Hi All, I'm hoping that some of you may work in corporate IT departments and / or have setup your own business and therefore have experience of working with Volume Licensing. The business: A small start-up business. They need access to Office 2013 (Home and Business) on every machine. To start the company will require 5 licenses (5 separate machines). Within 3 months the company expects to need to add an additional 3 machines (bringing the total to 8 machines). By month 6 the company expects to add 4 more machines bringing them to a total of 12 machines. The question: From pricing up 5 licenses based on Amazon rates it would cost £900 to license the first 5 machines with retail licenses and then £180 per additional machine. Giving a total cost for 12 machines being £2160. From my understanding and google-ing volume licenses make sense past 5 machines. They would be interested in either Open Value or Open License. My guess would be that Open License is significantly cheaper since it lacks Software Assurance (something I don't think they'll really care for). I've looked into Office 365 Small Business Premium as well and it works out at £7.80 per month (so long as you subscribe for a year) giving a total per machine, per year of £93.60. Based on this maths by the start of the third year you would have been better off buying the Retail 2013 version. I was wondering if any of you knew roughly how much a volume license might save in this instance? Also who would be a recommended volume license partner in the UK? Thanks a lot for any information you can provide, David
Volume licensing will not save you money. It just makes it easier only having one key. You'd be looking at £450 + VAT for Office 2013 with SA (upgrade insurance) per user. OEM/PKC is the cheapest option but it dies with the PC or go for Office 365 and get email thrown in as well (if you go for a business package). Drop me a PM if you need more info. I work at a MSP so do this day in, day out.
You need to be closer to 400 workstations before it you will save with volume licenses. 365 is generally the way forward for a small business, if they want Office and Email you can't beat it for price. I've lost track of how many small businesses I've helped move off other providers or internal systems and onto it. The cost savings win every time if the business needs Office and Email. Remember that 365 isn't just the cost for the Office software, it's the other services as well: Email & Calendars - Both in Outlook, devices/mobile and Webmail with a 50GB user mailbox. Online conferencing - might not be needed but is pretty useful when dealing with remote staff as meetings are much easier with it. IM and Skype - as above for remote working. (Lync is really really good!) OneDrive for Business - 1 TB of storage per user that can be accessed anywhere and the ability to share files with others inside and outside the organization, control who can see and edit each file, and easily sync files with PCs and devices. Team sites - Collaboration and sharing of documents with 10 GB storage. 365 is also good as you look at cost per user on an annual basis, so it's easy for a business to see how much it will cost them when they need to expand.
the advantages with office 365, include having the most up to date version during your subscription, as in if you decided to update office 2013 to office 2016 when it becomes available, you may have that expense again, where 365 is automatically upgraded. As well as the things Atomic and Saspro mentioned
Thanks all for the quick responses. Yeah I use conferencing and lync at work and I do agree that they are great. They already have email being managed elsewhere and seem happy with that. The business (industry) is weird in the fact that people only ever meet in person, at least at the regional level. The core staff only have one meeting per day which never changes between shift changes and then one other meeting once every two weeks. So once you rule out the need for IM, Skype, Calendars and Conferencing. Team sites is actually what they are doing with sharepoint currently, but they aren't actually allowed (trusted) to create new sites just add additional content to existing ones. One drive for business would probably also break regulations at least if the core staff had access. I do agree with the upgrade potential of office 365, but I doubt they will. I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of office they buy is 2026. So in short the business is much closer to having a family of 12 people who all own their own computers. Their primary concern was simply why is office going to cost so much and how can we legally get it cheaper. The consensus seems to be you don't. At least now I understand more about volume licensing now. Thanks again all.
Captive market, businesses either pay or find an alternative. [or don't pay and get a massive bill when MS do a license check] It is often hard for them to understand that something so simple as Office is actually more expensive then their Windows license.
Not just for them. Especially if your usual usage scenario is a bit of excel and a bit of powerpoint and a bit of word and nothing else fancy. If I got paid for every idiot that's too stupid to send a PDF instead of a .docx...
