The saying, “Can’t beat them, join them,” holds true from back in the good old days to today.  Public cloud demand is growing exponentially, and now traditional service providers are wondering if they, too, should shift to the public cloud.

As an example, many service providers are looking to public cloud providers to turn their solutions into managed services.  In fact, according to the white paper “The Partner Opportunity in Transitioning from Data Center Hosted Services” (A FORRESTER TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT™ STUDY COMMISSIONED BY MICROSOFT), one Microsoft partner alluded to their organization was “more focused” on keeping applications running in their cloud to becoming more of an advisory role.  

Microsoft is promoting programs such as the Data Center Optimization (DCO) program or CSP Hoster to help traditional SPLA partners into managed service providers.  Using programs such as Azure Arc, Microsoft is creating an environment for service providers transition towards the public cloud but doing so in baby steps.  There are even some licensing benefits as well.  As an example. when Azure Arc is enabled, customers, hosters, and whoever can purchase SQL using a pay-as-you-go model through Microsoft directly or CSP such as the CSP Hoster program. Yes, the pay-as-you-go model is SPLA, but one benefit over SPLA is pay-as-you-use.  When you deploy a SQL server in SPLA, you must pay for that license for the entire month regardless if it is the last day of the month or the first, you owe for the entire month. Pay-as-you-use provides flexibility for high-demand or maybe short-term projects.  

With that being said. SPLA offers unlimited virtualization rights with SQL Enterprise and Windows Data Center which is a big benefit.  In speaking to a US hoster, they prefer SPLA over anything else.  They mentioned 3 reasons:

• They believe that if they are CSP only or offer Flexible Virtualization only, they are ultimately just resellers. When you Google, MSP, there are thousands of MSPs, far more than SPLA providers. Your competition is now ten-fold.  When end customers bring licenses into a third-party data center, there is missed licensing revenue as the end customer is buying licenses from someone other than the hoster.
• Security. They promote to their customers that if they want local support and local deployments, their information is not shared with the publisher (Microsoft).
• We control the customer end-end.  We do not need to qualify for CSP Hoster, we offer licenses (from us), data center management (from us) and support (from us).

There’s a lot of scenarios to consider before moving to one solution over the other.  In fact. SPLA has it’s place and so does CSP.  I would argue before you do anything, you should understand what is installed in your own data center before moving to someone else’s.  How do you know which servers or licenses are even eligible if you do not know what is installed?  Octopus Cloud can help you manage this and create an independent plan to help you make the right decision.  It’s not just one data center over the other, it’s finding what’s right for your business.

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