Benefits of Software Assurance

Software Assurance (SA), a subscription add-on to an on-premises software license, plays an important part in Enterprise Agreement (EA) renewals and other licensing decisions. SA can simplify budgeting for software version upgrades, and it delivers important rights for virtualization and other security and management technologies. However, organizations can easily buy too much SA, and incur unnecessary costs, or purchase too little SA and incur license compliance risks. By understanding SA benefits, organizations can make better, more targeted decisions. Organizations considering SA renewals should also evaluate SA benefits for moving to Microsoft-hosted services, such as Office 365.

SA: What It Is, Why Bother

SA is available as an add-on to most licenses sold to customers for use on-premises, including Windows, Office Professional Plus, Windows Server, Exchange Server, and SQL Server. The most prominent benefits of SA are the right to upgrade to new versions of the licensed software released during the SA term and assorted “indispensable” use rights and technologies, many related to virtualization scenarios, which are either not available or would be very expensive through other means of acquiring them. SA also delivers a variety of training and other benefits, which we will refer to as “sweeteners.” While not strategic in nature, these sweeteners do allow organizations to offset some of the costs of SA fees. Note that online services such as Office 365 and Intune do not offer or include SA as such, although these online service subscriptions do provide some SA-like benefits, such as access to the latest versions of the associated software as long as its subscription continues to be maintained. (See the sidebar “How Software Assurance Relates to Online Services“.)