NFP and Charities are loosing out in Europe it seems?
Tonight, Susan Bradley, myself and John Lennon (Not the singer, but a SBS Consultant in Northern Ireland) had a discussion on this subject.
It seems, though we are not certain, that whilst the USA has NFP / Charity pricing on SBS, Europe does not seem to. This is a major problem for resellers as it actually stops SBS getting into these organisations as it is cheaper to put in Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 NFP licencing.
If this is indeed the case, it must change! We will make it happen…..
When I last wanted to buy SBS I approached pugh.co.uk who are MS partners for volume licensing : they sell everything except SBS and say MS won’t let them sell it to charity and educational users.
So the only way to get it is retail, the cheapest retailer I found was afterhours.co.uk and at least any profits go to a charitable cause.
I spent fortunes on SBS 2000 and then "wobbled" about the upgrade. In the end I stuck with SBS 4.5 until 2003 came out and I did the migration bypassing the 2000 version because I needed features in the 2003 Premium and IIS6.
Admittedly SBS 2003 is cheaper than previous versions, but there are loads of Voluntary and Community Organisations that would jump at the chance to buy it "cheapest" maybe using the extra savings to make sure they also have the best hardware to make it run, or put it to some other useful charitable cause.
In reality the US is no better due to MS cleverly hiding Charity info from the public and partners. Yeah we know it is there but no resources. It is the only facet of the MS system – including all academic paths – that does not appear on MS websites, or in relational comparison charts, or have a central subweb with real info, or have support or…. MSA partners appear to not get credit for serving NFP clients as opposed to points, etc for others. I realize MS is being nice and ‘profitless’ to help NFPs but we who have to serve these low budget operations have no incentive, put in just as much work as serving a full price customer, and MS doesn’t support us. I have 30 churches that would consider a staff upgrade but I’d go bankrupt doing it.