From Compliance Risk to Strategic Business Advantage
Situation
Ensuring that licensing is accurate is the responsibility of the direct consumer/purchaser of the licenses (the entity the accepted the EULA - end user license agreement). This has traditionally been businesses with on-premises deployment for the use of their own staff. However for a service provider delivering a "cloud" service the responsibility for licensing shifts either partially or completely from the end customer to the service provider. Understanding this and many other complexities and then using your licensing effectively is the difference between compliance risk and strategic business differentiator.
Software Asset Management is the recognised approach to achieve this maturity. However for most organisations their experience of SAM has been centred on the “audit” aspects only. This focuses on compliance and does not consider the business context, is retrospective by definition and because of this misses the opportunity to be proactive and address compliance before there is an issue. There is a further major gap in the process in that it does not look at license optimisation i.e. over-reporting.
Solution: Licensing Optimisation
rhipe firmly believe that to add value any engagement in this space has to be a collaborative process, not something that is imposed on the service provider or end customer. Having a clear focus on the business benefits that can be achieved assists in this process of working together..
Benefits may include:
- Identifying unbilled or under-utilised services
- Licensing knowledge maximising value e.g. License Mobility, SALs for SA
- Optimised licening reducing costs e.g. Windows Std vs DC
- Lowered cost of license management with tools
- Reduction in business risk
Our Approach
From the outset Licensing Optimisation is an attitude across the rhipe business rather than an isolated team. With a focus on awareness and education our Partner Services, licensing specialist and sales teams build licensing optimisation into their daily conversations with service providers.
By being proactive our goal is to provide the service provider with possible benefits as soon as possible and ensure that any compliance risk is identified and addressed before it becomes a business exposure.
- Awareness: Roadshows, new letters, targeted campaigns, license program update communications, alerts in reporting portal.
- Education: Rolling education (physical & virtual), supporting service provider “to customer” events, group licensing workshops
- Engagement: Account management, compliance blocks in reporting portal, SPLA renewal review, direct LOP engagement
- Bronze – high level review of current reporting, corrective activities required and missed licensing opportunities
- Silver – current reporting in context of business, licensing workshop, tools guidance
- Gold – in depth review of deployed software, licensing tools utilised, detailed licensing position established
News & Articles
FAQs
Simple answer is YES. Longer answer (with caveats) is:
Partner evaluation & testing
Evaluation and testing of products is allowed for a period of 90 days.
This period begins on the date the SPLA partner first acquires the original media for the product (software or online services).
The partner is required to keep records of such deployment benefiting from this right (see page 8-9 of the SPLA Agreement)
Further information can be found on Page 5 of the SPLA agreement.
Simple answer is YES. Longer answer (including caveats) is:
End user demos
A customer may demonstrate its software services for up to 50 prospective end users.
The customer must keep records of all demonstrations including names, and user id’s.
The end user demo period is 60 days.
Further information can be found on Page 5 of the SPLA agreement, & page 4 of the SPLA program guide.
The major change is a change in use rights for the Cloud Platform Suite (CPS): Service Providers are required to use Windows Azure Pack “WAP” for provisioning and deployment of a physical or virtual OSE in the Host Fabric. To see more details of this and other changes please read this post)
Core Infrastructure Suite (CIS) DOES include SQL server std edition to support System Center. However you cannot use the SQL component included to support any other line of business applications apart from System Center. Further details can be found in the Service Provider Usage Rights (SPUR). Details of how to access the SPUR can be found here.