Organizations should watch out for a Microsoft sale technique where a licence ‘audit’ is just a way to gather customer data and try to upsell to Office 365
TechRepublic reports on some forum threads that report MS salespeople trying to get a ‘voluntary’ audit of software licences by making various thinly veiled threats about noncompliance, deadlines etc.
The audit can take up a lot of staff time and the result is a spreadsheet of information about a company, that Microsoft reps can use to sell more and more expensive licences.
Microsoft Software Licensing is famously complex and ever-changing so it’s easy for an organization to be ‘non-compliant’ entirely innocently. It seems Microsoft sales use this complexity to raise their sales figures.
An example is licensing SQL Server on a virtual machine. Reddit has a report of Microsoft trying to charge for the capabilities (cores) of a physical machine rather than the virtual machine that’s running SQL Server. A difference of $24,000 in licence cost.
The article has some advice on identifying real audits from self-serving sales ‘audits’. Real audits aren’t usually done via email. Outside vendors working with Microsoft may have a @microsoft.com email address but it’s prefixed with ‘v-‘.
Another, rather cheeky, trick is to ask Microsoft to pay for the audit at your company’s usual hourly rate. That is sure to dampen any interest in gathering your data. Also raise the issue of your customer’s privacy and the necessity of confidentiality.
Raise the possibility of moving to Google Docs or some other office suite. Microsoft tries to make that hard by entangling Office features with their cloud and server technologies. Usually the threat of a move away from Microsoft Office is enough to make the pricing and terms a little better.
