According to Microsoft:

“The pilot is restricted to Microsoft Gold Partners only at a cost of $2,500 for access to Gartner and $5,200 for access to Forrester; pricing is based on the types of services made available. Fees for the services are paid by Gold partners directly to the firms, however partners may sign-up to participate in both of the companies’ pilots. Sign-up is limited to 250 partners per firm on a first come, first serve basis.”

 Partners wanting access to Gartner research, can access it a this Gartner site    And here’s a site for Forrester fans.

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

According to the Windows Team Blog, Microsoft Golds have to wait till August 16 to download while   ISVs can start August 6.

Worse, from a Gold perspective, is that volume licensees with Software Assurance can start downloading August 7.

“Looks to me that my customers will get this before I do,” said one irate east coast Gold VAR.  His view is that undercuts his relationship with his customers–who he advises on IT issues.

Two weeks may seem like small potatoes to many, but Gold partners tend to have be sensitive on such matters. Many see Microsoft as tightening its grip on customer relationships at their expense.

And, for years the highest-tier Gold partners have complained that Microsoft has devalued their brand. Partly in response Microsoft is cutting the designation over the next two years and will instead implement a more specialized and harder to attain “Advanced” partner designation.

More info here from Murray Goldman’s blog.

As far as I know, and God knows it’s near impossible follow all these release dates, .Net 4.0 has been out in beta form since this spring and is due in the Visual Studio 2010 timeframe. But here’s the deal. If a developer is playing with early versions of services in hopes of rolling out some real deliverables, this kind of stuff doesn’t fly.

This guy–a Microsoft Gold partner by the way–is doing most of his e-commerce work with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Still,  he likes to keep up with what Microsoft is doing. So far, he’s not impressed. Microsoft does not “get” that putting stuff out there and then pulling it back is a non-starter. Or that all of its myriad technology interdependencies are huge pain in the butt.

Asked what Microsoft can do in terms of pricing and sales model to get him into Azure, he said: “Learn how the new world works. You can’t be locked into this old view of months and years between updates. And you can’t pull back stuff and expect people to work on it.”

Next week, Microsoft will have to face an army of VARs and other channel players at its Worldwide Partner Conference and convince them to cast their lot with Microsoft’s still-new, and sometimes disappearing services, vs. going with Amazon or perhaps even Google infrastructure. And it has to show them a way to make money doing so. That is a very tall order.