Why can't you leave your Enterprise Agreement?

Microsoft has extracted an enormous amount of capital from
organizations of all shapes and sizes. This flow of capital from the customer to the vendor creates a good deal of friction. Microsoft's most profitable vehicle to transfer this wealth is the Enterprise Agreement (EA). A decade of profiteering has left many IT and business leaders anxiously waiting for the day when they can drop their EA.

Motorola, Ahold, Konica Minolta, Land Rover, Genetech, Lexmark, Avago, JohnsonDiversey, Valeo, The State of Wyoming, Washington DC and The City of Los Angeles have moved about a quarter of a million users to Google Apps. More than 3 million other businesses and 30 million other users have made this transition as well. Each of these firms suggests any firm can become less reliant on an Enterprise Agreement yesterday. Northwestern, Notre Dame, Brown University, University of Southern California, Arizona State University, Vanderbilt, Boise State, University of Minnesota, George Washington University, University of North Carolina, Washington University, St. Louis University, the Departments of Education for the states of New York, Maryland, Oregon, Colorado, Iowa, and more than 10 million other students using Google Apps would suggest that the incoming workforce has very different expectations about how technology should work.

We know this Enterprise Agreement really isn't working for us anymore, if it ever was, but we just can't let it go. Why not?


Denial


Subconsciously you know things have fundamentally changed. Everyone jokes that's it's no different, that technology is always changing and today's hype is the same old story. Sure someday we might use the Internet for many of our software services but that's a long way off and we'll never use it for ALL of our technology needs. Our young workers just don't understand that technology is different in the "real" world, they'll get used to it.

Fear


They say they want innovation and collaboration but really they just don't want any surprises. Office 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003, and 2007 ... well we haven't seen any real innovation for most of the decade, maybe we'll see it in 2010, I heard they're coming out with some great stuff. I know at the end of the day Exchange Server works, Outlook works, and I think we're finally getting the hang of SharePoint. Web apps, multi-tenancy, consumerization, and new service providers? Security is an issue, our data wouldn't be safe. We'll keep an eye on these "trends" but at the end of the day we'd rather stay where we feel like we're in control.  We can do a quick review, change our user count a bit, change the date on our old EA and sign up for another 3 years. Nice and familiar.


Financial 


That Enterprise Agreement and our software product and hardware infrastructure are my bread and butter. My job is to keep our data safe and sound - even if Google could do it, I don't see why it's a good idea for us to change anything. Yes the Enterprise Agreement is expensive, but it's a cost of doing business, a necessary evil. We're already doing more with less by virtualizing. It's better to stay the course. It's the prudent financial decision. Innovation and collaboration are great in theory but they're really marketing terms.

Religion


We run our servers. I won't hand my production data over to another company. We offer high availability internally already. We've made tremendous investments in our applications and have our own state of the art infrastructure. We have made the strategic decision to continue our investment in the "private-cloud".

The Answer


The organization has to begin rapidly adopting modern cloud computing services. Ultimately this has little to do with technology and everything to do with business models. Running technology services comes at a tremendous cost to a business fundamentally organized and managed for a completely different purpose. Like all major decisions the answer is both simple and complex. We know change is possible, we know change takes action and we have more than enough experience to know what actions to take. The complexity stems from changing more than a decade of habits, taking into account a broad user group, planning for and addressing the potential impact across applications and listening to those who will inevitably dislike the disruption. But hey, that's your job. It's time to drive the organization forward. Cloud Computing enables IT and business professionals with more technology services than ever imaginable just a few years ago. This is what it's all about.

Your success in life isn't based on your ability to simply change. It is based on your ability to change faster than your competition, customers and business. — Mark Sanborn