Microsoft says it will enhance the benefits of
subscribing to its Software Assurance (SA) next year, but has
stopped short of undertaking a wholesale restructuring of the
much-criticised licensing programme.
Ahead of Microsoft’s announcement, David Roberts of the
Corporate IT Forum said last week that the software giant should
look to reduce the costs of software licensing, simplify the
licensing process and lead the whole industry into a “conflict-free
licensing zone” rather than simply fine-tuning SA.
But with this latest update the company has not changed the
fundamental basis of its SA licensing. The new scheme will offer
seven additional benefits to subscribers from March 2006, with the
company aiming to convince users that SA is more than a basic
maintenance offering covering upgrades and support.
Brent Callinicos, Microsoft corporate vice-president of
worldwide licensing and pricing, said, “Each of the new benefits is
designed to help customers access support, services and technology
from Microsoft and our certified partners. Organisations can choose
to use the benefits when planning, deploying, managing or upgrading
their software with greater confidence.”
Among the new benefits are Desktop Deployment Planning Services,
and Information Work Solution Services.
Desktop Deployment Planning Services provide SA Select and SA
Enterprise Agreement customers with consultancy services, delivered
either on site or remotely by experts from Microsoft certified
partners or by Microsoft Consulting Services.
The one- to 10-day consultancies will develop a desktop
deployment plan demonstrating the latest tools, technologies and
best practices for deployment, and showing how desktop total cost
of ownership can be reduced.
Information Work Solution Services provide SA Open Value
customers with workshops to enable them to get the most out of
their Microsoft Office systems.
Other new benefits are designed to enable customers to take
advantage of the latest technology and widen staff skills to
deliver better technology deployment, migration and management.
Windows Vista Enterprise uses the Virtual PC Express product to
support application compatibility scenarios running customer legacy
applications in a virtual machine. Virtual PC Express will be
available for customers to use before the release of Windows Vista
Enterprise Edition in 2006.
Extended training will also be offered to larger customers.
Customers that have at least 30,000 Microsoft Office or Windows
client licences will receive an additional number of training
vouchers that can be used for training from certified trainers.
Microsoft is also improving support with the 24x7 Problem
Resolution Support offering. Customers will receive 24/7 phone
support for all business-critical outages, including server,
Windows and Office-based problems.
For enterprise customers concerned with the security and
manageability of legacy PCs running legacy operating systems,
Microsoft is introducing Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs. This
SA feature is designed to provide a bridge solution that enables
customers to get additional life out of legacy PCs while reducing
security risks and improving manageability.
In addition, the Enterprise Edition Step-Up Licence helps
provide SA customers with the ability to achieve cost savings by
migrating from the standard edition of a select list of products to
the enterprise edition, without having to purchase a new licence
and paying only the price difference between the two products.