News

Microsoft Talks Up Enterprise Mobility Suite Financing Program

• By Kurt Mackie
• October 21, 2014

Microsoft recently turned the spotlight on a new finance program that pays for Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) technical support costs.

Although the program has been in effect for three months, it is not well-known. Brad Anderson, Microsoft's corporate vice president for enterprise, client and mobility, briefly described the program in a blog post last Friday.

Organizations buying EMS under Microsoft's volume licensing program are eligible to get the tech support financing. EMS is a licensing program introduced in May that entitles organizations to use three solutions: Windows Azure Active Directory Premium, Microsoft Intune and Windows Azure Rights Management Services. According to Anderson, Microsoft will provide professional services support financing of $10,000 for EMS customers with "more than 1,000 EMS seats." If an organization deploys two or more services, Microsoft doubles its support financing to $20,000.

Microsoft also has funding options for organizations with less than 1,000 seats, although Anderson didn't provide the details.

Microsoft's EMS tech support offer is good for a limited time. Organizations need to contact their account representative before Dec. 31, 2014 to be eligible.

Anderson said that Microsoft was motivated to provide the tech support funding after analyzing Azure's use stats. Many organizations had paid for Azure subscriptions but they hadn't started using the services, he noted.

Getting organizations to use the cloud can come with some complexities, according to Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash.-based independent consultancy.

"I think this is usually a truism of transitions from on-premises to the cloud," Miller stated via e-mail. "It's generally more complicated than any vendor thinks it will actually be for customers to adopt. They need to understand security/compliance/risks, licensing, dependencies, relation to existing products/services, and migration...and then execute."

Microsoft had a few other Azure announcements on Monday (read the full story here). In a San Francisco press event, CEO Satya Nadella and Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie announced the following Azure service expansions:

• New Azure G-Series family of virtual machines for data workloads, with support for "up to 32 CPU cores, 450GB RAM, 6.5TB local SSD" storage running on Intel Xeon processors, enabling more than 50,000 IOPS per virtual machine and less than 1 millisecond latency. It's a quick rollout following the D-Series of virtual machines that Microsoft announced last month.
  
  
• New Microsoft Cloud Platform System cloud-in-a-box hardware and software combination using Dell's hardware, which can be purchased by organizations starting on Nov. 3.
  
  
• New Azure Marketplace for accessing services or operating systems, with new Linux-based CoreOS support available starting on Monday.
  
  
• Cloudera support for Azure, with certification by the end of this year.
  
  
• Expansion of Azure into 19 regions around the world, which Microsoft claims is twice what other public cloud service providers offer.

The press conference event was recorded by Microsoft and is available on demand here.