Moving Forward: Apps4Rent Helps Deploy SharePoint Licenses On The Cloud

Moving Forward: Apps4Rent Helps Deploy SharePoint Licenses On The Cloud

Minnesota based FLABBERT (name changed) – a surgical instrument company and an Apps4Rent customer, found it difficult to transition its SharePoint site on the cloud. The Microsoft Volume License (VL) program they had, allowed them to deploy all their licenses in Apps4Rent datacenter, with the hardware and applications hosted in a dedicated set up. Managing the increasing workload on the SharePoint platform was getting expensive in a dedicated environment. They were looking for a way out to save licensing costs, yet move the site on the cloud. Apps4Rent helped them achieve their goal without them having to pay extra for moving the licenses to cloud.

The Situation

FLABBERT (name changed) was hosting its SharePoint 2007 site on an Apps4Rent dedicated environment. It’s a surgical instruments manufacturer that caters primarily to biomedical and life sciences companies and boasts of a 100+ product catalogue. More than 1100 users access the SharePoint instance daily. They have been operating with a Microsoft Volume License (VL), with all their licenses deployed in Apps4Rent datacenter at New Jersey, USA. With an increasing client base and operations expanded across 5 global locations, the heavy workload on the site was slowing down the business. Moving to the cloud was faced with resistance, considering 1100 licenses had to be moved – it seemed like an overwhelming task.

That’s when Apss4Rent – a Microsoft Authorized Mobility Partner suggested them repurposing their existing licenses acquired under VL to the cloud with Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance program.

The benefits were apparent – by merit of using a shared infrastructure, they would leverage the economies of scale that cloud offers; and save licensing costs to move the SharePoint workload on the cloud.

Apps4Rent Offers Its Expertise In Moving Existing Licenses To The Cloud

Apps4Rent has been managing the SharePoint 2007 server for Flabbert since 2009. It’s been a while that the increasing workload on the application server warranted the move to the cloud. Our expertise is managed cloud solution ensured that the site was running uninterrupted all these while despite the challenges. But it came to a point where our experts decided to push the client to move the hardware from the dedicated environment to the cloud. The client conceded.
With License Mobility through Software Assurance, we started deploying the SharePoint application server on our shared hardware infrastructure.

Under the Volume Licensing terms, we created access to the server instances for their Client Access Licenses (CALs) with active Software Assurance, on our data center. For the remaining licensed that could not be migrated (like Windows server operating system (which requires a SPLA license)), we deactivated the same on the dedicated environment.
The client could now deploy its SharePoint Server Volume License instances from our dedicated server to the virtual machines running in our hosted cloud environment.

We ensured that the client meets the eligibility criteria – active Software Assurance must cover the Microsoft Application SharePoint Server licenses. We seamlessly moved the licenses to our environment without the client having to pay up again for renting the licenses. We reassigned all the licenses within a single cloud server farm. Further, we gave full administrators’ rights to the environment to the client’s internal IT team, to help them out with the Microsoft SAM audits for the license verification procedure.

Benefits Client Gained

Flexibility:

• The client could move application server workloads to Apps4Rent’s IaaS offering without paying for additional licensing.

Cost effectiveness:

• The client could take advantage of existing licensing investments when deploying to the cloud
• The client could capitalize on a lower-cost service provider’s infrastructure platform such as Apps4Rent’s.