In certain markets, Ukraine, Turkey, Iraq, Brazil, India, Poland, and a handful of others SPLA is paused. What does “pause” mean and what impact does this have if I am a hoster in the US or UK?
Well, kind of like an audit. take a breath. SPLA is not dead. In fact, globally, SPLA continues to grow. This pause is for net new hosters who want to sign up in the program. If you are an existing hoster, there’s no impact. You can continue to use SPLA and even renew SPLA with updated terms. I think the bigger question is SPLA moving forward, and what changes do I see happening. To answer that question, let me share an example.
This morning I had the pleasure of speaking to a large hoster in Europe. We discussed SPLA and his thoughts on CSP. He’s an infrastructure provider, mainly hosting Windows, RDS, and a little SQL. Most customers bring licenses into their datacenter. He’s not interested in using Azure or AWS, he wants to host out of his datacenter, and uses it to differentiate amongst the larger providers. End customers bring licenses into their datacenter and they host it.
Wow SPLA Man, that’s a turn pager of a story. Tell me more!! Sure. I think this hoster is what SPLA is about. No one is a SaaS provider using SPLA. Hosters don’t provide Office as a service through the SPLA program. They provide Windows Server (it’s cheap) and they provide SQL (it’s expensive). What he likes about SPLA is the flexibility. He controls the customer end-to-end. Unlike CSP hoster, Microsoft does not know who the end customer is in SPLA. That’s where I see SPLA changing. In fact, with this latest announcement, they state “change is the first in a series of changes evolving the SPLA program. Future changes, including new SPLA agreement templates and a new process of reporting and submitting END CUSTOMER USER DATA for compliance verification are also planned”
End customer data has and always will be the problem with SPLA for Microsoft. They want to control the end customer and know why and how they are purchasing their software. Other than that, SPLA is a huge benefit to Microsoft. Differentiates Microsoft from AWS and the like.
If you are an infrastructure provider (like in the story above) what should you do now? I will keep saying it, start with education. Arm yourself with the best licensing practice around. This licensing environment in which we live is changing rapidly. Second, I would communicate these changes to your customer and how they may impact the way they purchase Microsoft products. All the changes that happened over the last few years, has zero impact to SPLA. It is all about the end customer. Last, I would start developing a SAM practice internally. You need to clean up your own mess before you do anything else. You should look into using OctopusCloud
More to come on this. I am also doing an interview with AWS and Microsoft. Stay tuned for more.
Thanks for reading,
SPLA Man
SPLA Licensing 