Not yet and not any time soon.

Last week I met with the Microsoft hosting team to review upcoming programs, changes, and anything else related to SPLA.  There’s very little mention of licensing, but I did find it refreshing that they see (and so do I) SPLA as a strategic piece of their business.

It’s all about hybrid environments for Microsoft and that’s how you should focus on your business.  SPLA isn’t going away, but there will be a shift as to which products are deployed in your cloud v what is deployed in Microsoft.  This shift has already occurred with Exchange and now Dynamics (365 programs).  What will remain is infrastructure.  As you are well aware, not every customer wants their infrastructure hosted in Microsoft data centers.  Secondly, not every customer wants a public cloud   (Azure/O365).

Microsoft’s definition for “hybrid” is not just running workloads on premise and in the cloud.  They see (and I do too for that matter) a play for hybrid among datacenter providers. If you host your infrastructure in your datacenter, where are you backing everything up to?   If it’s to the server room next door to your office, you need to rethink your DR strategy 🙂   That’s where Microsoft sees a play for Azure.  Let’s run certain workloads in your datacenter and certain workloads in ours.  If you backup to another 3rd party Microsoft still wins because of the need for SPLA.  In other words, they might not see Azure revenue, but Microsoft will still receive revenue from the third party SPLA agreement.  That’s why SPLA  will not be discontinued.   It provides flexibility and options and at the end of the day, Microsoft wins in either scenario.  That’s the value proposition for Microsoft.

Where do you see your business?  How are you optimizing your SPLA now?  What connections can I help introduce?  How do you differentiate from Joe’s Hosting, Amazon, and Azure?

Thanks for reading,

SPLA Man