NHS England negotiating new enterprise wide licensing deal with Microsoft
- 20 December 2017
Digital Health News understands that NHS England is in negotiations with Microsoft to put in place a new enterprise-wide agreement for Microsoft Office software across the English NHS.
Will Smart, chief information officer (CIO) of NHS England, is understood to be engaged in ongoing negotiations with Microsoft, with a proposal on the table that initially focuses on enabling NHS trusts throughout England to migrate to the latest Windows operating systems.
It’s believed the proposed enterprise-wide agreement (EWA) would also provide a path for NHS organisations to later move onto Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 platform.
Office 2010 is due to cease being supported by Microsoft in 2020, at which point NHS trusts who wish to continue to use Office software will need to move to Office 365.
Unlike previous editions of Office, 365 is charged as a service, creating new licensing challenges for NHS organisations, particularly how to fund through revenue rather than capital.
One trust CIO told Digital Health News that shifting to Office 365 represented an ideal moment for a new national EWA to simplify complex new licensing arrangements and harness the collective purchasing muscle of the NHS.
“Office 365 is a revenue annual spend, a completely different animal. Unavoidable cost is coming unless an EWA is done.”
The NHS already separately licenses the email and related collaboration components of Office 365 through its NHSmail2 contract delivered by Accenture.
Some NHS trusts are currently getting caught out by software audits that are often showing that they are not fully licensed for all the Microsoft software they run, and as a result facing hefty additional licensing costs.
Digital Health News approached NHS England and the Department of Health (DH) for comment.
A DH spokesperson confirmed that it was “aware that discussions between NHS England and Microsoft were underway”, but declined to comment further.
It is unclear whether the proposed EWA would be funded in full or part, but it appears that there will be some national investment, both in software and the hardware upgrades that many trusts would need in order to run current versions of Microsoft.
NHS England is advising trusts to continue to conclude licensing agreements with Microsoft, and indicated these will then be retrospectively incorporated into any national deal.
It is also unknown whether a licensing deal would extend to SQL and server licensing. There has been speculation that a licensing deal with Oracle might accompany a Microsoft agreement.
[themify_box icon=”info” color=”gray”]
NHS England negotiating new EWA with Microsoft
· Will Smart is said be negotiating a new EWA with Microsoft
· Agreement would see Office 2010 deployed across the English NHS
· Trusts would migrate to Office 365 as Office 2010 support expires in 2020
· NHS England’s last EWA with Microsoft expired in 2010
· Trusts have been under increased pressure to move to new software since WannaCry
[/themify_box]
Windows shopping
The NHS had a £500m EWA with Microsoft that expired in 2010, after running for nine years.
The decision not to renew the EWA provided a short-term cost saving to the DH but shifted the cost of licensing Microsoft products onto individual trusts, many of which have struggled to maintain their licensing and upgrades ever since.
The end of the deal in 2010 has been cited as contributing to some trusts dragging their feet moving away from the redundant Windows XP and Windows 7 platforms.
Support for Windows XP was officially withdrawn in April 2014 but as many as 20% of NHS organisations are still making use of the operating system, and around 90% are thought to run something on it somewhere within their organisation.
Pressure has been mounting on the NHS to move away from older Microsoft operating systems, particularly since the global Wannacry outbreak in May.
The subsequent investigation by the National Audit Office revealed that NHS trusts had been warned about potential risks of using outdated software three years before the WannaCry outbreak.
The impact of WannaCry, which affected 81 of the 236 NHS trusts in England, led NHS Digital to negotiate a custom support agreement with NHS Digital in August to patch all its devices running on Windows XP.
The custom agreement covers all NHS organisations in the UK, with the contract running until June 2018. This coincides with a government report issued in July, which stated that Windows XP support will be withdrawn nation-wide next year.
Extended support for Windows 7 is due to end in 2020.
7 Comments
“…. proposal on the table that initially focuses on enabling NHS trusts throughout England to migrate to Office 2010 and the latest Windows operating systems.”
The original NHS/Microsoft EWA which expired in May 2010 already included Office Professional 2010 licences, so negotiating licences for that version in a new EWA doesn’t make sense. Should this be Office 2016?
Pay per use is the right way to go but you need smart people who can squeeze the max() out the technology available. As an example you could build a 100 licenced dashboards, building them quickly but with bad foundations so they: take too long (i.e. response times) to provide too little insight; cost a fortune in licensing costs; and do not have a long term future. In the short term the dashboards may “look good”. Or, you can take your time, build just a few (min()) dashboards (< licencing costs) getting the design right so that each provide plenty of insight. Do IT right, do IT once and do IT4all. These days, in my P&HO, skilled technicians are as important to the future of the NHS as skilled clinicians.
All very well for Donna to say “I’d add that moving from capital spend to pay-as-you-go services has been a grneral trend for quite a while. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise.” but if you look at a lifetime licence for Office at £229 compared to an Office 365 subscription at £119 per annum the “lifetime” one does not have to last long. The subscription model is just a way for software vendors to generate more money.
Should be open source, whilst it will be more expensive in the short term it will free up funds for patients in the future.
There are other operating systems and supplier of Office solutions ie. Word Processor, Spreadsheet, etc. as well as the open source solutions.
This issue is not going away, but will come back every so often as agreements expire.
So this is not really a surprise and the business side of the NHS should be more than aware of this and cater for it as with other resources.
pay-as-you-go services make no sense at all in public sector organisations, which tend to hang onto ( often perfectly good )assets, for decades.
Office 365 is not the only option, we have an EWA and roll out Windows 10 with Office 2016 as our standard. Just a thought but isn’t it a possibility that NHSMail will ultimately cease and shift fully to Office 365 and therefore this may make some sense in the longer term?
Revenue based licensing is a huge problems for large NHS organisations, on current terms our EA is going to more than double in cost from what it was 3 years ago so anything from the centre is welcome.
I hope this is about more than just Office though as server infrastructure running on 2008 is a problem for many organisations as well, who don’t currently have access to newer versions mainly due to the cost of CALS.
We have reviewed Office 365 and cloud offerings but for us it still doesn’t stack up at this point, but that will very much depend on the organisation I suspect.
I can’t imagine many NHS organisations being in a position to consider very much additional revenue expenditure on licensing if they don’t already have a budget for it, capital maybe, so help is needed.
In 2013, the government said “Purchases through the cloud should be the first option considered by public sector buyers of IT products and services”.
This marked the formal introduction of ‘Cloud First’ as official government policy.
All public sector – including the NHS – has been required since then to look on G-Cloud first (the Digital Marketplace) before considering any other option.
Why then should funding via OpEx rather than CapEx be a “new licensing challenge” for the NHS . . . given that’s been mandated for almost five years now?
I’d add that moving from capital spend to pay-as-you-go services has been a grneral trend for quite a while. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Comments are closed.