A short missive before the Thanksgiving Holiday gets into full swing. We frequently receive questions about volume licensing and specific product licensing programs here at the Microsoft Volume licensing blog. So our intent here with this post is to pull together a few reources which address topics that come up on a fairly regular basis. 

We recently returned from the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM) conference, which drew an estimated 1,000 attendees ranging from C-level executives, managers and IT professionals responsible for IT asset management.  As a platinum sponsor for this 10^th annual event, we were thrilled to see a great turn out for  the Microsoft keynote session about technology trends and challenges facing CIO s today.

Cloud computing is at the core of the top trends challenging customers today.  Server virtualization, hybrid deployment and BYOD are cascading challenges that influence the way our customers consider and manage their IT assets.

Following our announcement in August 2012 of the MAP Toolkit 7.0, our friends on the Microsoft Solutions Accelerator team have just released the beta version of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 8.0 and we welcome you to join in in the beta.

If you are not familiar with the Microsoft MAP Toolkits, they are essentially agentless inventory, assessment and reporting tools that help assess an IT environment for platform migrations. MAP automatically generates detailed reports on hardware, device, and application compatibility in just a few hours—information you can immediately put to work in your migration plans.

Have you grown quickly through acquisition and had trouble keeping track of all the software and licenses you’ve acquired in the process? Carousel Industries was in a similar situation and reconciled software assets while saving costs by updating its licensing strategy. It accomplished this by working with Universal Management Solutions to undergo a complimentary Software Asset Management (SAM) Baseline engagement using the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit to gather inventory data. Read more in the Microsoft case study, Carousel Industries: Technology Consultant Handles Growth, Updates Licensing Strategy with SAM.

Carousel Industries has provided technology services to enterprise customers across the United States for 20 years. In 2009, the company entered into a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, part of Microsoft Volume Licensing. Just two years after entering into the agreement, Carousel Industries doubled its employee count, through both acquisitions and hiring, to reach its current size of more than 1,150 employees; three quarters of these employees are remote workers.