A tweet yesterday from James Edwards (which led to a discussion and a series of tweets) got me a little scared about the future of Adobe Non-Profit Pricing that I’ve written about before. Then today I got an email from Adobe with the subject “Notice of new volume licensing program and temporary Adobe system shut down” with more acronyms than should be allowed in an IT email (and that’s saying a lot…and ILA (I Love Acronyms)!), which was more confusing than anything, I think because I don’t deal with points and discounts for non-profit pricing with Adobe, it’s just a straight price (and better than the points discounts anyway).
I talked to my Zones sales rep, Eric Inabnit ([email protected], or 800-258-0882 ext. 3361), about it to see what the real deal was. He did some checking, and like James found out from his CDW rep, it appears that Adobe is consolidating their Educational and Non-Profit SKUs to simplify things, but it appears the pricing will stay relatively similar to its present levels, with a few minor adjustments. To quote Eric, he is hearing that, “they will be combining the nonprofit and academic price sheets to simplify management on their end. They are saying that if you qualified before you will still qualify, your sku’s will most likely change however pricing changes if any, will be negligible.”
Adobe will be shutting down its entire licensing system from October 7th to October 14th, however, so you cannot retrieve your license information for existing licenses nor can you order new licenses during that time. I can live with that, I wasn’t planning on any October Adobe orders.
This is good news, and while it’s by no means the final word, it does make me worry less about the potential budget impact it might have on churches! Adobe’s products are already some of the highest-priced software packages we buy that aren’t for servers (and frankly, much of our software (Microsoft, especially) costs a lot less than some single Adobe licenses), even with the reasonably significant non-profit discount.
If I discover any additional information I’ll update this post; send me any new information if you’ve got it! (Leave a comment or mention @dszp on Twitter.) Thanks, James, for bringing the Adobe changes to my attention and checking into it as well.