Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the complexity of Microsoft’s licensing agreements? If so, you’re not alone. Licensing is probably the least favorite subject of Petri’s readers, but somebody’s got to manage it.
Licensing can get complex, and Microsoft is starting to sell its cloud services directly and bypassing parts of the channel, so there isn’t always a man in the middle who’s potentially able to negotiate good deals on your behalf and really lay out the options for you. You’re going to have to deal with Microsoft more going forwards as a direct channel.
Microsoft has cut fees paid to Licensing Solutions Partners (LSPs), reducing the margins and incentives for them to sell Enterprise Agreements and others, such as MPSA or CSP or SPLA.
Why buy from an LSP? One issue with consulting Microsoft directly regarding the optimal licensing option for your project is that the recommended solution is always the most expensive. LSPs can provide better deals for their customers.
An alternative to Microsoft’s Licensing Solutions Partners?
Onyx claims it will provide answers to your licensing questions quickly and easily using artificial intelligence (AI). Started by two former SoftwareOne employees, Neil Lomax and Chris Brown, they bring a lot of experience with them.
You might think, surely this is a bit overkill? Can I not use Copilot or ChatGPT to get the answers to my licensing questions? Well, maybe. But Onyx says that Large Language Models (LLMs) don’t give reliable responses if you want very specific answers to your licensing questions. And hallucination is a problem where AI tends to just make things up if it doesn’t know the answer to a question.
An AI service ‘backed by humans’
To address these challenges, Onyx has designed their own LLM, and they’ve put various safeguards in place to make sure that the answers you get back are factual and correct. The service is ‘backed by humans’ to make sure the answers that you’re getting through the AI are up to scratch.
The idea behind the LLM is to provide companies with unbiased information that’s going to get them the best deals on Microsoft licensing. There will be several pricing tiers, and according to Oynx, the service costs will amount to a very small fraction of your overall Microsoft licensing costs.
Onyx also plans to expand its service in the future. Starting off with Microsoft, the team plans to include SAP, Oracle, and various other vendors. Plus, they’re also hoping to provide companies with strategies to optimize their licensing to really get the best return on investment.
Originally, Oynx developed their LLM on Microsoft Azure, but Lomax and Brown decided Microsoft might not like their new service and decided to move everything to AWS to head off any potential objections from Redmond.
Who is Onyx for?
Onyx isn’t for everyone. The startup is targeting organizations that have software contracts ranging from one million to one billion U.S. dollars.