Being a Managed Service Provider has it’s own challenges. Keeping customers happy and help them innovate and achieve business goals is one of them. But at the same time, that is what makes your heart tick, right? At the other end of the spectrum we do find the monthly struggle of getting the numbers right for the Microsoft SPLA report. And then there is the big question: “Are we doing it right?”. Help is available. SAM4SPLA from Quexcel is a managed Software Asset Management Service for Service Providers which lowers risks and saves you money.
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Microsoft SPLA
We know that most Service Providers find Microsoft licensing rules complicated and changing too often. It is hard to keep up. At the same time, you have to provide a correct monthly report for your Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) contract. This can take up to a couple of days a month work for one of your staff. And still there is the question, are we doing it correct? And you will only find out, hopefully not the costly way, in a Microsoft audit.
Tooling
Some Service Providers turn to tools suppliers for help. Think about SNOW, Flexera or Octopus Cloud as software which can help you determine correct monthly usage of Microsoft, VMWare and Citrix technology (amongst others). But those are tools only. Yes, admitted, some suppliers offer consultancy to help you, but still you will have to do a lot of the work. And additionally, most solutions require local agents to be installed to gather data and are complicated (read: time and money consuming) to implement.
SAM4SPLA
To really help service providers into fast forward mode we introduced SAM4SPLA. This is a complete managed service around an agentless inventory solution for all technology vendors. SAM4SPLA will lower your legal risks because we provide a compliant situation and help you with monthly, correct, reports. Hence, we even do have an API available, so we can inject your monthly usage report directly into the systems of your SPLA reseller. Besides the classic SPLA licensing, the service also includes cloud connectors for Office365/Microsoft365 and related services. Here are some of the highlights:
- Multidomain solution
- Usage overviews totalized and per customer
- Agentless scanning solution*
- Monthly compliance check and reporting
- API available
- Cloud connector available
- Monthly subscription
Because SAM4SPLA is a managed service, you do not have to make any upfront investments. And onboarding is cheap and can be done within a day**
Innovation
There is more. Customers ask, or demand, Service Providers to innovate. Customer want new technology and ways of work and the Service Provider has to realize that. The SAM4SPLA Service will help you with that too. Besides the yearly included Digital Innovation workshop, the detailed information about software usage and cloud can help leverage business innovation ideas or customer cost savings. We are happy to tell you how this works in an online of physical meeting (depending on your location). Please do contact us to make an appointment.
Getting started
Starting with SAM4SPLA is very easy. Tell us the number of hypervisor hosts and virtual machines you are using and we can tell you your low monthly subscription price. After your enthusiastic ‘yes’ to the offer, we will get started and you can be up and running within a couple of days.
Take the concerns and work for monthly correct SPLA and cloud reporting out of your business. Let us take care of that and get a lot of new opportunities on top of that. Contact us for more information, a quote, or to get started.
* One needs service accounts or admin credentials to reach and read machine information. For actual usage tracking and remote (out of domain) machines, a local agent might be needed.
** In 90% of the situations, getting the scanning software installed, credentials entered and the service started will take no longer than 2 hours. Optimizing scanning results to cover all or almost all of the machines and software, may take up to 2 days of work.