Big Easy Promotes Partner Services

The Big Easy, a sales promotion for partners, offers customers rebates to purchase IT services and non-Microsoft products from a partner. Available in the United States until June 27, 2008, the promotion focuses on common products sold through volume programs typically used by smaller businesses, such as the Open License and Open Value programs. It also includes software preinstalled on new hardware sold by specific smaller and regional OEMs.

Getting a Rebate

With the Big Easy promotion, end customers get a rebate, made out to the partner of their choice, which must be used to purchase other products from that partner, including hardware, non-Microsoft software, and deployment services.

Customers are not required to buy Software Assurance (SA), Microsoft’s upgrade and maintenance program, with their purchases, but adding SA does increase the size of their rebate.

The rebates are influenced by the number of product groups in which a customer makes a purchase. These product groups, which do not correspond to the Microsoft business groups that develop them or to the product group categories used by Microsoft’s enterprise sales force, include the following: