Would anyone be willing to talk with me about how you distribute Microsoft server and SQL licenses in a distributed IT environment? Is an internal resource required, or are you able to have the distributed business units purchase from your reseller off of your contract?
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We have a distributed university IT environment with a central SAM program. Distributed business units purchase from our VAR off of our contract. Depending on the product, we may have to issue them a volume license key - in which case we ask the purchaser to supply the proof of purchase. We are looking to modernize that a bit by having our VAR automatically send us a PoE that is ingested into our SAM system.
One thing we’re trying to do is get in front of such purchases, to help understand WHY a business unit is purchasing MS Server and SQL licenses. There are too many duplicative services and our central IT has a shared infrastructure service that manages virtual servers and databases, so we can often supply what they’re truly after with our service, rather than the business unit putting together a new and redundant (and probably not cost effective) service. That’s been difficult, though, and the mechanism we’re using now is inserting ourselves into the procurement process as an approver for certain software purchases. One single MS Server license isn’t going to meet that threshold for review, though.
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Hi Dan. Would you be willing to tell me about your SAM system that your VAR is working to integrate with?
Certainly - I’ll DM you.