Are you Sabotaging your License Compliance with SPLA?
SPLA, or the Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement, allows service providers to offer hosted software services to their customers. These services include web services, database services, and applications, which are also Microsoft products. Microsoft’s SPLA is a helpful licensing program, honouring Microsoft products to be hosted commercially.
With Microsoft SPLA, there are contractual obligations that companies need to follow. Typically, companies will dedicate a few select employees to ensure SPLA compliance. This strategy, though it may seem useful, can cause a waste in time and finances, especially with manual SPLA reporting. Other special challenges with SPLA compliance involve the monthly license-reporting model. This means that companies must confirm and report their usage each month to an authorized SPLA reseller.
What are the risks?
You could be sabotaging your license compliance with SPLA if you lack the skill set to document what you have installed or used, or run internal company audits, all of which needs to be done on a monthly basis.
When doing SPLA reports, the term ‘use’ by Microsoft is defined ambiguously and can cause reporting confusion. Most businesses think only to count users that access a product each month. In reality, Microsoft SPLA requires user-licensed products must be licensed based on the number of users authorized to access a product. If companies would use their actual user/ usage records for Microsoft auditing, those records would most likely be ignored. Instead, Microsoft requires installations and hosting environments, even if they have never been used or run by an end user, must be reported.
TBSC’s advice: software asset management (SAM) with SPLA reporting
Having a software asset management provider that assists with SPLA reporting is our best advice. By doing this, your business can avoid potentially large, timely, and expensive audits when doing the manual reporting on your own. Likewise, SAM with SPLA reporting ensures:
- Software usage will not exceed the entitlements
- Automatic reporting
- Time & cost efficient
- Report how many licenses have been deployed
- Collect & calculate license requirements
How can TBSC help?
TBSC has developed Smarter SPLA, a smarter way of managing your SPLA. Smarter SPLA was awarded the European Commission- Seal of Excellence, turns the manual labor of SPLA reporting into an automatic and time-efficient task.
Some features of Smarter SPLA are:
- Customizable web control panel
- Agentless discovery
- Create a subscription to send automatic report schedule
- Versatility to collect data from all environments
The outcomes of using Smarter SPLA are:
- Reconciliation and optimization against licensing agreements
- Reduce manual processing and lower administration costs
- Improved accuracy in monthly SPLA reports to reduce errors
- Validates against SKUs/Licensing models
Smarter SPLA is an easy to set-up and quick to use solution to your SPLA reporting. In addtiona, Smarter SPLA performs automated and extensive reporting that can be exported to Excel or a billing system.
For more information on Smarter SPLA, please contact a member of our sales team at: Sales@businesssoftwarecentre.com
