As companies look to renew their Microsoft enterprise support, they are encountering an unwelcome surprise: a change from Microsoft Premier to Microsoft Unified Support.
Essentially, Microsoft rolled out its biggest change to support in two decades, shifting its Premier Support customers to Unified Support. There are unlimited reactive support hours and there are three levels – Core, Advanced, Performance – which have a minimum contract size of $25,000, $50,000, and $175,000, and pricing based on a percentage of Office 365 annual costs, client software annual costs, other software and online annual costs. Research from several industry analyst firms shows the transition adds up to a 30% to 60% cost increase » for most Microsoft Premier Support customers.
To get more details on the specific differences between Microsoft Premier and Microsoft Unified Support, visit our website » where we break down each level of service for you. While the pricing has increased, the quality and level of service has not. Many companies are looking for a price list to get a jumpstart before negotiating with Microsoft, but those are hard to find.
Due to the fact that many public sector entities have to publish prices as part of the bidding process, a search for “Microsoft Premier Support Published Price List” will give you a few price lists for different state government entities, but there are so many factors that go into play for pricing it’s hard to use that as a template for how much you could expect to pay.
However, especially as more companies turn to cloud computing, they expect to receive transparent pricing for the services they wish to consume from vendors. As with any enterprise negotiation, the sticker prices are a starting point which usually change depending on the specific customer conversations. For tips on how to negotiate your enterprise support contracts with Microsoft, read our latest blog post on the topic » to get you started.
We believe in up-front, transparent pricing at US Cloud, which is why we offer everyone the opportunity to download our price list for Microsoft Premier (Unified) Support. Download our price list today », and check out our interactive calculator » to see how you could free up support funds to drive innovation.
Having high quality support isn’t just about dollars and cents, though. When you are looking for a company to handle your Microsoft support, make sure they can bring a high level of quality you expect for business-critical infrastructure, such as: