CIOs to Microsoft: Forget 'get legal' program, cut our license pain instead

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. may be trying to make it easier for delinquent corporate customers to "true up" their volume license contracts. But CIOs who have tangled with Microsoft on licensing issues said this latest program does little to tackle the real issue: the difficulty, short of buying Microsoft's most expensive class of license, of staying compliant.

Microsoft's new Get Genuine Windows Agreement (GGWA) lets big companies that are discovered to be intentionally or accidentally pirating Windows XP Professional to quickly purchases copies via a reseller.

GGWA is part of a recent wave of antipiracy and license compliance efforts that Microsoft is targeting at big corporations, its most profitable segment.

Corporations have largely been exempt from past antipiracy efforts, which focused on software crackers and pirates distributing stolen license keys, resellers trying to save a buck by reusing the same license key with multiple customers and consumers.

But in the past several years, Microsoft has started to target companies with programs such as Software Protection Platform (SPP), which requires corporations to tighten up how they install software and manage volume license keys, and Software Asset Management (SAM) -- a thinly disguised corporate software audit that Microsoft, as part of its contracts with customers, is guaranteed.

Microsoft said the audits are necessary to see if a company is either intentionally pirating the software or, more likely, inadvertently doing so. For instance, a company might have bought PCs from an unscrupulous reseller. Or a company may have lost count of how many computers have a particular software installed upon them.

But CIOs who have had direct experience with SAM said that GGWA focuses on the wrong problems.

"It's never a problem buying Microsoft licenses. The bigger problem is tracking them," said Milton Bliss, CIO at Sunwest Management Inc., a Salem, Ore., operator of nursing homes and retirement communities. "The problem we have faced in the past is knowing exactly how many devices we have."

A loyal Microsoft customer, Sunwest went through a SAM audit with Microsoft last year during which it was discovered that the company was running more copies of some software than it was paying for.

"We found out how much we were short, and they walked away with a whole stack of money," Bliss said. Sunwest settled with Microsoft by signing up for an Enterprise Agreement (EA), which requires an additional Software Assurance contract on top. SA requires companies to pay an additional 75%-100% over three years on top of an EA license, in return for the right, if Microsoft delivers it, to the next version of that software.

While the EA "on a per-PC basis" wasn't more expensive than Sunwest's prior license, the SA did make it so, Bliss said.