, a service built around AWS Managed Services (AMS) to help clients move applications from on-premises infrastructure to AWS.
The service is structured in two phases:
- Discovery and planning workshop — a four-hour engagement offered at no charge.
- Onboarding acceleration — a paid phase covering application discovery, architecture and infrastructure design, and migration strategy development.
Jeff Aden, executive vice president of marketing and business development at 2nd Watch, was candid about AMS’s role: “For us, we see [AMS] as a piece of the cloud journey that gets the customer to be successful. We are not shying away from it. We see it as an opportunity for a customer to continue to adopt and scale their cloud usage.”
Aden also noted that not every customer requirement fits within AMS, leaving room for value-added services from MSPs. He cited ISVs as one use case — using the Onboarding Accelerator to bring on-premises software products into cloud-delivered form — while emphasising the service is not limited to ISVs.
AWS first entered the managed services space in late 2016. Despite initial industry concern, MSP executives at the time generally reported that AMS had not materially harmed their businesses.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Cloud Engineering Teams
- Azure Lighthouse addresses a genuine pain point for MSPs managing large numbers of customer tenants — multi-tenant visibility and control in a single interface.
- AMP is particularly relevant for organisations still running SQL Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 workloads and evaluating whether to migrate, extend support, or modernise.
- The five new Azure advanced specialisations signal where Microsoft sees partner investment priorities: migration, open source, Kubernetes, and web application modernisation.
- The parallel AWS story from 2nd Watch illustrates that multi-cloud MSP services are maturing, with structured onboarding frameworks becoming a differentiator.