Microsoft Software Assurance Tipping Point

There’s no new news here, I’m just bringing together a number of pieces of information that I’m not sure many people have put together.

Microsoft released it’s Software Assurance licensing programme some time ago now. Many customers looked at it, but struggled to see the benefit in it. There perception was that it worked for people who were going to adopt every release of Microsoft software as soon as it came out, but that was about it. The thing is that many customers don’t upgrade quickly, nor do they take every release. Many enterprise customers skip versions of Office, taking every other one, many did the same with Windows, skipping Windows 2000 and moving straight from NT or 98 to Windows XP.

Microsoft is steadily changing the landscape on Software Assurance though. A number of recent announcements have increased the pressure on customers to take Software Assurance, or made it more valuable, depending on your point of view.

Desktop Optimisation Kit

Microsoft have made the Desktop Optimisation Pack available to Software Assurance Customers. This kit includes four interesting components:

• Microsoft SoftGrid – formerly Softricity SoftGrid
• Microsoft Asset Inventory – formerly AssetMetrix
• Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset – formerly Winternals IT Admin Pack
• Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management – formerly Desktop Standard GPOVault

As you can see, this is a bundling of recent acquisitions – and only available to Software Assurance customers. These products will be available for a period as separate products with perpetual licenses, but eventually the plan is that they will only be available to Software Assurance customers (source: Gartner).

Yes, that’s right, if you want these capabilities you need to have Software Assurance.

These products are the type of products around which you build a whole process, you don’t just deploy them for some added value. In other words, they are the type of products which you get locked in to.

If you have spent a load of money packaging and deploying applications via SoftGrid you aren’t going to change to anything else easily.

If you have invested a lot in getting a GPO management process which relies upon the capabilities a AGPM then you aren’t going to replace it easily.

The Desktop Optimisation Kit now puts a cost on exit from Software Assurance.

Vista Enterprise

There will be one edition of Vista which will only be available to Software Assurance or Enterprise Agreement Customers – Vista Enterprise.

The primary benefit of Vista Enterprise is the availability of BitLocker without all of the cost of Vista Ultimate. If you are an enterprise customer you probably don’t want all of the Media Center capabilities that Ultimate anyway, nor do you want the heavier hardware footprint that it brings because that just pushes cost up. As an enterprise customer you probably do want desktop hard disk encryption.

The need for a licensing agreement to use Enterprise Edition puts another cost on the exit from the agreement. How many customers would want to deploy clients as Enterprise Edition, to then downgrade to Business Edition. If you’ve made extensive use of BitLocker it’s going to be very expensive to change.

Conclusion

These two activities provide a benefit to Software Assurance customers, which will mean that it’s preferable to more customers, but it will also add a cost of exit from the agreement which will make them more cautious.

(I’ve also learnt that writing a complicated post while blowing into a tissue every 2 minutes is hard work . So if you saw an unfinished version of this post – sorry. If this post doesn’t make much sense – sorry.)