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Microsoft Alert: September Outage and What You Should Know

Microsoft’s cloud services experienced a significant outage yesterday. There were reports that Microsoft’s efforts to repair the problem affected some customers for more than 6 hours. We are not yet aware of any customer data that was lost. Microsoft customers from all over the world reported significant issues with access to critical functions. In the United States, several 911 Emergency reporting facilities from Atlanta, Georgia to Tucson, Arizona were down. In addition to emergency services, virtual learning in colleges and public schools took a major hit as students, teachers, and administrators all over North America were forced to stop ...

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Managing IT Spend in a Global Pandemic: Strained Capacity and Reflexive Buying

Unlike consumers who have been panic-buying bathroom paper products in bulk over the last few weeks, IT executives have prepared for security threats and natural disasters for many years and have deployed highly resilient solutions with varying degrees of business continuity. Clients have spent millions for things like network redundancy, contact center contingency planning, remote workforce support, and business application and underlying compute and storage infrastructure availability. The list could go on. In fact, there is a whole industry set up to help IT leaders face this business continuity challenge. What many of those plans fell ...

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Market Alert: More Details Emerge on Microsoft’s 2018 Pricing Changes Effective October 1st

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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Microsoft Pricing Update

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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