I hope everything's going well with you? The weather is starting to improve (although we had a bit of snow in the UK today!) and the days are getting longer which is always good!
Well...the rumours that Microsoft were looking to acquire the security firm Mandiant didn't come to fruition - instead, Google snapped up the security company.
It appears that OVHCloud, a French cloud provider, plus 2 other unnamed orgs, have filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft - seemingly centred around Office and Azure. This can be added to the ones filed by NextCloud, Slack, and Value Licensing over the last couple of years...there's certainly a lot of attention on Microsoft's tactics as they are once again one of the pre-eminent software companies.
Those of you in the world of SPLA will be pleased to see that there is a new SPUR Portal, very much modelled after the Product Terms site.
See the rest of the news below and remember, tomorrow is April Fools' Day (I'm not sure how international this is?!) so be careful what you read!
Have a good week 😁
Cheers
Rich
ps: Remember you can check out previous newsletters here
Microsoft Cloud Partner Program
Controversial times! Microsoft have announced a whole range of changes to their partner program coming in October 2022 - including a new name and a replacement for the current Silver & Gold competencies.
Whenever they change things like this there are positives and negatives - I think the new partner designations will help customers be sure they're working with a truly expert partner but equally, I think that smaller partners will be hit harder by the number of staff required in some cases. The competencies map across to the new "Solutions Partner Designations" as so:
I know a lot of partners are still shattered after all the NCE changes and were hoping for a bit of a rest...but it's not to be! That said, partners can renew their legacy status once meaning they have until October 2023.
I've got loads more info, examples, and links to the Microsoft pages/docs here.
Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment
AKA MACC, this lesser known Microsoft agreement can help give some flexibility to how organisations purchase Azure over a longer time period, while still enabling discounts. It also enables a range of software purchased via the Azure Marketplace to count towards your Azure consumption. It's worth talking to your LSP/Microsoft team if you're interested.
More info and links here.
SQL Server 2012 end of support
SQL Server 2012 goes out of support (completely) on July 12, 2022 - so no more security updates or anything! Running databases without security patches is never a good idea, particularly not in this day and age, so organisations will have 2 options:
Buy Extended Security Updates (ESU)
Migrate to Azure
While migrating this to the cloud can be costly in terms of effort, and has ongoing Azure costs at the end, the ESUs are NOT cheap...reaching 125% of the cost of a SQL license! Whichever option you go with, there's not a lot of time left to decide...
More info, links, and a pricing example here.
Microsoft Product Terms - March 2022
Pretty quiet this month:
"Privacy Management" has been rebranded "Priva" 😒
SQL Server Big Data Nodes have been retired
Additional pre-requisite licenses for Cloud for Healthcare add-on
NB: Although Microsoft announced that the CSP NCE cancellation period has been extended to 7 days (from 72 hours), the Product Terms still says 72 hours.
You can see the full list here.
