Is SPLA going away?  Is it turning into CSP? What is happening??!!!!   There will be a webinar in June reviewing this exact topic.  To register, you can go to www.mscloudlicensing.com and become a free member.  There will also be a recording.   As a side note, it’s a licensing community specifically for service providers.   I hope you find it useful.  There doesn’t seem to be too much information on CSP and SPLA,  so they combined the two into one site.

Is SPLA going away?  One thing that is always consistent with Microsoft is change.  Which is really odd for SPLA, there’s been no programmatic change (operationally, not licensing) to the program since Microsoft pushed all SPLA providers to an authorized reseller.  I believe that was over 15 years ago!

Microsoft is making licensing changes and updates to CSP regularly.  It has become a full time job just to keep up!   As an example, Microsoft added a monthly subscription option for reserved instances; I would suspect they would do the same with server subscriptions.  All they will need to do is add the ability to host from a private datacenter and SPLA becomes less favorable.  Why fart around with the licensing and compliance risk of monthly reporting when you can subscribe to it via CSP (at a lower cost)?   I see this as SPLA 2.0.  Still monthly licensing, still third-party billing (if CSP Indirect) and you can add your own services on top of it.

I am not adovcating for CSP or SPLA but the reality is something is going to give.   I also believe you will continue to see changes to CSP to accommodate the hosting channel and less resources and use rights for SPLA.

What are your thoughts?  Leave a comment on the hosting forum at http://www.mscloudlicensing.com or email at info@splalicensing.com.   I would love to get your feedback.  The only way we can be an advocate is to get feedback.

Thanks for reading,

SPLA Man.