One of the great benefits of the new Enterprise Agreement (EA) is the flexibility it provides enterprise customers, enabling them to procure and manage a mix of both software and cloud services products within a single agreement all the while adding cloud services at their preferred pace.

For those customers looking to make the leap to Office365 and take advantage of the EA, we encourage registering for the upcoming webcast seminar “Considering a Move to Office365? Let Microsoft explain the move to you!” 

Now that we’re well into 2011 and kicking off Microsoft’s new 2012 fiscal year with the Worldwide Partner Conference, we continue to hear that for many companies, this is the year they’ve resolved to move some or all of their applications to the cloud. As the General Manager of Microsoft’s Worldwide Licensing Programs, my ‘what the cloud means to me’ story looks slightly different from my Microsoft engineering or marketing colleagues.

From virtualization, device proliferation and the consumerization of IT, managing an enterprise’s IT inventory is becoming increasingly complex and time consuming.  But it’s a task of significant importance, as organizations want to take advantage of every software license they hold, and manage the updates, support and service that are attendant.  Getting an accurate count on software licenses and assets can be difficult.  Inventory can consume people resources, time and budget, and even then it leaves many software procurement teams with an “educated guess” on what they need to buy or what they no longer need.

To that end, customers have asked us to help them lower the cost of managing their software licenses. We have responded by providing more robust SAM Services, in addition to free tools such as the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit

Today, Microsoft is taking its efforts a step further by announcing plans to implement the ISO/IEC 19770-2:2009 standard for software identification tags.  These SWID tags are simple XML files embedded in the software that provide a universal method for IT departments to track and manage the software running in their respective IT environments.

A Microsoft Volume Licensing Expert Answers your Burning Questions on Licensing the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

Microsoft VDI offers the ability to rapidly and securely deploy desktops from a data center to users. IT support teams can manage desktops centrally, and VDI can help improve security by centralizing users’ data. VDI also gives end users the flexibility they need to access their work desktops from almost any device that has a reliable network connection.

Louise Ulrick, a UK-based licensing consultant and trainer, has relished taking the opportunity to answer some of your thornier questions on the licensing of VDI. She first began running licensing training courses all the way back in 1995.  Today, Louise continues to love licensing and works all over the world on behalf of Microsoft.

Having options is a good thing, but sometimes choice can be a bit daunting. Fifteen years ago, the perpetual license model was the only way that you could buy most business software. Subscription models started to become more prevalent in the software industry 10 years ago, and today almost every software package is available as either a subscription or perpetual purchase. The exception is public cloud software, or software as a service (SaaS), as this is almost always offered by subscription only.

On-premises software is traditionally associated with perpetual licenses, but software that is licensed via the perpetual model can be hosted by a cloud services provider, and a lot of on-premises software is priced via subscription. Often, a customer will make a deployment decision separate from a licensing decision. To maximize the utility of both models, most customers use a mix of on-premise and cloud software, and software vendors are responding with hybrid offerings that allow customers to choose the approach that makes sense today, with the ability to change course in the future if that is appropriate.