New Volume Pricing Planned for Midmarket

Open Value, which offers many of the benefits of an Enterprise Agreement (EA) for smaller companies, is getting a new price level that makes it more competitive with an EA among customers with up to 2,500 PCs. The change will benefit smaller Microsoft partners and license distributors who in many cases have had to turn a growing customer over to a Large Account Reseller (LAR); smaller partners can now offer these customers prices competitive with those from LARs. The change also means that LARs will face competition in a market segment that they have had to themselves until now.

Extending Open Value

Open Value is one of the Open family of volume licensing agreements, which are typically aimed at small companies or departments of larger companies that want to purchase smaller volumes of Microsoft software.

Like most Open programs, Open Value requires a purchase of at least five licenses, but it is also available with a Company-Wide option, in which customers get greater discounts if they purchase specific desktop software—Windows client OS upgrades, the Office suite, or a suite of Client Access Licenses (CALs)—for every PC in their organizations. Open Value also requires that customers purchase and make annual payments for Microsoft’s Software Assurance (SA) upgrade rights and maintenance for each license. (SA is optional in the basic Open License program.) These features make Open Value Company-Wide (OVCW) very similar to the EAs used by Microsoft’s largest customers, who also pay an annual fee per desktop, for a similar set of desktop software with SA.