Microsoft Steeply Raising Enterprise Licensing Fees

hypnosec writes "Microsoft is trying to make up for below expected earnings following Windows 8's and Surface RT's lack luster adoption rates by increasing the prices of its products between 8 and 400 per cent. Trying to make more out of its enterprise customers who are tied under its Software Assurance payment model, Microsoft has increased user CALs pricing 15 per cent; SharePoint 2013 pricing by 38 per cent; Lync Server 2013 pricing by 400 per cent; and Project 2013 Server CAL by 21 per cent."

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[Moblaster]

It's a free market. Microsoft is not forcing anyone to buy its products. If may be mildly coercive in the short term to companies that feel they "must" use Microsoft products, but raising prices is also the best method to charge customers what the product is really worth to them. If it's worth it to switch, they will. But if not, then fair is fair.

SharePoint is like a Swiss Army Gun

[Nova Express]

It does a number of things, some of them vaguely useful, but none as well as other stand-alone tools, it's awkward as hell, and people hate using it.

Raise the price on it and even some of the most MS-centric IT shops will go "Fine, we'll just set up an internal Apache server and Confluence instead."

Australian prices

[mjwx]

Microsoft has increased user CALs pricing 15 per cent; SharePoint 2013 pricing by 38 per cent; Lync Server 2013 pricing by 400 per cent; and Project 2013 Server CAL by 21 per cent."

Allow me to translate, for Australian license partners,

Microsoft has increased user CALs pricing 45 per cent; SharePoint 2013 pricing by 114 per cent; Lync Server 2013 pricing by 1200 per cent; and Project 2013 Server CAL by 63 per cent."

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a free market.

You might think only a moron would mod parent informative, but...

Around 2007, Microsoft realised tech sites like Slashdot had a significant involvement in the very public rejection of Vista as a replacement for XP. They hired several reputation management companies, including Waggener Edstrom and Burson Marsteller to manage their online presence before the W7 release.

One of the results of that was that the reputation mangers ran hundreds of sock-puppets in blogs and news aggregators, like Slashdot and Reddit. They swamped the discussions, including those unrelated to their OS with scripted comments based on a few themes - "Have you tried it yet?" "Much faster than XP" etc etc. There was no opportunity to discuss Linux/FOSS or any other non-proprietary effort without wading through dozens of highly moderated pro-Win 7 postings. Pretty much every first post was a Microsoft-favorable pamphlet.

The result was that almost anyone with a real interest in tech abandoned the site. There are still a few of the old die-hards here, but it's mostly marketers and sock-puppets now.

Re:Okay, so which is it?

[guruevi]

Not only OEM's but Enterprises as well and basically all Microsoft shops. You want Windows 7? You have to buy 8 with Software Assurance. You want Windows XP? You have to buy 8 with Software Assurance. You want Windows Server? You get 2 licenses of Windows 8 for their VirtualPC software. You want to build your own computer? Here's 8. You want to renew your contract for SA for 10,000 computers, they're now all eligible to run 8, also $1M please.

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[Tough Love]

It's strong-arming if you vendor lock a customer than steeply raise rates.
blah blah free market blah blah still an adversarial dick move.

Not merely a dick move, but illegal under the Sherman and Clayton [justice.gov] antitrust acts.

Re:Australian prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow me to translate for Canadian licence partners,

CAL's pricing 35 percent, SharePoint 2013 pricing by 80%, Lync Server 2013 by 900 percent and Project 2013 Server by 55 percent.

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it means the switching costs are high. Which can be the case even if you are using an expensive, shitty product and there is an absolutely perfect, free alternative.
Even if the switching costs were certain to be amortized within a year you might not be able to switch e.g. because there is no money for a steep short-term investment.

Re:Looking to implement SP

[MightyMartian]

We've been using Alfresco's community edition. It has AD integration and does an okay job with Sharepoint protocols.

Re:Exchange rate

[wvmarle]

That would not explain the difference in price rises (8-400%).

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[prowler1]

Zimbra. To a large extent, it's a drop in Exchange replacement which will plug straight into an existing AD environment if you so wish.

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[Thorodin]

So what did they do with their EMR software? Where I work, the EMR or hospital information system, runs on Windows. Period. Not Linux. Windows. And so we're locked in. The provider's and nurse's documentation is done in MS Word. I keep asking why are we paying $200-$300 a pop for Office when there are free versions out there? Answer - the system only works with MS Word. Swapping EMR's out is not a solution. We're talking upwards of $50M and for a small hospital. But, I probably won't have to worry about it in a year's time or so. Thanks to Medicare\Medicaid reimbursement rates going down (in some procedures, the payment is less than the cost to provide the service) and ACO and Meaningful Use, small hospitals are finding it difficult to survive. So, when the takeover (around here it's euphemistically referred to as a 'meger') happens I'm sure IT along with a lot of the non-clinical areas will show a reduction in staff.

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[QuantumRiff]

Zarafa! I have migrated two companies now. Works exceptionally well. It uses outlook, so end users don't even realize they are not on exchange anymore. (course, webmail, or any imap/ical client work as well)

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My response to Microsoft dick move. SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. Medical institutions have no plan B.

Let enough doctors' iPads not be compatible with some crucial part of 'Plan A' and see if a Plan B doesn't start to materialize. Piss off enough 200,000 dollar a year MDs and the fifty to eighty a year IT peons figure out how to make shit change. Been there, seen it happen at a cozy little thousand employee company in Melbourne Florida just recently.

I'm guessing that 'doctor's iPads' are one of the reasons that MS is raising the price of CALs and various email/groupware/etc server licenses; but no mention of bumps to Win7/8 seats...

They don't have unlimited control over their clients(in particular, iDevices have left them flat footed at least until 'Surface' hits in volume, if not beyond); but they do have some leverage, and appear to be using it in a fairly logical way. This definitely isn't the time to be pushing the prices on endpoint OSes that are suffering; but(as long as access from other platforms isn't totally fucked, and at least for things like Exchange it isn't), there is a reasonably good chance that you can make up some of the difference just by bumping CALs and server license fees.

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[aaarrrgggh]

Try and find an enterprise grade accounting/erp system for a 20-200 person company that doesn't rely on Windows. There are some GPL projects, but they are far from the same level of completeness.

We will likely switch from gmail to Exchange (at a mere 30 people) due to limits of Google's systems and the costs to overcome them. You can get about halfway there with Linux for about half the cost.

You can cobble together systems with GPL solutions, but the dollar cost ends up being in-line with MS stuff once you need more than 40 hours to install and configure. Samba, Asterisk, backups, LAMP are all easy to justify going Linux, but I have not had much luck justifying more complex projects going that route.

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[SgtChaireBourne]

Here's two: Citadel [citadel.org] and Kolab [kolab.org]

Among other things, Kolab is a product of a series of contracts for the federal office for Security in the Information Technology in the German Government, though both are quite secure.

Then there are two more: OpenGroupware [opengroupware.org] and Zimbra [zimbra.com]. Module options are out there. If you're not finding them, then it's because you are not looking.

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[fang0654]

I'll second this. We used this to replace Exchange in house years ago, and it runs great. We've got 350 users on it right now running Outlook / Webmail / ActiveSync / BES / etc, with the system still running nice and fast.

Re:How to treat a loyal customer

[PraiseBob]

I'm rebuilding my Exchange mail store yet again, right at this moment. It happens every 6 months or so, no matter how many precautions I take to prevent it in the future. It certainly seems a relevant criticism to me.