Microsoft Launches Surface As A Service Options for Partners

Microsoft has started offering Surface as a Service subscriptions in a bid to bring up enterprise adoption of Windows 10.

The Surface service means that Microsoft’s CSPs (Cloud Solution Providers) can now sell Surface as a Service. Essentially, Surface devices can now be sold to customers of channel partners on a subscription basis.

Moreover, Microsoft has done the same for Windows 10 Enterprise Edition, allowing channel partners to sell Windows 10 subscriptions at $7 (£5.30) per person per month via the Cloud Solution Provider channel.

The subscriptions are “ideal for businesses that do not have dedicated IT resources or have limited IT staff, and want their licensing and IT needs managed by a trusted and experienced partner” said Microsoft today at its Worldwide Partner Summit in Toronto.

While Windows 10 has seen healthy adoption in larger businesses, the service offerings will likely attract smaller companies looking to spend less.

Microsoft claims that Windows 10 is installed on more than 350 million devices right now, with 96 percent of its enterprise customers using or in active pilots of Windows 10.

“CSP is our strongest go-to-market offering yet and has been growing at an incredible rate with more than 17,000 partners now transacting in the year since we launched the model at WPC 2015.”

CSPs will also be able to sell to their customers Microsoft’s full stack of services and, including Office 365 and Microsoft Azure subscriptions through a single partner with one user account.

Windows Server 2016

Microsoft also announced today that Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 will launch this autumn. Microsoft said: “This new version of the enterprise operating system customers know and love, has been dramatically refactored to help you embrace the cloud-first world, but still retains the familiar — but improved — enterprise features you trust your business on.”

Another announcement came in the form of the general availability of Microsoft Azure’s SQL Data Warehouse. In Microsoft’s own words, the product delivers the “true promise” of cloud elasticity to data warehousing, and can help save time and money.

“To give an idea of the benefits, a data warehouse can be provisioned in 3‒5 minutes and scale in seconds to meet demand while the SQL-based view can unlock intelligence for all your data, across structured, unstructured, on-premises and cloud, using tools you already have like Power BI and Microsoft Excel,” said Microsoft.

“It also has auditing and threat detection built in, which use machine learning to understand workload patterns and serve as an advanced alarm system against potential breaches.”

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