By Richard Smith
General Manager, Microsoft World Wide Licensing & Pricing (WWLP)
Today I am pleased to announce another key milestone in our licensing transformation. For the first time, we can now welcome our government and academic customers to purchase and manage Software, Online Services, and Software Assurance through the Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA). Qualified Public Sector organizations can now enjoy the same benefits that thousands of commercial customers are already leveraging.
For example, government customers in the United States can now buy Government Community Cloud online service via the MPSA, providing the provisioning and security of segregated data across the cloud that many government customers require.
We’re energized by the positive feedback from our customers and progress we’ve made to date. For example:
Simplicity: With this release, multiple industries within an organization—such as commercial and academic—can be covered under one agreement.
Flexibility: Online Services, Software, and Software Assurance can now be purchased through a single agreement with the flexibility to create on-premises, cloud, and hybrid solutions to fit your business and technology requirements.
Faster time to completion: Insight Enterprises, a Microsoft partner, helped a customer open an agreement, create two Purchasing Accounts, and place their first order of 50 Office 365 ProPlus-all in less than an hour.
Further, we are especially thrilled to extend the MPSA to an additional 67 countries, such as Brazil, Korea, Mexico and South Africa, bringing the total to 104 globally in more than 30 languages.
Our customers continue to look to Microsoft to meet their needs, and the MPSA delivers critical simplification and flexibility. Today’s announcement is another key step in our goal to transform volume licensing for our government, academic, and commercial customers. More exciting announcements are coming soon. Stay tuned, and learn more at http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mpsa/default.aspxand follow us on Twitter.