Software Assurance Benefits – Part #2
Let’s continue with Software Assurance benefits….
Training Vouchers
Eligibility: days granted based on number of Office and Client licenses with SA Coverage.
Training IT staff can be a big expense to your customers. Deployment projects typically require your IT department to update their skills on new Microsoft products and technologies.
Software Assurance offers dozens of in-depth instructor-led courses provided by our CPLS community to allow your customer to:
- Support their software investment by preparing your IT staff to efficiently deploy, maintain, and support new technologies.
- Provide your developers with the technical expertise to build line-of-business applications for your organization.
- Reduce your overall training budget.
Please visit this page to search for eligible courses.
In addition, training vouchers can also be converted into packaged services days at a 3:1 ratio. See below for more information about this other benefit.
Packaged Services
Eligibility: days granted based on number of Office and CAL points.
One of the key reasons why customers are going with Software Assurance is to take advantage of the upgrade rights on their covered licenses. To go further, your customers might have access to deployment consulting days called Packaged Services. In a nutshell, these days offer guidance and analysis on the planning of the deployment of several technologies: SharePoint, Exchange and the Desktop platform (Windows and Office).
One additional offering is called Business Value and offers a more strategic engagement. Business Value Planning Services (BVPS) helps your organization's business decision makers develop a plan to maximize the business value of the Microsoft Office system through structured, multi-day engagements.
The BVPS consultant works with your customer to document, analyze, and design a plan that can help them unlock the potential of their existing investment, drive change, and improve their business processes.
Please check the partner portal site to get more information.
Home Use Program
Eligibility: every IW product with SA with grant 1 eligible user to HUP for this product
Your customer is deploying Office 2010? Looking for any possibility to train your users and reduce the ramp-up time? The Home Use Program can allow you to easily make your users more familiar with the new Office 2010 interface right from home, while offering them a great deal: Office Pro Plus 2010 for CDN$11 !
Every user of an IW product in the organization (Office for instance) is automatically eligible for 1 copy of the software for their own use at home.
Start a conversation with your HR Dpt contact and tell them about this program that can both increase your users’ efficiency, retention and happiness.
Your customers might also have access to other benefits, like TechNet, eLearning and more, so make sure you use this as a conversation starter every time you contact customers with L+SA. Keep in mind SA on the OS also opens access to MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack), I’ll cover this in my next blog topic.
I hope this topic will help you position Software Assurance to your deals and grow your business!
May the Force of Licensing be with You
Mathias Rousseau