What Is an Enterprise Agreement?

An Enterprise Agreement (EA) lets organizations with 250 or more PCs license almost any Microsoft business-related offering. With a traditional desktop EA, an organization licenses all its PCs for Microsoft’s most important software at a predictable annual cost, simplifying budgeting, procurement, and compliance. Furthermore, EAs typically offer the best unit pricing, including significant discounts on server software. However, some licenses must be purchased organization-wide or in certain combinations, both of which could lead to overlicensing, where more licenses are purchased than are actually used. In addition, new purchases commit customers to annual Software Assurance maintenance payments. Because of this potential for overlicensing, other licensing programs are often used as supplements or alternatives to an EA.

An EA consists of three levels of interrelated contracts:

• The Master Business and Services Agreement (MBSA), which sets general terms of the customer’s volume licensing