SAM as Cloud Enabler

Simon Leuty & Jason Allaway of SSS, 2012 Microsoft SAM Partner of the Year

I’m attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in sunny Toronto this week.

The Microsoft SAM partner ecosystem is a large and influential part of the overall industry and it is great to be here discovering how SAM is evolving.

Microsoft awarded SSS, a SAM managed services company, with the Microsoft SAM partner of the year award. SSS are a UK based operation but are expanding into the US market. Mari Peterson, formerly of Express Metrix, is leading US expansion.

The aim of the partner of the year award is to recognize innovation and delivery of solutions around Microsoft technology so I was interested to sit in the session from SSS and discover how they positioned themselves.

The SSS proposition in a nutshell:

• SAM is not about compliance but business intelligence
• SAM is about providing accurate information clients to aid strategy and enable them to make informed decisions
• Forget about SAM philosophy and SAM mechanics – it’s all about the end report for the customer
• SSS offer ongoing, vendor neutral SAM managed services. Ultimately the end deliverable is license visibility across all vendors on an ongoing basis. They don’t sell tools or licensing.
• From a baseline of good SAM, customers can build good visibility of hardware needs, define software strategies, and explore virtualization options and cloud computing requirements.

The Microsoft WPC is a partner event and SSS were here to position their services in front of prospective new business partners (Jason Allaway stated over 80% of their services were delivered via partners). This is a great proven way of building a scalable SAM business, focusing on specific expertise and helping out complimentary partners.

With regards to enabling the Cloud:

• Investigating cloud-based technology is a high priority on the CIO agenda
• If you don’t know what you are running today – how can we move it to the cloud?
• How do we know if cloud is right for my business? How much will it cost? – All of this can be enabled with an ongoing SAM practice.

Commenting on the award, Jason Allaway, CEO of Specialist Software Services said:

“We are delighted to accept this award in recognition of how we help our customers to better understand the complexities of their IT infrastructure and software licensing programmes. He added, “We enable companies to harness the technology available to them in a strategic and cost-effective manner whether on-premise or cloud based. This endorsement of our unique approach reflects the passion we have for leading the way in our marketplace.

Dinis Couto, general manager, WW SAM, Microsoft Corporation said:

“Microsoft is pleased to honour Specialist Software Services as Software Asset Management Partner of the Year for providing a full software life cycle solution for the most complex customer environments. Specialist Software Services delivers exceptional value and measurable savings for their customers. We congratulate Specialist Software Services for this well-deserved recognition.”

More info here: SSS.