Your Microsoft licensing model is a margin decision. Most operators inherit it.

Nothing, and we take no cut. We are not a Microsoft reseller, we hold no licensing position and we do not earn from what you eventually buy.

What you get is a warm, briefed introduction to a Certified Microsoft Gold Partner and Tier 1 direct Cloud Solutions Provider, instead of a cold sales queue. We brief them before your first call so you are not starting from zero, and we stay in your corner through the engagement. You contract directly with them. There is no obligation to proceed at any point, and introductions are typically made within one business day.

Usually not without additional rights. Volume and Enterprise Agreement licences are bought for an organisation's own use, and the moment a third party's workload runs on hardware you own or control, provider licensing terms generally apply instead.

It is the most common compliance gap in hosting and neocloud environments, and one of the quietest, because nothing appears to go wrong until somebody checks. The partner reviews how your capacity is actually consumed and tells you which program each workload should sit under.

Two things drive it. First, Windows Server and SQL Server are licensed per physical core, so the dense high-core hosts that make GPU and AI infrastructure economic also make per-core licensing one of the largest software lines on the P&L. Edition choice and virtual-machine density modelling matter enormously.

Second, the moment you rent capacity to a third party you move from standard licensing into provider territory, where SPLA, outsourcing rules and dedicated-host requirements apply. Both need modelling together, because optimising one while ignoring the other is how operators end up carrying an exposure they never priced.

They solve different problems. SPLA is the program for making licensed software available to third parties as a hosted or managed service, billed monthly on actual usage. CSP is the partner channel for Microsoft subscription products such as Microsoft 365 and Azure, bought and managed through a partner rather than direct.

Plenty of operators need both — SPLA for what they make available to tenants, CSP for the subscriptions their own business runs on. The exposure usually sits at the boundary between them.

Both are licensed per physical core, with minimums per processor and per server, and the edition you choose changes how much virtualisation you are entitled to run. Standard and Datacenter behave very differently at high VM density, and SQL Server layers Enterprise versus Standard feature and core considerations on top.

Getting the model wrong is the most expensive licensing mistake on a data center floor. The partner reviews real core counts, host density and workload profile — including SQL Server health checks, performance tuning and high-availability design — before recommending anything.

Sometimes, and it depends on the product and on what your tenants are actually entitled to. License Mobility through Software Assurance is the mechanism that lets eligible server licences be deployed on a provider's shared infrastructure, and it carries conditions on both sides.

A bring-your-own-licence arrangement nobody has verified is a risk you are carrying on your tenant's behalf. The partner checks what can legitimately be moved and what that leaves you responsible for.

It lets organisations apply existing Windows Server and SQL Server licences with active Software Assurance toward the cost of equivalent Azure resources, so you are not paying twice for the same workload mid-migration. Whether you qualify depends on licence type, Software Assurance status and where the workload runs. The partner reviews your entitlements and tells you plainly what you can and cannot apply.

Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons operators get in touch. Licensing optimisation establishes a defensible position on what you own and what you owe. Separately, compliance gap analysis maps your Microsoft environment to NIST, CMMC, HIPAA and FedRAMP, producing a prioritised remediation plan, configured policies that close each gap, and audit-ready documentation you can hand to a customer or an auditor.

Dedicated single-tenant hardware and shared multi-tenant infrastructure carry different licensing requirements, so the commercial shape of a deal often decides its licensing shape. Because dedicated arrangements are negotiated one at a time, the licensing position gets set per contract rather than per platform, which is how an operator ends up with several different positions across one floor. The partner reviews the arrangements you have signed and shows you where they diverge.

It belongs in the same conversation. The licensing model and the commercial model constrain each other: host density and physical core counts drive per-core cost, and whether you run your own workload or rent capacity decides which program applies.

Settling either in isolation is how a cluster gets priced on economics that do not survive contact with the licensing position. We already run cluster procurement, GPUaaS contract negotiation and capacity sourcing mandates, so both threads can stay in one place.

The introduction is typically made within one business day, and the form takes about a minute. From there the partner scopes the review with you directly — depth depends on how many hosts, programs and tenants are in scope, so they will tell you rather than us guessing on their behalf.

Useful things to have to hand: a rough host and physical core count, which Microsoft programs you currently buy through, and whether any third-party workloads run on your hardware. If you cannot answer those, that is itself a finding worth the conversation.

This desk and the Microsoft partner behind it are US-based, and that is where the great majority of the work sits. Licensing programs, provider rules and compliance frameworks all differ by region, so if your footprint spans several countries, say so in the brief. We would rather be straight with you up front about what we can and cannot usefully help with than spend your time finding out.