Application Platform Agreements

The Application Platform Agreement (APA), announced in 2008, can help large organizations budget for certain Microsoft servers, including SQL Server and SharePoint Server, by combining perpetual licenses with subscriptions for server products. The APA is an add-on to an Enterprise Agreement (EA) that licenses an entire organization for a set of server products over a specific term.

“All You Can Eat” for Platform Products

An APA is a three-year agreement that entitles the customer to deploy covered products as broadly as they want within the enterprise during the agreement’s term, in return for an annual payment set in advance. The customer also receives Software Assurance (SA) upgrade rights and maintenance on the covered products. The APA covers products (such as SQL Server) that aren’t part of a base EA and that would have to be bought either on a separate Select agreement or as “additional software” through the EA. (For a list of products covered by the APA, see the chart “Application Platform Licenses“.)