Woody Walton
Well the wait is finally over. Starting Monday, March 2nd, the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite , aka EMS, will be available for sale through distribution via Microsoft’s Open License Program. EMS was only available via the Enterprise agreement since its inception last year and has sold quite well addressing several business needs around mobile device management, cloud identity management, and data protection. The inclusion in the Open license lineup is long overdue, and although we must deal with the yearly payment model which is not ideal, does allow for transactions to filter through resellers until it is incorporated into other more “cloud ready” sales modalities such as Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.
To refresh everyone's memory, EMS is comprised of three products, each addressing different business needs.
Some of the these products such as Windows Intune and Azure Rights Management Services (RMS) have been available separately for some time through the Open licensing program, but the noted absence of Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium has caused frustration with the reseller community for some time.
Azure AD premium is seen as beachhead into the cloud as many resellers want to develop hybrid and or/cloud identity solutions for their customers and Azure AD premium provides a much more robust platform for identity needs. See the graphic below or the Azure website:
EMS represents a great value in that the pricing is discounted versus the purchasing of the component offerings separately (all constituent products are available a la carte).
Azure Active Directory Premium =$6 per User /Month ($72 annually)
Windows Intune (without Windows Client OS) = $6 per User /Month ($72 annually)
Azure RMS = $2 per User /Month ($24annually)
This versus a combined price of $7.20 per User /Month ($86.40 annually)
This allows for a great up-sell/ cross-sell opportunity to and from Mobile Device Management sales to Hybrid / Cloud identity offerings.
Just a note that a lesser offering called Azure AD Basic will be released at the same time. It will sell for $1 per User/ Month and has limitations (see graphic and hyperlink above).
EMS and associated SKUs are available for Commercial, Education, and Government customers.
I have heard this was what resellers wanted/ needed to start selling Azure to customers. Please let me know your thoughts.
Regards,
Woody
* all prices referenced are commercial MSRP.