UK Education Group Partner News

Subscription Enrolment for Schools Pilot – SESP

A year ago we started conversations with OGC and Becta to refresh our licensing schemes, with a goal of adding in some more flexibility for individual customers, and responding to changes in the way that all public sector organisations use ICT. With OGC (now known as Buying Solutions) we looked at the whole of public sector excluding education. And with Becta we looked solely at education.

Across the rest of the public sector that resulted in the new Public Sector Agreement (or PSA09) which introduces more flexibility over the choice of product packages and subscription arrangements – matching up with the Chancellor’s statements in the budget that public sector organisations should review carefully the need to own assets. And Angela Eagles, the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury ‘praised’ the new agreement as it could save £75m over the next five years.

“This new agreement will contribute to the Government’s efficiency targets in support of its Operational Efficiency Programme, and clearly demonstrates the huge benefits that can be achieved through collaborative procurement.”

Now it’s the turn of Education

Today, we’ve announced the outcome of our discussions with Becta, and are launching a pilot programme for a new licensing option, specifically for UK schools.

It’s a bit of a mouthful, as it is called the ‘Subscription Enrolment for Schools – UK Pilot’, so let’s call it SESP for now! It gives you a mid-way option between the Select Agreement and the School Agreement. Here’s the simple bullet points for SESP:

• It’s a subscription agreement - you pay an annual subscription, based on what you choose to license
• You can choose to either license some/all of your students, or some/all of your computers
• If you choose to license by students, you also get the rights for those students to use the same software at home free (eg if you license Office 2007, then every student can also install it on their home computer too)
• When we release new software versions, you’re automatically covered to use them (think Windows 7 & Office 2010!)
• Because it is a subscription, you’re only renting the software. So if you cancel your subscription, you have to stop using the software (or convert the licences to perpetual licences by doing something called a ‘buy-out’)

When is it likely to be helpful?

There are some clear scenarios when this could be helpful to you in a school, for example:

• If you have previously bought Select licences, and you want to upgrade some of your software (to either move towards subscription, or reduce your up-front cost). For example, you decide that to meet the Information Security guidelines from Becta, you want to install Windows 7 to get BitLocker and BitLocker To Go – to encrypt all of your laptop disks and USB memory keys.
  You can use SESP to get upgrade just your teachers’ licences
• You have a current School Agreement covering all of your computers, but 20% of them don’t use Office.
  You can ‘downgrade’ to SESP to only license those that do use Office. But don’t forget you’ll need to make sure the other computers have the right perpetual Windows upgrade (eg Windows Business) to run on your school network.
• You want to allow students to bring in their own laptops, but want to have the same software on them that are on your school computers, eg Windows Business to connect to the network, and Office 2007
  With the student option, you are licensed for the computer the student uses, whether you own it or they do, and whether it is at home or school.
• Your IT technician is bored, and wants more paperwork to deal with.
  Only joking a bit. If you have a current School Agreement, all you have to do today is count all your computers, once a year. With SESP there will be more work to record which groups are covered under which licences, so will mean more record keeping. But that’s worth it if you want to have lots of different configurations of software packages across different machines/users.

My summary table of options

Here’s my quick summary of the three main options schools now have:

Where to find out more

You can read more about SESP (including a comprehensive 11 page FAQ document) on the UK Education website. But the real place to find out more is the education licensing expert at your current Microsoft Education Large Account Reseller. Not only will they understand the nuances, but they can also help you with the pricing.

Licensing can be notoriously complicated, so can I also recommend a quick read of How to get the best deal on Microsoft software, which pre-dates today’s news, but is a step-by-step guide on how to select the best licence arrangement for schools. (My most important tip is ‘Don’t buy an Open licence unless without reading it first!’)

What does SESP mean for Education Partners?

Throughout the development of SESP-UK, Becta has stressed the need for more choice and flexibility in the licensing options for schools. To this end SESP offers the choice of subscribing by counting users or devices, and also offers customers the choice to licence their whole institution or just part. SESP moves schools licensing much more towards an à la carte model. However with this flexibility comes significantly increased complexity (and, as you’ll imagine, this trade-off has been a topic of much debate with Becta). Many of you will have had feedback from customers that they wished licensing could be made simpler. Becta is aware of this and ultimately have prioritised offering greater choice and flexibility over the simplicity offered through the existing School Agreement.

The new pilot will not take away any of your customers’ existing options, and will add this SESP option as a new choice in addition to the existing licence models (School Agreement, Academic Open and Academic Select).

One of the ramifications of the complexity of SESP-UK, is that there is a need to restrict the community of partners able to sell SESP-UK to Education Large Account Resellers (EdLARs) at least for the short to medium term. We recognise that this may be less than ideal for the community of Authorised Education Resellers and so it is important that we give the rationale for this decision being reached.

The complexity of SESP is such that there is significant investment for Microsoft and partner organisations to achieve sales and operational readiness to set up SESP licensing with customers. Undertaking this task with hundreds of AERs is not practical, particularly within the context of a pilot moving into uncharted waters with respect to customer demand, operational processes and pricing. For this reason the pilot needs to be very limited in the number of partners involved; the obvious community on which to focus is the EdLARs, who each have at least one dedicated academic licensing specialist. The number of EdLARs and their typical capabilities in handling more complex licensing make this a much more viable partner community with whom to launch this pilot.

We intend to review this position 6-12 months from launch and any decision to expand the partner community able to sell SESP-UK will be made in the light of operational experience to date.

We remain committed to there being a broad community of partners to serve the wide market of UK schools, and will be keen to ensure that any successful pilots are rolled out to the widest education partner community. We strongly believe that most schools will continue to see the value of School Agreement, when they compare it to the complexities of SESP-UK, and that you will not be disadvantaged in your business.