Forrester on Microsoft's new Select Plus licensing

I asked Forrester Research lead analyst Duncan Jones for his thoughts on the just-announced Select Plus licensing program offered up by Microsoft.

Jones said that the program is largely an improvement on Microsoft's Select program, but also pointed out a few potential pitfalls to watch out for.

On the plus side, Jones said that Select Plus should help large organizations that have multiple, autonomous business units.

"Often there is no central person or process to coordinate a group-wide forecast, agree (on) joint strategies and negotiate a single Select agreement because each unit wants to make its own decision when it is ready to do so," Jones said in an e-mail interview. "These companies end up paying more by buying licenses retail or (from a computer maker). Under Select Plus the enterprise can get economies of scale without losing any flexibility for the business units to decide what and when to buy."

Select Plus also offers customers the ability to see all their licenses in one place, he said. The new program will be better in almost all cases than Select he said, with the exception being a company that is "significantly expanding its purchases over previous years yet is unable to make one big purchase immediately."

He also notes the fact that companies wanting to add Microsoft's Software Assurance program have to buy a full three years' worth under the new program. Under Select, customers would buy one, two, or three years depending on which year of the three-year agreement they were in. "This means companies have to make an assessment on whether SA makes sense for each (order) they raise, based on what they think of the program and when they think the next version of that product will be released," Jones said.

Any Select customers want to share their take?