Existing Windows licences would soon be allowed to transfer to Amazon Web Services infrastructure, in a development that allows the channel to target clients tied to long-term agreements with Microsoft.
AWS channel and alliances vice president Terry Wise announced the 'bring your own licence' news in front of thousands of partners from around the world at the AWS Global Partner Summit in Las Vegas.
"It will be available in the coming weeks. It's imminent," Wise told CRN.
He said customers with long-term licensing agreements would be a prime target of the BYO scheme: "But really, it's anyone with a Windows operating system licence that wants to bring it over to AWS."
Lead solutions architect for Brisbane AWS partner CloudTrek, Mark Green, told CRN at the summit that the education sector – a vertical that his company is heavily involved in – would very much look forward to the BYOL scheme coming in.
"A lot of these institutions have really favourable education licensing rates with Microsoft," said Green.
Wise said that some enterprise software licensing requires the product to be associated with specific hardware, and that AWS had now resolved the technical difficulties in meeting this compliance requirement.
"The enabler is the launch of EC2 dedicated hosts," said Wise.
Other announcements to come from Wise's keynote presentation were new partner competencies on DevOps, migration and Internet of Things, as well as direct connect bundles and new security training programs.
Australian software multinational, Atlassian, was named as one of the inaugural AWS DevOps competency partners. The migration and IoT competencies will launch in the "coming months".
The one-day AWS Global Partner Summit was held today as a part of the larger AWS re:Invent conference held throughout this week in Las Vegas.
The journalist travelled to AWS re:Invent as a guest of Amazon Web Services.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
