Marketplace funding, explained: what Frontier Accelerate means for you in FY27

If you have ever had a nagging sense that Microsoft will help fund the work you are already doing, moving customers onto Azure, publishing your solution, building an agent, and you have never quite worked out how to get at it, you are in good company. The money has been there for years. The trouble has been that it lived under several different programme names, with different owners and different rules, and you rather had to know where to look.

FY27 makes that a lot easier. Microsoft has pulled what used to be the SDC and ISV Partner Investments into a single umbrella, Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace, and in doing so has raised the ceiling, added new routes in, and made the whole thing considerably easier to explain. Here is what it actually consists of and how to work out what applies to you.

One umbrella, six engagements

Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace runs for the FY27 investment term, 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, and sits inside Microsoft Commerce Incentives (MCI). Underneath it there are six distinct engagements, and they do three jobs:

Assess. SDC Customer Assessment & POV and (SI Led) SDC Customer Assessment & POV. These are pre-sales engagements that fund the assessment and planning work before a customer commits: the architecture, the proof of value, the business case.

Migrate. SDC Customer Migrate & Modernize and (SI Led) SDC Customer Migrate & Modernize. Post-sales engagements that fund the actual delivery, getting the end customer live on the software company’s solution running on Azure.

Build and publish. AI Build & Publish (Marketplace) and AI Build & Publish (Copilot Agent Store). These fund the software company’s own product work, infusing AI into a solution and publishing it as a transactable Marketplace offer, or publishing an Agent 365-integrated agent to the Copilot Agent Store.

The neat part is that assess and migrate are designed to be run back to back on the same customer. That is where the headline "$275K per project" figure comes from: up to $25K on the assessment, up to $250K on the deployment.

Two routes in: SDC-led and SI-led

This is the bit worth being clear on, because it decides which door you walk through.

If you are a software development company (SDC/ISV), you can run the assessment and migration engagements yourself for your own solution’s end customers.

If you are a systems integrator, there is a parallel SI-led path for exactly the same motions. You do the work of moving an SDC’s customers onto Azure, and you claim for it. Both partners’ credentials matter here: the SDC needs its designation, and you need one of yours.

If you are both, you can use both. And if you are a distributor or vendor advising partners downstream, the SI-led route is usually the one your services partners have been missing.

How the funding is sized

Every engagement uses t-shirt sizing, and what gets measured depends on the motion:

• Migration engagements are sized on planned Azure consumption (ACR) in year one, from an XXS band at $5K to $15K ACR up to the new High Value Migration tier for opportunities above $500K ACR. HVM is the FY27 addition and pays up to $250,000.
• Assessment engagements have just two sizes, Standard (above $15K ACR) and Large (above $250K ACR), paying up to $25,000.
• AI Build & Publish (Marketplace) is sized on planned Marketplace Billed Sales, paying up to $100,000 at the top band.
• AI Build & Publish (Copilot Agent Store) is sized on Agent 365 monthly active users, paying up to $125,000 at 30,000+ MAU.

Two things to note. Payments are calculated in USD and vary by market, based on the country attached to the nominating partner’s Partner ID. The UK sits in Market A, which is the higher of the two bands. And there are no earning caps on Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace engagements, so this scales with your pipeline rather than against it.

What you need in place

The prerequisites are genuinely achievable, but they are not optional:

• The Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program Agreement, and enrolment in Microsoft Commerce Incentives.
• SDCs need a Certified Software Designation in Azure, in Security, or in one of the Industry AI areas.
• SIs need one of the qualifying advanced specialisations: App Modernization on Microsoft Azure, Infra and Database Migration to Microsoft Azure, AI Platform or AI Apps on Microsoft Azure, Analytics, Agentic DevOps, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure VMware Solution, Azure Expert MSP and a few more besides.
• AI Build & Publish (Marketplace) additionally asks for either $100K+ Marketplace Billed Sales over the trailing twelve months, or SDC status with a minimum $1M Azure Consumption Commitment.
• The Copilot Agent Store path is tighter again: SDC status with a $1M MACC, and Agent 365 integration is non-negotiable.

On the customer side, the migration engagements cover Strategics, Majors, SMC-Corporate and SMB customers with a valid TPID. For the two Build & Publish engagements you are the end customer, so it is your own TPID on the claim.

Nominate first, claim later

The single most common way to lose this funding is to do the work first and go looking for the money afterwards.

Both SI-led engagements and any High Value Migration require a Stage 0 nomination before you can claim in MCI, an intake form covering customer name, TPID, Partner Location ID, SDC and solution details, contacts and estimated first-year ACR, with deal value added for HVM. Allow three business days for a response.

Proof of execution then follows a consistent shape: customer attestation, partner survey, your invoice to Microsoft, and a signed POE template, plus whatever evidences the work itself, whether that is valid Azure subscription IDs, a solution architecture showing the qualifying services, a published Marketplace app URL, or an agent name and blueprint ID.

Engagement windows run from 120 days for the smaller sizes out to 300 days for High Value Migration, starting from customer consent.

Plan for the governance

FY27 measures partner behaviour a little more closely, and it is easier if you know the shape of it upfront. Partners are expected to maintain a 2:1 pre- to post-sales ratio, so at least half of claims should be post-sales. On migration engagements there is a 60% ACR attainment expectation across post-sales claims, monitored for reporting and governance rather than triggering an automatic pause. And on the Build & Publish engagements you are expected to reach 100% of the minimum billed sales or MAU for the size you nominated, within year one of claim approval.

None of that is onerous. It simply rewards nominating honestly and sizing realistically.

Where to start

The honest answer is that most partners qualify for more than they think, and the hard part is not the paperwork. It is working out which of the six engagements apply to your business model and which prerequisites you already hold.

We have built a free tool to shortcut exactly that. Tell it how you work with the Marketplace and which prerequisites you meet, and it will show you the Frontier Accelerate programmes you can access and the maximum value per opportunity.