One of the things that I remember from the two years I spent getting my MBA was the “4 P’s” of Success Products: Product, Packaging, Pricing and Promotion.

Multiple professors repeated this message throughout the MBA program: The products that gain significant adoption in the market come from organizations that get all four Ps right – and you can see this repeated in the histories of really successful companies/products.  It starts with having a great product – one that meets a need and delights customers.  When the right product is combined with the right packaging, pricing, and promotion – magic can happen.

Back in October, I wrote about three Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) Game Changing announcements from Microsoft (First, Second, and Third). Those first three announcements were really focused on product functionality and packaging, e.g. the deep technical integration between Intune and Office, the inclusion of Intune MDM capabilities into Office 365, and the announcement of Office for Android tablets. With the release of updates to the Office mobile apps, and the updates to the Enterprise Mobility Suite services in November/December, I believe that, as of today, Microsoft has delivered the absolute best solution for enabling users to be productive on any device.

The announcement I am focusing on today is all about a packaging and pricing update that dramatically simplifies the acquisition and cost of Office 365, the Enterprise Mobility Suite, and Windows.

Over the last two months I’ve shared this announcement under NDA with hundreds of our biggest customers, and, without exception, they all have the same response:  “Wow! This makes Office 365, EMS and Windows so incredibly affordable… so, how quickly can you help us get this deployed?”

With the 4 P’s in mind, here’s how partnering with Microsoft for your EMM gets you the absolute best solution at an incredible price.

Cloud Enabling Your Enterprise Agreement

Many large and medium-sized organizations around the world already have what is called an Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft. The EA is made up of three components: Windows Client, Office, and the CAL Suite. CAL stands for “Client Access License” and the Core CAL provides the license for users to access and use Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, SCCM, SCEP, and Windows Server. The intent of the EA has been to provide a simple way for organizations to acquire the products from Microsoft that they’ll need to empower their users to be productive. This has been, by far, the most common method for large and medium organizations to license these products.

With enterprises rapidly using more and more of our new cloud services (Office 365 and EMS are just two examples), customers have been asking for us to develop a “Cloud EA” that easily extends the investments they have made in their current EA to include these new cloud services.

On December 1, 2014 we added this “Cloud EA” to our price list. It is called the Enterprise Cloud Suite (ECS).

The Enterprise Cloud Suite is a super simple way to upgrade your EA to include the new cloud services we’ve delivered. The ECS includes the following things:

• Office 365 E3
• The Enterprise Mobility Suite
• A per-user offer of Windows Software Assurance (SA) rights.

There is currently an incredible amount of interest in these solutions – and it is still accelerating.  Office 365 and EMS are the fastest growing products in Microsoft’s history and have hit what Geoffrey Moore calls “Escape Velocity” due to the vast numbers of customers already using these cloud services.

For those of you at organizations which already have an EA with Windows, Office, and the CAL Suite:  By adding ECS you have a way to move to an entirely user-based licensing setup. The price you pay will really depend on each situation, as well as what you’ve already licensed.  If you don’t have an EA, you can simply purchase the ECS via an Enterprise Cloud User Subscription License (USL). 

It’s simple, easy, and cost effective.

You are likely asking: “What does Windows SA per user as a part of your Enterprise Agreement enable?”  The short answer is that it will enable the move to user-based licensing for both the existing Windows SA customers as well as for the new customers.

Putting the Enterprise Cloud Suite Price into Perspective

With an ECS user subscription you will be able to bring the value of Windows, VDI, Office 365, and EMS together – and this will simplify your licensing and reduce your total costs when compared to licensing by device.

Over the last few months, I’ve been in dozens of meetings with organizations who are paying about the same as the ECS price just to get a per-user license for stand-alone EMM products (which, obviously, only does a fraction of what ECS delivers). In most of these cases, these organizations also have to deploy and maintain the EMM solution on top of their monthly license costs. This makes the total cost of ownership many, many times higher.

If you are already using an EMM solution from someone else, I strongly encourage you to investigate the monthly cost of your current EMM solution.  An upgrade to the Enterprise Cloud Suite provides a way for companies to move to entirely user-based licensing for a vast set of Microsoft Cloud services.

Consider what your money could be getting you:  O365 + EMS + Windows SA per user.

This is a concrete way to make your organization more productive and save it money!

* * *

Over the last few weeks I’ve met with a number of Fortune 100 customers who were already deep into their exploration of Office 365 and EMS – but there are two customer conversations that really stick out to me. In each meeting, after spending some quality time covering the latest innovations and capabilities in O365+EMS, we began talking about the Enterprise Client Suite. Both of these organizations were early adopters in the Enterprise Mobility market, and they had both licensed a number of different solutions (followed by the pain of cobbling those solutions together). Both organizations said they were incredibly impressed with the integration Microsoft was delivering across identity, productivity, and management – and both noted that they had spent thousands of hours working towards this kind of integration with the products they’d already purchased. But they had failed.

There was a tangible “Aha!” moment when we compared their current spending to ECS.

Both of these organizations were paying ~ 3x the price of the ECS to license multiple products from three different companies vs. what their costs would be with ECS. In addition to the potential license savings of moving to ECS, their ongoing operations costs will decrease dramatically since the components of ECS have been built to work together and don’t require constant fine tuning.

At the time we spoke, these organizations were using a combination of products from AirWatch, MobileIron, Good Technology, Okta, and Box. Their total costs came to over $20/user/month.

With an Enterprise Agreement + ECS they are getting the following for less:

• Office 365 + EMS provides MDM/MAM with Intune
• Enterprise File Sync with OneDrive for Business
• Secure e-mail with Outlook across devices + Intune
• Full Office on all their platforms
• All the benefits of Azure Active Directory that come with EMS
• Windows SA per user

Pretty amazing.

Product. Packaging. Pricing. Promotion.

Microsoft is not just offering the most capable solution for Enterprise Mobility – we’re doing it at a far, far lower price.

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