Thanks Deon, further to that we noted with dismay that any Dept wanting to move their Microsoft hosting into a cloud hosting environment eg. at SITA, loses the portability of their licensing for the Windows Server OS and System Centre licenses. These revert to a SPLA licensing (Service Provider Level Agreement) and the excellent government discounts are lost for these two license types. Other MS licenses are not effected as they are portable.
This has serious implications for say a server farm full of Windows Server OS hostings. One solution is to convert many of those VMs to using Linux instead as Linux can host MS SQL as well as many 3rd party applications like OpenText and other applications.
We are still busy quantifying the actual impact though.