Tip: Coordinating Software Migrations with Purchasing Strategy

Software migrations often involve purchasing software licenses in a particular sequence. When planning a major migration, companies should plan their product purchase strategy as carefully as they plan their technical migration strategy to take advantage of volume licensing options that can reduce software licensing costs.

For example, many companies are migrating from Windows NT to Windows 2003 in an incremental fashion, first moving client workstations to Windows XP Professional, then moving NT servers to Windows Server 2003, and finally upgrading to Exchange 2003 (which requires Active Directory, not available on Windows NT Server).

This migration involves many licenses in the server pool: upgrades from Windows NT Server to Windows Server 2003, upgrades from NT Server Client Access Licenses (CALs) to Windows Server 2003 CALs, upgrades from Exchange 5.x Server to Exchange 2003 Server, and upgrades from Exchange 5.x CALs to Exchange 2003 CALs.

Volume licensing strategies that can assist in this migration are described in the following paragraphs. Some of these options are mutually exclusive, while others can be combined.