The Microsoft Partner programme has evolved, bringing new licensing benefits for our customers. These new licensing benefits will allow us to change the way our licences are sold and supported by cloud providers.

New changes will support customers’ ability to move their license to a partner’s cloud, leverage shared hardware, and have more flexibility in deployment options for their software licenses.

The latest changes have three primary goals:

• make it easier for customers to bring their software to the partners cloud
• ensure partners have the power to sell cost-effective solutions
• empower partners to build hosted solutions with speed and scale

Microsoft have introduced new virtualisation benefit for Microsoft licensing customers that will greatly expand the customer choice when outsourcing.

Under this benefit, customers with Software Assurance or subscription licenses will be able to use their own software to build or install solutions and run them with any cloud provider infrastructure. Allowing customers more flexibility to run their software within multitenant clouds.

Windows server licences

You can now license Windows Servers on a virtual core basis. Meaning, you only need to buy what you need (subject to a per VM minimum), without being tied to a physical number of cores on one server.

With the virtual core licensing option, customers can license Windows Server by the number of virtual cores they are using in machines, making Windows Server easier to license when virtualising or outsourcing.

Microsoft licensing subscriptions