Microsoft Licensing

Licenses Affected by 15% Per-User Price Increase (Chart)

Microsoft is raising the price of user-based licenses 15% for many server products. Listed are the major Client Access Licenses (CALs), Client Management Licenses (CMLs), Subscription Licenses (SLs), and CAL suites affected by the change. Volume licensing customers who buy through Select, Select Plus, Open Value Non Organization-Wide, and Open License will be affected starting Dec. 1, 2012. Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers (and in some cases Open Value Organization-Wide and Open Value Subscription customers) generally will not feel the impact until after their current contracts expire.

After Dec. 1, 2012, the per-device license fee for CALs and SLs—and the per-Operating System Environment (OSE) license fee for CMLs—won't change, but the per-user license fees will be 15% more expensive. (The one exception is the Project Server 2013 CAL; the per-device price will go up approximately 5% and the per-user price will increase by 20%).

Besides potentially impacting customers moving to the latest product versions—for example, the wave of products officially released Dec. 1, 2012, such as Exchange Server 2013—the per-user pricing changes can also impact customers wanting to expand deployments of earlier versions of affected products. This is because, in general, the only way for a customer to license an expansion of use of a noncurrent product version is to purchase licenses for the current version of the product and then exercise version-downgrade rights.

The most notable licenses unaffected by the per-user price change are SLs for the various Office 365 offerings and the SQL Server 2012 CAL. Other on-premises products not affected include Dynamics CRM 2011, Dynamics AX 2012, Duet for Office and SAP Server 1.5, Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2, and Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010.