Recently I ran a Webinar for our SPLA Partners but I thought it would be useful for the wider group of partners to understand where SPLA licensing fits in.
SPLA (or Service Provider Licensing Agreement) is licensing designed for hosting purposes. Most licensing excludes hosting for third parties, this includes OEM, Open License, EA and CSP. This means a partner can’t use licenses that they have purchased under these programs to run an end customers business or business processes.
SPLA is priced on a monthly basis with prices fixed annually, and is billed based on a usage declaration for the previous month, so on actual usage so you are only paying for licenses that have been utilised in the past month.
There are some differences in the license methods and SPLA has it’s own product terms called the SPUR or Service Provider Use Rights Microsoft Services Provider Use Rights.
With the changes Microsoft implemented on 1 October 2022, end customers with subscription licenses or licenses under Software Assurance, can bring their licenses to be hosted by a hosting partner (outside of the Listed Providers – AWS, GCP and Alibaba), including on shared infrastructure! This is called Flexible Virtualisation and replaced the old License Mobility which only applies to the listed providers now. New options for partner hosted cloud (microsoft.com)
The Webinar can be found https://www.dickerdata.co.nz/microsoft-vod under the Partner Resources - Video On Demand header.
