Keeping Up Blues

SPLA partners are also trying to cope with rapidly changing technology, falling margins and information overload.

Pain points associated with upgrades and migrations — from resources to costs — are no longer the major inhibitors for small service providers. Instead, it's the onrush of technology releases, including core Microsoft applications such as Exchange, that's hitting those partners hard, Paul said.

"New major releases from Redmond are posing major concerns as SPLA partners are managing more concurrent versions and working harder to keep up with new ones," he said.
Cloud-based products such as Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, both part of Office 365, "have reset the retail value of those services, sometimes to half of what they were prior to the hyperscale cloud explosion," Paul said.

Meanwhile, customer expectations for uptime, financially-backed SLAs, and security are higher than ever, forcing SPLA partners to spend more on infrastructure and support per hosted user.