Unprecedented times for business leaders now as the gears of industry and commerce are basically at a standstill. Most companies have a complete freeze on spending and are contingency planning for things to get worse before they get better. While sometimes there is ‘opportunity in chaos’ so too is the potential to make costly mistakes in our haste to facilitate immediate needs. Today, we’ll be looking at Microsoft and some issues to consider as the economy heads for a downturn. Remote Work: Although remote/home office work is a well-established trend in many industries, others are still grappling with management and cost challenges (not to ...
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Software audits have become an unfortunate but necessary revenue stream for most suppliers today. And who can really blame them? It usually works! Just as governments have now come to rely on revenue from things like speeding and parking tickets, so to have software companies come to rely on software audits to move the needle on revenue or generate fear, using pressure and leverage to create opportunities for new licensing revenue. The reasons are well known, and really haven’t changed significantly in the last few years: Competition from disruptive suppliers Migration away from perpetual licensing to subscription-based cloud solutions ...
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You may recall from our alert in July, Microsoft has substantial changes to their pricing due to take effect October 1, 2018. This pricing will cascade globally from Redmond product managers. As a result, we anticipate an incredibly busy September as customers try to understand what the impact will be and how best to optimize their agreements. The actual pricing is due to be available to resellers on September 1, 2018 and will likely become widely available soon after. In addition to the changes we previously communicated (see below), here are a few of the latest updates that have come to our attention: “Level A” is going away. Any Microsoft ...
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True to their usual schedule, Microsoft has announced some substantial changes to their pricing policies, along with some price increases to Office and Windows licenses / subscriptions, to be effective October 2018. There are some significant changes hidden in Microsoft’s bland language – most notably “Removing the programmatic volume discounts (Level A and Open Level C) in Enterprise Agreement (EA)/EA Subscription, MPSA, Select/ Select Plus, and Open programs (Open, Open Value, Open Value Subscription)” - which will in effect cause substantial price increases for the majority of small and medium businesses with fewer than 2,400 PCs/users. ...
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Microsoft is coming to the close of its first half earnings in Q4. If you know what to look for, the timing represents a strategic opportunity to review and optimize your spend. Did you know: When renewing a Microsoft EA or Office365 subscription, most clients experience a net increase in costs of at least 20-25% for the same services, licenses and subscriptions. These increases result from several sources: The low, “teaser” prices offered by Microsoft to get enterprises onto Office365 are not being offered at renewal – despite that there has been no change at all in the services used, and that in general the promise of cloud computing ...
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