Making Lemonade out of Microsoft's October 2018 Price Increases

Microsoft is set to increase its prices on Office and Windows in October. The price changes and adjustment will be on a range of on-premises and cloud products. The changes include a 10 percent increase in Office 2019 commercial prices, while the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will also be raised.

October pricing changes include:

• Establishing a single, consistent starting price across all programs aligned to web direct for online services (OLS)
• Removing the programmatic volume discounts (Level A and Open Level C) in Enterprise Agreement (EA)/EA Subscription, MPSA, Select/ Select Plus, and Open programs (Open, Open Value, Open Value Subscription)
• Aligning government pricing for on-premises and online services to the lowest commercial price in EA/EAS, MPSA, Select Plus, and Open Programs
• Delivering a newly designed Customer Price Sheet that better outlines how a customer’s price was derived (direct EA/EAS only)

In conjunction with the programmatic pricing changes, several changes to our product pricing will be delivered, including:

• Office 2019 commercial prices will increase 10 percent over current on-premises pricing
• The price increase will include Office client, Enterprise CAL, Core CAL, and server products

Windows 10 Enterprise E3 offers will be renamed

• E3 will now refer to the per user offer only- Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User becomes Windows 10 Enterprise E3
• Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device becomes Windows 10 Enterprise
• The price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3
• Windows 10 Enterprise E5 per device will be discontinued

Each of these changes will be reflected on the October 2018 pricelists, with preview on the September 2018 pricelist.

Is there a silver lining? Well, if you have been considering how to better take advantage of the latest collaboration, security and communications options, this is can be an opportunity to go to the cloud and enjoy a lower price point.

It’s an incentive to finally leave behind on-premises email. You can bundle and save with Microsoft 365, and working together with a CSP like SoftwareONE, make the transition quicker.

We can offer a complimentary estate review to assess their potential exposure based on these changes. We can also evaluate customers on how strongly they’ll be affected by these price increases.

For example, legacy Pro Desktop-type enterprise agreements are likely to be highly impacted and Microsoft 365 customers are more low impact. We can also work with you to see if options like an early commit can help offset some of the changes.