InterlinkCloud

Interview with Matt Scherocman – Licensing Wrangler and President of Interlink Cloud Advisors

Slashing through the dense thicket of software licensing often requires the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, and an army of product experts. Understanding and sourcing your Microsoft licensing is like pouring over the Cheesecake Factory menu. But instead of deciding between hundreds of appetizers, lunch or dinner dishes, you must wade through pages of operating systems, applications, and security solutions.

“The entire licensing process has always been a problem for companies,” says Matt Scherocman, President of Interlink Cloud Advisors. “Thankfully Microsoft is doing something about it.”

That “something” is Microsoft’s new Secure Productive Enterprise (SPE) offering that may make licensing headaches a thing of the past. SPE is a secure, desktop licensing bundle that is sold by user. Before getting to this new, streamlined offering, however, Microsoft has taken us on a bit of winding branding and bundling journey.

A company’s IT systems play a critical role in their daily business operations. To prevent business disruptions and delayed revenue growth, organizations must have a plan in place to streamline the IT integration process post-merger. Without one, companies risk the following costly mistakes:

Assuming licensing assets will transfer.

It is common for the value of software licenses to be included in a valuation. However, software licenses don’t always

Mergers and acquisitions are filled with technology and organizational challenges - many which M&A teams may not have planned for. Whether it's people or software licensing, the M&A process is rarely predictable. Based on our experience of combining the infrastructures of hundreds of firms post-merger, we’ve outlined some key challenges that IT will face during M&A, and the solutions available through Microsoft Cloud solutions.

M&A Technology Challenge 1: Underestimating Change Management Needs

The most important component of the M&A process is the end-user. The end-users need to stay connected and productive, but the rapid changes brought about during M&A, often disrupt workflows and frustrate entire departments. M&A teams frequently underestimate how changes in technology can strain business units, leaving end-users feeling lost, and in a state of chaos.

Nobody likes file servers. They’re often in a state of chaos, and accessing them from a mobile device is difficult. Virtual private networks only work well on PCs, and even then, we find users crossing their fingers every time they go to connect.  However, there’s good news: Office 365 addresses those issues - and more.

Azure AD Domain Services provides managed domain services that relieve the high cost and administrative overhead required when deploying domain controllers using virtual machines in Azure. Other approaches often require admins to manage and monitor every small detail of these domain controllers, which can cause workloads to be vulnerable to transient network glitches or outages, resulting in lower uptime and reduced reliability due to network outages. With Azure AD Domain Services, you no longer have to worry about this.