New Zealand’s Government Signs An Agreement With Microsoft

NEW ZEALAND: According to the reports, government agencies have achieved an estimated $ 9 million saving over the next three years with the signing of a new triennial licensing agreement with Microsoft, known as G2006.

But both the government and Microsoft sources are prepared to reveal what percentage saving this will represents.

The G2006 deal was concluded last week following about a year of negotiations and a similar agreement signed in 2003.

The growing profile of open source software was clearly an element in the negotiations, says Microsoft public sector director Chris Brice. But, it was “not raised explicitly as a factor in reaching agreement.”

The country’s district health boards were also angling for a stronger representation on the steering committee negotiating G2006.

“They got the representation that they requested,” says Paul de Wijze, ICT manager of all-of-government operations in the SSC.

The deal will apply to state service agencies, Crown entities, local authorities and State Owned Enterprises, but not schools or tertiary educational institutions. It will provide a “framework” within which individual agencies arrange Microsoft purchases, says de Wijze.

There are basically two scales of pricing: the enterprise agreement, where the agency agrees to run Microsoft software on all its workstations, and the select agreement, where there is no such organization -wide commitment.

It is also reported that an agency may also purchase Microsoft software through an open license agreement, outside the G2006 framework.

Microsoft will be setting aside 5% of the revenue it will make from software sales to the government, as a part of the 2006 agreement, to help those agencies already using Microsoft products to deploy them more effectively.