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Microsoft Unveils Enterprise Mobility Suite Tech Support Discounts
Microsoft has a program that pays for Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS)
technical support costs.
This finance program has been in effect for three months, although it may
not be well known. Brad Anderson, Microsoft's corporate vice president for
enterprise, client and mobility, briefly described the program in a Friday
blog post.
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 today. 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.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.