Tag Archives: Multitenant Hosting Rights

As we enter the new FY at Microsoft, I thought I would put together a list of topics that’s on everyone’s mind.

• SPLA going away?  I don’t think so.  There’s too many SPLA partners to make an entire program disappear.  I also think this is one of the benefits Microsoft has over all it’s competitors.  If a customer wants to have an application hosted in one datacenter and use Azure for disaster recovery – Microsoft wins.  If Amazon is running Windows workloads (which they are) they must pay Microsoft for that usage through SPLA.  I also think SPLA is a way to move customers to Azure.  If you are a SPLA customer who just went through an audit, the SPLA customer might ask themselves why they continue to host at all?  Let’s use Azure and my compliance problems go away.  (they don’t but that’s for another article).
• Is CSP/QMH really a must?   I guess the jury is still out (it hasn’t even launched yet for the partner community – September 2017).  There are a lot of restrictions to this program to consider – underlying Windows Pro licenses, becoming CSP direct authorized, not using CSP Indirect, RDS licenses when deploying VDI, etc.  If you decide to go down this route, pay close attention to what you can and cannot do.
• Will SPLA pricing increase?  Yes.  No doubt about it.  Nothing stays the same for too long.
• How can AWS win the cloud war?   Amazon has a revenue first, profit second mentality in my opinion.  Just look at their last earnings report (2017).  They can buy their way into the SaaS market at any cost.  They are not just a cloud company, they are an everything company.  They have the leverage to really get creative with their marketing and win businesses over.
• How can Google beat AWS and Microsoft?  Google hasn’t scratched the surface with their footprint in the enterprise space.  One slip up by the other cloud powerhouses and Google becomes a very attractive offering.  Google has the power, the money, and the brand to make headway. Like AWS, they are not just a cloud/software company, they are an everything company.  I really think Google will surprise a lot of analyst in the near future with their cloud growth.
• How can Microsoft beat them all?  Any organization that uses Microsoft software in a hosted environment must pay Microsoft for that luxury.  They already have a large footprint and very large customer base to move to Azure.  They also have 30k + SPLA partners (estimate) that are being used to sell their solution.
• Will SPLA Man be able to afford a nice piece of jewelry for Mrs. SPLA Man?  For all the single women who read SPLAlicensing.com, don’t make the same mistake Mrs. SPLA Man made.  Poor Mrs. SPLA Man, when I first met her at the bar, she thought SPLA was something I created for the space station. Space Program Living Association.  S.P.L.A. – kind of like a home owner’s association but for space.  (I am not sure where she got that idea).  I do have a cool blog??!

Thanks for reading,

SPLA Man