• Illustration: A Licensing Advisor Report

A new tool for pricing volume licenses gives customers access to volume pricing, including volume discount information, for most major Microsoft products and will be expanded in the future to provide more information about product use rights, support benefits, and other licensing-related data.

The Pricing Problem

The new Product Licensing Advisor site addresses a significant barrier for customers who want pricing information, as earlier Microsoft efforts to provide licensing information were uneven. For example, the online product catalog did not consistently list prices for all stock-keeping units (SKUs) and volume prices were not available for most products.

Microsoft says a survey of customers in the spring of 2005 showed that pricing was a key issue for customers, particularly for mid-size businesses that had less experience with volume licensing.

While the company has several online licensing tools, access is restricted to partners and other special groups. As a result, volume pricing issues generate about 800 calls a day to Microsoft help lines. If it were any consolation for customers, even Microsoft's help desk didn't have easy access to an online tool: they generally worked from spreadsheets.

The new site not only lets customers get prices but it lets them store a given pricing configuration under a unique ID number, which Microsoft or their reseller can reference later.

Volume Pricing Available

The new site provides the most detailed information Microsoft has ever offered publicly about its pricing, including pricing for the high-end Select and Enterprise Agreements (EAs). The company has not generally released such information publicly, although a determined buyer could sometimes locate Select or EA pricing for a particular product at an online reseller's Web site. The Licensing Advisor site now lets customers see Select pricing under various discount levels. They can also get pricing for EAs, although the pricing displayed there is for only entry-level agreements. (EA pricing for large customers is often negotiated, and can be influenced by a customer's purchase of other products and product support or consulting services.)

Prices are quoted as estimated retail prices (ERP), but these are not the same as off-the-shelf retail prices (which Microsoft calls full packaged product, or FPP); these ERPs are prices typically available from Microsoft resellers for volume purchases of licenses.

The site lets customers select pricing for various products under various licensing programs. Prices include license-only purchases (where available, in Open and Select volume license plans) and licenses with Software Assurance (SA, Microsoft's upgrade and support add-on). Step-up pricing—typically used when a customer with SA wants to upgrade from one edition to another, such as from Windows Server Standard Edition to Windows Server Enterprise Edition—is also listed when it is available.

The site also provides some basic guidance to customers about related products that they will need. For example, a customer who selects Windows Server is prompted to indicate how many users or devices will be accessing the server. The resulting price report shows the number of Client Access Licenses (CALs) the customer will need in order to access the server in compliance with Microsoft's licensing requirements for server CALs.

The Advisor also gives customers some ability to compare their payment schedule over a six-year period under certain licensing scenarios. However, some comparisons are not available, such as comparisons of licenses purchased without SA versus licenses purchased under programs that require SA. These are apples-to-oranges comparisons that could confuse customers unfamiliar with SA, so their absence is understandable; nevertheless, many customers will want to run several scenarios through the Licensing Advisor and make their own comparisons.

Customers can download reports to Word or Excel for further review and can link from the site to resellers that sell the product. They can also save a specific report with a unique ID number generated by the site. The customer—or a reseller with whom the customer works—can then retrieve the report by clicking on a "resume" link and entering the ID that Microsoft generated for the report. A reseller can use this detailed report, which contains specific SKUs and quantities, to generate their own price quote. (For an illustration showing what such a report looks like, see "A Licensing Advisor Report".)

The ID number is also generated when customers click a link for contacting Microsoft by telephone. Customers who call the number can give Microsoft staff the ID number so that they can call up the customer configuration for which the customer wants guidance or additional information.

Future Releases Planned

The first iteration of the site is limited to licensing information for U.S. corporate customers, and pricing might not be available for all products. The company plans to launch an improved version of the site by Jan. 2006 that will include information about product use rights and SA benefits, such as technical incident support or deployment consulting, for the products that the customer has selected. It will also be linked to detailed product advice (although basic product advice already appears in a right-side pane when the customer's mouse hovers over a product name).

In spring 2006, the Licensing Advisor will be expanded to provide prices in many more languages and regions and will help customers configure multiproduct solutions with the appropriate licenses, such as a Microsoft customer relationship management solution built on Small Business Server and Exchange Server. Future iterations of the product may allow customers to enter additional information about their current software so they can better determine what additional licenses they need to achieve a given result or to provision a new solution.

Resources

The Product Licensing Advisor site is www.microsoft.com/licensing/mplahome.mspx.

The Product Licensing Web, which lists current product use rights and SA benefits for Microsoft products, is at www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/userights.

Recent improvements to SA benefits were covered in "Software Assurance Benefits Enhanced, Simplified" on page 33 of the Oct. 2005 Update.

Descriptions of various Microsoft volume licensing programs for corporate customers are available in the Dec. 2003 Research Report, "Understanding Microsoft Licensing."