Know your Microsoft SPLA audit terminology, the definitive SPLA audit terms and acronyms guide: part 1
I tried to use Siri to figure out some Microsoft acronyms. Try it. It’s useless. Siri told me SPUR (Service Provider Use Rights) is a metal tool used in horsemanship. Well that’s not going to help me if I’m being audited.
Microsoft is famous for having more acronyms that any other business on the planet. If you are going through any compliance motion with Microsoft (Self-Assessment, Risk Assessment, Full Audit), you need a better partner than Siri to help you navigate the experience.
Altaris Cloud is a company comprised of ex Microsoft folks: former Microsoft SPLA auditors from the Big-Four audit firms, the guy who ran SPLA audits for years as well as former Microsoft hosting sales executives. Collectively we have been connected to the company for years and live in the world of TLAs and FLAs (three and four letter acronyms).
To that end we’ve put together our version of the Urban Dictionary for some of the more common Microsoft acronyms that likely will come up in an audit.
If we’ve missed a term or want to talk about your hosting business, feel free to give us a call or schedule a free consult here.
LCC – Stands for License and Contract Compliance. This is Microsoft’s official audit group. They are the ones compiling the official SPLA and volume licensing audit notification letters, sending them out, sometimes doing the actual data collection/analysis, and ultimately managing the settlement process
ELP – Stands for Effective License Position and is the outcome of the data analysis phase of an audit. It’s the basis for those painful compliance-based settlement motions you go through. This comes in the form of an Excel workbook and essentially is meant to show a comparison between what you have reported and what your software usage is. For SPLA, it’s broken out on a month to month basis.
Deployment Table – These are components of the ELP workbook that contain detailed product deployment information.
CELA - Stands for Corporate, External, & Legal Affairs. This was formally Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA). This is group who the LCC team at Microsoft brings in to help with any legal escalations that come up during an audit. It’s also who they turn to if you ignore that audit notification letter.
SAM – Stands for Software Asset Management. This is a generic industry term but specific to Microsoft there is a Software Asset Management team that conducts license reviews but tries to differentiate itself from the LCC team’s goals. One way is through their SAM for Hosting program. We have a lot of opinions on this one, if you’re curious contact us for more info
OCP – One Commercial Partner. Extension of the Microsoft SPLA hosting sales arm that conduct their own targeted compliance motions that are similar to LCC
WWLP – World Wide Licensing and Pricing. This is the group that decides on the licensing rules, prices, and in rare instances, SPLA amendments
MBSA – Stands for Microsoft Business and Services Agreement. This is the overarching agreement all your SPLA contracts fall under
Full audit/3rd Party Audit – Audit based on a formal invocation of the verifying compliance section of the SPLA and MBSA. Here Microsoft hires an E&Y, Deloitte, KPMG, or PWC to come in and perform the audit. It’s probably the most intrusive of Microsoft’s compliance motions, contact us if you have concerns over this or any of the audit compliance motions.
VSA – Stands for Verified Self-Audit. Still a formal invocation of the MBSA and SPLA contracts like a full audit. Unlike a 3rd party audit, you complete data collection on your own and fill in a deployment workbook. LCC contractors and/or staff performs validation procedures.
SPLA – Services Provider License Agreement. Hopefully you’ve heard of this one!
SPUR – Services Provider Use Rights. This is the publicly available document containing the messy, ever changing, complex SPLA licensing rules 😊
PUR – Product Use Rights. This document contains the licensing terms around most non-SPLA licensing models. Be careful, Microsoft’s licensing isn’t the easiest (it’s why we’re in business!). There are key differences between the PUR and the SPUR that you need to be aware of.
License review/inspection – Compliance motion initiated by the OCP team.
CSP – Cloud Solution Provider. Microsoft’s long-term vision for hosting.
AOC – Microsoft has different groups in different regions. AOC stands for American Operations Center and is responsible for (among many other things) running audits in North and South America.
EOC – See above, this stands for Europe Operations Center
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