Microsoft Campus Agreement

DATE: July 20th 2010

The Microsoft Campus agreement allows academic institutions to use Microsoft software across their campuses.

This campus agreement is typically only interested in the staff FTE count and not generally the student FTE count. An academic institution which let's say has 10,000 staff (of which 4,000 are considered for the FTE count) and also has 20,000 students, will have to pay a sum equivalent to 4,000 licenses based on their staff FTE only.

This means 35,000 people (10,000 staff and 25,000 students) are licensed to use Microsoft software for the cost of 4,000 licenses.

If an academic organisation were to consider using Citrix, then the campus agreement would require a combined staff and student FTE count. So if the organisation had 25,000 students of which 16,000 were considered FTE then in addition to the staff FTE count of 4,000, the academic organisation would have to pay for 20,000 licenses (4,000 staff + 16,000 students).

The maths is simple

The first major cost issue to deal with, is the Citrix product license is more expensive than the Microsoft equivalent. Even a suite license which allows Presentation Virtualisation (XenApp v RDS), Application Virtualisation (XenApp v App-V) and Desktop Virtualisation (XenDesktop v Microsoft VDI) is as much as 5 times more for academic institutions when Citrix products are considered.

Then there's the cost of the much higher FTE counts, as student FTE counts are included in the total FTE count of an academic institution. My example previously showed a FTE count of 4,000 for Microsoft and 20,000 for Citrix based on the same academic institution. That's 5 times more for Citrix.

Now when we combine the actual license cost and the percentage increase in FTE count, the Citrix licensing cost is over 25 times as much as a Microsoft licensing and with academic budgets tightening all the time, this could be very painful for some organisations to swallow.

TCO

When it comes to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), the Citrix cost over a 4 year period could be 100 times more than choosing the Microsoft options.

There are certain restrictions imposed by the Microsoft Campus agreement but these are not relevant when making a high level comparison with the Citrix campus agreement.

Microsoft Premier Suite license

For Academic institutions the Microsoft Premier Suite license offers incredible value and I would strongly recommend it's consideration. Included in the license cost are the rights to use App-V, RDS, VDI...

The best part of choosing Microsoft products is because they are so cheap to license as part of the relevant campus agreement, it's easier to build small environments which can then be scaled up, instead of forking out a fortune in licensing just to get the ball rolling with other vendors.