Microsoft Small-Biz Promo Bundles Office With Windows XP, Underwrites Services

Under the initiative, the Redmond, Wash., company is launching a Small Business Platform SKU that wraps Windows XP, Office 2003 and a client access license (CAL) for Small Business Server into one, easy-to-understand three-year license. The SKU assumes that the customer has Small Business Server 2003.

In addition, through March, Microsoft will write a check of up to $10,000 to the customer's partner of choice to cover implementation and services connected to deployment.

"This is a sort of Enterprise Agreement for small businesses, bringing with it all the services and upgrade rights of Software Assurance," said Cindy Bates, general manager of Microsoft's U.S. Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners Group (SMS&P).

Enterprise Agreements, or EAs, are Microsoft volume licenses, typically covering three years of product upgrades and fixes, as well as maintenance.

The cost of the new small-business SKU works out to be about $922, compared with $1,200 if the components are bought separately. More details can be found on this Microsoft site.

The SKU includes the small-business edition of Office, which adds Small Business Manager and Publisher to the usual Word, Excel and PowerPoint triumvirate. Customers also can get Office Professional with the Access database for an incremental charge.

Customers will be asked to designate a consultant or an implementation partner, to whom Microsoft will write a check of up to $10,000, depending on the size of sale and other factors, Bates said.

The services money can be spent on educating customers of heretofore-unknown features and functions of Office and then implementing them, said John Nicolau, general partner of VantagePoint Partners, a Glenview, Ill.-based IT consultant. "Maybe you don't deploy rights management right away. But when some killer app comes and you take advantage of [Windows] RMS [Rigths Management Services], you already have it--maybe not deployed--and I take it off the shelf and deal with it," he said.

Consulting firms like VantagePoint do not resell software could reap services sales through the new small-business promotion. "Sure, we could be the beneficiaries of this, but I'm either fixing [customers&] old stuff or implementing their new stuff. I work either way," Nicolau said.

In such deals, Microsoft will track the license and compliance issues, a fact that pleases some partners but might worry others who think the vendor is tightening ties to customers at the expense of solution providers.

"The value I see for our clients is the fact that with Software Assurance coming with it, it's easier for us because Microsoft tracks all the licenses. I don't have to worry about all the EULAs," Nicolau said. EULAs are end-user license agreements.

The idea of the SKU is to ease buying and licensing of key technologies, Bates said. "All of these components were already available. This is just a great way to buy software. We didn't have a single SKU, and it was difficult to manage all the different licenses," she said.