Software Assurance vs. Upgrade Advantage
Posted
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 1:39 PM
by
sdeming
Q: (from Rob)
What’s the difference between Sofware Assurance (SA) and Upgrde Advantage (UA)? I can’t find any clear statements. Do we still offer UA?
A:
UA became SA when we switched to Licensing 6.0 in 2001. Upgrade Advantage only implied one benefit – upgrade protection. Now that we have Software Assurance – we can focus on multiple benefits including upgrade protection, home use rights, Vista Enterprise, cold server backup, etc. I often stress that people equate SA with upgrade protection because of it’s history, but it is SOOOO much more. Specifically you can’t sell upgrade protection on a product we recently released like Windows Server, so you should lead with a different SA benefit like cold server or training.
Here is a link to all of the SA benefits for the various licensing programs:
https://partner.microsoft.com/download/global/40029941