For quite a while now, buyers have been asking for new ways to leverage their buying power when it comes to buying software. Now it seems that they're getting their wish, at least when it comes to purchasing Microsoft software.

This summer, the software giant announced that it's making changes to its volume licensing program and allowing buyers across a large, decentralized organization to buy software in bulk as one entity in one single buying agreement.

"Some changes are driven by the fact that there are new technologies being introduced," says Chris Blackley, director of worldwide licensing and pricing at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. "As software and services are influencing the business model, customers are changing the way they buy software—large organizations have distributed entities that they're trying to consolidate and centralize, and we're moving our business so we can adapt to that."

The new office software buying option is called Select Plus and will be available to buyers starting this fall. Select Plus works on a point system, where each purchased product is worth a set point amount. Total points accrued across a purchasing organization correspond to a tiered discount level for volume buying.

Blackley notes that Select Plus won't change the pricing nor will it be a replacement of current buying options for Microsoft office software. Rather, he says Select Plus is a new program entirely aimed at companies of at least 250 software users or more that have a fragmented office software spend across the organization. Blackley believes that customers with decentralized purchasing programs would see the greatest benefit from putting all their office software spend under one contract through this new buying program.

"For large customers that have geographical distributed affiliates, often they end up with multiple contracts to support different purchasing needs at different spend levels, which makes it difficult to manage licensing," he says. "If you have multiple entities buying the same thing for a volume discount, [it's difficult to discern] who purchased what."

Also, contracts in the Select Plus program are no longer limited to a three-year term. Select Plus contracts are non-expiring but buyers have "no obligation to buy anything" according to Blackley. From Microsoft's perspective, since most office software has a lifetime of more than three years, getting rid of the expiration eases up the administrative process when renewal comes up, says Blackley.

Tied into this new contract structure are flexible agreement terms. In the past, if a customer signed an agreement with Microsoft with forecast spend levels and either went over or under the forecasted spend, there would have to be a new amended agreement created just to keep things on track. Blackley says the Select Plus agreements will remain as-is because "we've gone to automated discounting capability, and we'll look at actual spend during the year and the system sets a customer price level based on that."

By looking at actual spend instead of forecast, Microsoft hopes to adjust buyers' spend gradually instead of all at once, which means less administrative work for them buyers must be careful that they don't vastly overestimates their software usage.