So, being a good corporate citizen, our beleaguered IT manager client reluctantly consents to an invasive and disruptive ‘SAM Review’ which, coincidentally, is timed to complete just before the renewal of existing but expiring Enterprise Agreement, or other volume licensing agreement. Microsoft SAM Reviews are not audits they are a voluntary exercise. The wordsmithing is top-notch we must give due credit to Microsoft’s marketing department… the letters leave a typical IT manager with the impression that an audit is anything but voluntary… Microsoft fails to mention that particular detail, but let’s be sure to emphasize the point right here: For the past several years, Microsoft has been building out a ‘Software Asset Management’ (SAM) ‘ partner ecosystem’, and clients are now receiving letters from Microsoft, “asking” for their cooperation and participation in a ‘SAM review’. One example of the pressures being applied to customers: At NET(net), we’ve long been advising our clients that they should expect and plan for regular and frequent software license compliance audits. And, as the common wisdom goes, once a customer moves their operations to a provider’s cloud stack, it will be very difficult to dislodge for a competitor (more on that topic later). Why would one of the richest companies of all time intentionally cannibalize its incredibly profitable licensing business, in favor of a much higher cost cloud hosting business model that is rapidly reaching commodity status? Because they have no choice if customers are not on Microsoft’s cloud, they will be on Amazon’s or Google’s or someone else’s. The ‘softies’, with great fanfare, are using every trick in their huge, complex, ever changing book of tyrannical licensing rules, to push their customers away from traditional licenses for on premise software, towards cloud subscriptions. Microsoft’s Enterprise customers should already realize that “Team Redmond” is in a desperate rear-guard battle to defend its incumbent monopoly positions in infrastructure software, against the increasingly successful insurgent attacks from Amazon, Google, and an ever-growing list of startups and disruptors.
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