While at SoftSummit in San Jose, Microsoft stressed that they are attempting to make their licensing less complex, but admitted that there are still complexities to be addressed – for example – cloud and virtualization. The company will continue to defend their licensing practices, while trying to navigate through its complexities and ongoing challenges.
Microsoft predicts that we’ll be looking at a “hybrid world” with a mix of cloud and virtualized assets and server-based assets. Microsoft has a broad array of cloud services, ranging from Azure to BPOSS to hosted services. All of these are licensed via subscriptions. Microsoft customers will need to continually manage multiple contracts – those for on-premise assets (e.g., Windows 7 on a PC or Windows Server 2008 on a server) and those for subscription-based contracts for online offerings. The Microsoft spokesperson also acknowledged that virtualization poses some challenges, but they are working to get the right programs in place. No resolutions have been offered, but the company continues to acknowledge the problem.
These are all things we have been saying for ages. Glad Microsoft is coming clean and making the effort to make a change.
They also addressed piracy, claiming that China is an ongoing problem with no solution in sight. Additionally, new virtualization deployments are also causing companies to be under-licensed, without even being aware of it, due to the constantly changing licensing rules.