Back to SPLA School: This Year You Need to Pay Attention

It’s back to school time you know what that means. Time to start studying your licensing for the coming year and it’s going to be a tricky year with some major tests for your SPLA business. First, some major price changes have been announced that are not only quite large but also hit some of the most highly used products (see chart below).

Then you have the price changes that are slowly being phased in. If you have an active SPLA agreement signed before October 2016, you have benefited from still being able to report Processor licensing for any Windows Server except those running Windows Server 2016. By October 2019 every Service Provider will have to report Cores for Windows Server.

If your SPLA expires earlier, as soon as you renew your SPLA agreement you will have to report Cores for any Windows Server. Depending on the servers you provision, that could double your costs for Windows Server.

Lastly, don’t forget that your SPLA contracts with Microsoft allow them to increase prices once a year, which will be announced October 1st to the SPLA reseller community. During this time frame they can also introduce changes to the Service Provider Use Rights. Both these changes could put an additional burden on your business.

As someone who used to own the SPLA budget at two large Service Providers and worked on the Hosting team at Microsoft for years, I understand first-hand how frustrating it is to manage a cost that isn't predictable.

Myself and the team at Altaris know very specific ways we can lower your SPLA spend. No tricks, just simple things that are either overlooked or not understood.

Behind all these price changes is Microsoft’s clear strategy to get service providers to move workloads to Azure. If you want to explore these options to offset these ballooning SPLA costs, we can help you with Cloud Assessments, identify workloads suitable for migration to the public cloud and provide specific pricing / costs for doing so.

2019 Price Increases

Microsoft announced price increase for the below products. The price increases will take effect January 1st, 2019, so for your February reporting of January usage. Remember, this is just Microsoft’s increase. Your reseller may charge a premium on top of this.

Let us make this school year a success. Book a complementary consultation here to talk about your SPLA needs and let us help you explore your options.

As always, be SPLAWESOME!!