Ingram Micro to offer Microsoft's SPLA throughout North America 1 December, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

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"With Microsoft's SPLA licensing program, we've simplified the sale and are truly enabling our channel partners to grow their Microsoft business and increase their profit potential without having to outlay any unnecessary infrastructure costs or borrow against their working capital. Our Microsoft SPLA program has done quite well in Canada, and we are pleased to bring it to our partners in the U.S.," stated Jodi Honore, vice president of vendor management with Ingram Micro U.S.

Microsoft's usage-based, Software + Service (S+S) offering enables channel partners (including solution providers, managed service providers (MSPs), ISPs, ASPs, VARs, system integrators, independent software vendors and others) to license a wide range of Microsoft products and platforms through Ingram Micro on a monthly basis through a dedicated or shared hosting environment.

Examples of Microsoft SPLA-selling licensed products available to Ingram partners include Microsoft Dynamics business software; Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services; Microsoft Exchange Server 2007; Microsoft Forefront Client Security; Microsoft Office System; Microsoft SharePoint Server; Microsoft SQL Server; Microsoft System Center; and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system

"Software +Service is the way of the future," noted Honore. "[The Microsoft SPLA] provides [partners] with a lot of capabilities to provide services to their end user customers that have data centers or part of their business that is a hosting environment. This allows them to support the Microsoft products that way."

She added that this offering is a big deal to partners as they haven't been able to host Microsoft in the past.

"This way they get to keep their customers, build a consistent revenue and profit stream, have a predictable spin and have that service maintenance aspect of the business they can add on to," Honore said.

Additionally, partners are unlimited to the number of seats they can sell when they buy a license through Ingram's licensing program.

"[Partners] become uncompetitive at 250 seats to the resellers that can sell the enterprise licenses. With this particular model, they can sell any number of seats they want and if they happen to be a SMB that has large customers that want to buy a thousand seats, they can support it this way," explained Honore.

Microsoft's SPLA usage-based licensing program is available now to all qualified Ingram Micro partners in the U.S. and Canada. The program boasts zero start-up costs and requires no minimum, up-front purchase. To become SPLA authorized, Ingram Micro partners must be Microsoft certified and join the SPLA program.

Honore said one of the criteria for partners to become SPLA authorized is they have to have hosting capabilities.

Janet Waxman, program vice president of channels and alliances, hardware infrastructure, with IDC said that while offering Microsoft's SPLA allows Ingram to work collaboratively with Microsoft in driving the S+S initiative, the missing piece is someone needs to educate partners on what it means to them.

"It is going to change their business, if they go from a resell to a subscription base," said Waxman.

She added that this can be a good thing depending on how a partner's business is structured but can also be a difficult thing.

"They can't shift their business overnight," Waxman explained. "They need some education to what it means. In the long run, it can be very good for them but don't presume that they are all going to say they get it. If Ingram can educate [partners] on how this works and they can take advantage of this model, this is really a good thing."

Honore said that Ingram Micro will be offering training and education programs in support of SPLA. This would include Webinars out of the gate and a complete Licensing Desk that is dedicated to helping partners.

Another key to Ingram's success with Microsoft's SPLA, said Waxman, will be how fast partners' end customers quickly adopt SaaS. She added that if SPLA is successful for Ingram's partners, you might see other distributors like Tech Data and SYNNEX work out a similar deal either with Microsoft or another vendor.