As a BYOD consultant, I have found many common themes among my clients and, as I mentioned in my previous post, every organization I have been engaged with has a BYOD program in place -- even if they believe they don’t. 

So I have some bad news for those CIO’s that are sure there is no current BYOD program at their company: They are probably also under the illusion that they don’t owe Microsoft any more money for employee-owned mobile devices accessing Microsoft servers on their network. Well, whether you believe that you have an officially sanctioned BYOD program or not, the reality and the truth I have discovered says you do -- and therefore, you almost certainly owe Microsoft money because of all those personally owned devices connecting up to your corporate Microsoft servers.  The license risk issue is real and implicative, and if there are personally owned devices connecting to corporate resources in your enterprise, then you owe money.

Don’t get me wrong: Microsoft is a great company and one that in some part, many of us techies owe the first years of our career to.  They have done great things over the years, have developed incredibly useful products, and continue to innovate.  Their new Surface tablet with Windows 8 should be a winner and I am certain we will begin seeing these great devices popping up in the enterprise very soon.  All this said, Microsoft understands very well how to separate corporations from their money, so don’t think for a minute that allowing personally owned devices to connect to corporate Exchange, SharePoint and other Microsoft-based services is free, because it is not.  So it’s not a question of whether you owe Microsoft money for your BYOD program, it’s about trying to figure how much you owe them and what your true-up costs are going to be.

As with all software makers, the licensing schemas can be very complicated, and Microsoft is no different.  In fact, at one large Fortune 50 company I spent some time at, they needed to have a part-time resource dedicated just to managing the complex of software licenses for the enterprise.  Licensing should not have to be so difficult -- but it is, and Microsoft isn’t any different than the others in this respect (and that’s by design, I believe). 

So how do you determine what you owe Microsoft, as it relates to your BYOD program?  I’ll spell it out for you in tomorrow’s blog.