SPLA reporting must be performed every month and no later than the deadline set forth by your SPLA Reseller (distributor).
This is an obligation you undertook when you signed your SPLA agreement. Paragraph 11 includes a statement that says you will report monthly or submit a zero use report to your SPLA reseller.
It is commonly known that doing accurately SPLA reporting is both demanding and time consuming, but also important as missing or late reporting may result in severe consequences.
One of these consequences is that if you don’t report, “as expected” you are more likely to be audited. If you want more details on this part, we recommend you read about SPLA audits here
But there are also upsides to accurate SPLA reporting
Accurate SPLA reporting, of course, includes cost optimization, but when it is delivered as part of an automated reporting process, it can also provide data for more accurate end-customer invoicing.
It is due to the fact that if you have inventory data that can be related to individual end customers, fluctuations in license consumptions can be used to update the costs the end customer should be billed for. When the process is automated, you simply have to go through a report showing the changes to know which changes you need to take into consideration.
The key factors of Accurate SPLA Reporting
The doctrine: “You can’t manage what you don’t know” is also very true when it comes to SPLA reporting – “You can’t report what you don’t know.”
Accurate Reporting relies on two key factors:
- Inventory (know what you have) and
- License Calculations (know what you need).
License Calculations
Simply put, license calculations for server product often means calculating how many licenses are needed for a given installation based on the Inventory data.
But in many cases, there is more than one option for licensing, as there can be different editions of the software, where the license grants different use rights, especially regarding virtualization rights. So license calculations should also be performed to find the most optimal solution for optimizing the licensing cost.
In some cases, you might even have the opportunity to choose from different options where the calculations are based on different license metrics or even include product bundles, depending on the setup and versions installed.
Doing the license calculations requires quite a bit of knowledge on licensing, but also the time to stay updated on changes to the SPUR documents
Inventory
Starting with inventory the knowledge required is related to what is installed and/or who has/had access during the reporting month.
Some service providers query their environment at the end of the month to determine what is installed and who has access, and correlated this with the previous month data to measure growth and/or decline in usage and subsequently the need for licenses.
But as the SPLA agreement requires reporting (and payment) for any access to (not usage of) any given software during the reporting month, no matter for how much time, this will not provide sufficient data to do accurate reporting.
License Calculations
Simply put license calculations for server product often means calculating how many licenses are needed for a given installation, based on the Inventory data.
But in many cases there are more than one option for licensing, as there can be different editions of the software, where the license grants different use rights, especially when it comes to virtualization rights. So license calculations should also be performed to find the most optimal solution for optimizing the licensing cost.
In some cases, you might even have the opportunity to choose from different options where the calculations are based on different license metrics or even including product bundles, depending on the setup and versions installed.
Doing the license calculations requires quite a bit of knowledge on licensing, but also the time to stay updated on changes to the SPUR documents.
