Summary
If you work in the Microsoft SPLA (Services Provider License Agreement) market, you already know how thin the public record is. The vendor materials are plentiful enough, but they present the market as Microsoft would like you to see it, which is not quite the same thing as presenting it as it is. The large analyst firms do publish research on hosting and cloud licensing, and some of it is good, but it is written for enterprise procurement teams and priced accordingly. If you are a managed service provider trying to work out whether your licensing posture is normal or dangerous, a five-figure Gartner subscription is probably not how you were planning to find out. Beyond that, people compare notes in private LinkedIn threads, which is better than nothing but a long way from a shared, structured picture of the industry.
Nobody has published an accessible account of how far along Flexible Virtualisation Benefit (FVB) adoption really is, or what Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server actually costs providers when the licence bills arrive. There is no reliable way to find out how your audit readiness compares to the rest of the market. The question of what reporting tooling people actually rely on is just as opaque.
The same questions keep surfacing in our advisory conversations, and they have done for years. Are we the only ones still on manual spreadsheets? Is anyone using bring-your-own-licence above half of their workloads? How fast are our peers moving SQL Server off SPLA? So we decided to ask those questions properly, and publish the answers.
What SAMexpert Pulse is
It is a results portal for the surveys we run. Each survey lives on the portal as a structured editorial report. Every question gets its own chart and the underlying data, followed by a written takeaway that places the numbers in context. Where the data warrants it, there is expert commentary and a recommendation.
The first survey, State of SPLA 2026, is open now. It runs to twenty-eight questions across seven sections, covering organisation and role profile, strategy and business value, operations and governance, spend and financial outlook, cloud transition and modernisation, future outlook, and a final set of confidence indicators. That last section goes into compliance posture, FVB adoption, SPLA revenue dependency, and twelve-month migration activity.
Pulse will run annually. A core set of questions will repeat each year so we can track actual movement over time, while others will change to reflect whatever the market is dealing with that year. Each cycle gets its own report on the portal, and the trend lines accumulate.
What you get back
There are two levels of access. Let us explain the difference.
The first is the public report. Anyone who registers on the portal will have access to the full report when it is published. Registration is free and requires nothing beyond an email address. Every chart will be there, together with the written analysis and expert commentary. There is no paywall. The only thing we ask is that you log in to read it. We need that much because without registration there is no way to notify you when the next report is published, or to know whether anyone is reading.
The second is personalised benchmarking. If you fill in the survey and leave an email address at the end, we will send you an activation code when the results are published. Once you enter the code in the portal, every chart in the report will show your own answer alongside the market average. Question by question, you can see where you sit on each distribution.
Pay with data, not money. Personalised benchmarking exists only for survey participants. Without that exchange, there would be no dataset to publish in the first place.
The public report on its own is already something that does not exist in this industry in accessible form. If the market-level picture is enough for you, it is yours for free. But what the public report cannot show you is where your numbers sit within that picture, and that is what the personalised benchmarking adds. We are not aware of another source that offers this kind of comparison for the SPLA segment. The only way to unlock it is to take the survey yourself, and that is by design: the dataset grows because participants contribute to it, and in return they get something back that no amount of desk research could replicate.
Why we are doing it this way
Our consulting work gives us a detailed picture of what is happening across the SPLA market, but that picture is built from private client engagements that we cannot share. We are building this dataset partly out of self-interest. There is a difference between saying "in our experience, most providers do X" and being able to point at a published number that everyone in the room can verify. The second is a stronger conversation for us and for our clients, and the participants help us get there by contributing their own numbers.
The free-but-registered model is also deliberate. A paywall would shrink the conversation to those willing to pay for it. But if we published the report fully in the open with no registration at all, we would never know who is reading, or who to invite next time. Registration is the smallest barrier that lets the dataset keep growing.
We should be honest about scale, too. We are aiming for roughly five hundred responses per cycle. For an industry of this size, that is large enough to be useful, and we say so in the report itself. It is enough to give everyone a shared frame of reference, even if it falls well short of a global census.
What you will see when we publish the results
To give you a sense of what the finished report will look like, here are a few preliminary findings from the responses we have collected so far. Each one will appear in the report as a chart with written analysis and expert commentary. What follows is the substance without the formatting.
Seventy-two percent of respondents say Microsoft licensing policy changes have at least a moderate impact on their 2026 planning. A third call the impact "major."
Licensing uncertainty, at forty-seven percent, ranks above cost (forty-two percent) as the leading barrier to migration. Providers can live with expense; what stops them is the inability to model what a move would cost in the first place, which is a more paralysing problem altogether.
Bring-your-own-licence (BYOL) has reached sixty-eight percent market penetration, up from fifty-nine percent the previous year. Nine percent of providers report BYOL above half of their hosted workloads.
Only twenty-one percent feel confident in their current SPLA compliance posture. Forty-three percent say they have known gaps or no visibility at all.
Twenty-nine percent have not had any kind of SPLA audit in over three years, or ever.
BYOL adoption stands at 68%; only 21% are confident on their SPLA compliance. Adoption is moving faster than the discipline to manage it.
In the full report, each of these findings will carry a longer narrative and a comment from one of the analysts on the expert panel. All twenty-eight questions will be covered at this depth.
How to take part, and the trade-off on anonymity
The survey takes ten to fifteen minutes in one sitting. The link is here: State of SPLA 2026 survey.
A few things are worth knowing before you start.
You can fill in the survey anonymously. We deliberately kept that option, because some of the questions about spend and dependency are sensitive, and the confidence questions even more so. We would rather have honest numbers from an anonymous response than no numbers at all.
Three tiers of access: register on the portal for the public report; take the survey anonymously to add your data to the picture; leave an email to also see your own answer next to every chart.
The trade-off is simple enough. If you go anonymous, we have no way to tell you when the report is out, and no address to send a benchmarking code to. If you want both the notification and your own data overlaid on the charts, leave an email at the end of the survey. We use it for exactly two messages: one to say the report is live, and one with your access code. That is the full extent of what we do with it.
If the survey is not for you, you can still register on the SAMexpert Pulse portal to be notified when the report goes live and to read the public version. We would suggest that route for anyone who wants to follow Pulse without filling in every survey.
The SAMexpert team