That process led to a further expansion of the project in the form of a research study that ultimately collected feedback from more than 1,000 partners.

Among the more interesting findings of that survey, 64 percent of the respondents were profitable within a year of launching their practices.

The playbooks combine the in-depth interviews and results of those surveys. They delve into pricing strategies, incentive models, support models, financial planning — all the prep you do before you start a practice. They also span different partner types, recognizing the range of business models in Microsoft's channel.

"No one's just a VAR or MSP, everybody is a little bit of everything depending on where they find their sweet spot in the market," Kassner said.

And while the books, at 180 pages, are dense, partners are meant to flip to the parts they're interested in, he said.

Zoiner Tejada, CEO of San Diego-based Solliance, one of the two original consultants on the project, said the work stemmed from the realization that while cloud providers are offering more sophisticated products and services, consultancy ecosystems are still limited in their capabilities.

"If you're a customer, your options still are surprisingly limited," Tejada told CRN. "These playbooks are the missing manual for succeeding with Microsoft and Azure."

They explore the junction of technical capabilities and business knowledge, he said. As guidebooks, they can help partners avoid a race to the bottom by sharing strategies for driving value when shifting from selling licenses to subscriptions.

"As we were interviewing people and collecting resources and going through all the Microsoft training material, what surprised us was the sheer volume of detailed information that was already available but not really visible," he said.

Dave Sasson, chief strategy officer at Princeton, N.J.-based Hanu, said that even as a leading Microsoft cloud partner, the books proved revealing.

"Sometimes you think you know everything, but then there's something you don’t know," Sasson told CRN.

There's plenty of information available that's incredibly useful for partners, but its highly scattered across various sources, he said.

"These playbooks are really helpful to offer a more step-by-step approach, with all the resources and links to all these sites Microsoft has that are hard to find on your own," he said.