The purchase of managed services or services in the cloud may be seen as the way forward for proactive businesses, but at the same time its adoption is hampered by the financial impact of licensing agreements. This is most notable for the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector, which seldom has the cash liquidity to fund lengthy licensing agreements. However, salvation is at hand in the form of what is effectively a pay-as-you-go licensing model.
Microsoft has designed a simple and easy-to-use licensing agreement that has no contractual obligations. The Service Provider Licence Agreement (SPLA) opens doors for both the SME market and the large enterprise space. It was created to enable hosting providers to licence Microsoft products on a monthly basis, to deliver services and hosted applications to their end-customers.
As a full service IT provider, Reflex Solutions offers its customers everything from network infrastructure and data centres to voice and data connectivity, not to mention hosting and managed services. Therefore, says the company's MD, Greg Wilson, the SPLA is an ideal offering for its customers.
“Microsoft's SPLA allows us to provide the hosting of a wide variety of services for our client base. Should they require any of the following: Active Directory, Exchange, Microsoft SQL, customer relationship management (CRM), or accounting packages in the Cloud, we are able to deliver it cost effectively. The SPLA even means that we are able to offer a managed service into a client's data centre, renting them the servers they need. The SPLA thus makes hardware rental a more reasonable proposition for many companies,” he says.
He points out that where other Microsoft licensing agreements have to be paid a full year in advance, and cannot be renegotiated until the contract is up, SPLA allows for changes to be made on a month-to-month basis.
“This clearly opens doors for the SME market. It means they can obtain the same top end solutions used by the large enterprise market, but on an as and when they need it basis. This means they require less cash liquidity to acquire the solutions they need. At the same time, the SPLA also offers advantages to the large enterprise space, as it enables them to take these services off balance sheet and position them as monthly expenses instead.”
Wilson reveals that his company's Hosted Exchange product is a direct result of the SPLA offering. He says that this solution includes a server and all the management around Microsoft Exchange, as well as a 2Gb mailbox per user, for just R65 per user per month.
“For an additional R15 per month, we can also include an Outlook licence for this solution. Many clients appreciate this, as they have a number of users in their organisation that don't necessarily need a full Microsoft suite, but that do require Outlook for e-mail purposes,” he says.
“Of course, Hosted Exchange is just one way of making use of Microsoft's SPLA. We definitely have plans to develop a number of other solutions, such as a packaged Web server, based around this licensing structure.”
He says Reflex's main differentiator lies in the manner in which it packages the SPLA alongside the additional services the company adds on. This makes the offering unique and gives Reflex an added advantage over competitors who do not have the same levels of infrastructure as Reflex does.
“While the SPLA clearly offers benefits to organisations of all sizes, I firmly believe that customers will not decide that they want the SPLA and then search for a service provider to deliver it. Instead, they will decide on a particular service they require and then seek the best way of obtaining this.
“Thus, the ability to deliver tailor-made, customised solutions to meet client requirements - something we do extremely well - remains the most important issue. What the SPLA does is it gives Reflex the opportunity to offer our customers a whole new dimension in terms of the specific services they may be seeking,” he concludes.
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