Assessment and Planning Experience

With guidance on having the right conversations, help throughout the process, and the proper environment data collection and analysis tools, APEx will expedite your customer’s ability to make investment decisions and increase their confidence that they are making the right ones.

How long does it take?
Depending on your customer’s availability and responsiveness, the size of the environment, and availability of the right team in place to help, it can take from three weeks to several months. Be sure to plan ahead.

Start APEx today if you have a customer with an Enterprise Agreement renewal deadline, an upcoming account planning session, or just need to help your customer optimize their technology resources for future planning.

• Discussion guides
• Customer datasheet
• IT assessment and planning presentation for customers
• Suggested emails

First, target the right customers to participate. Look for customers facing a time-stamped event such as a renewal or true-up deadline for a Microsoft Volume Licensing Agreement, compelling license transition or end of an agreement, end of an agreement with a competitor, account review, or a need for additional products.

Even the most meticulous IT directors can find it challenging to know everything they have running in their environment and stay on top of the many software version licenses, legacy applications, and hardware components.

To kick off the process quickly, excite the customer to:

• Learn more about their own environment.
• Get the most from their IT investments and licensing.
• Plan for future upgrades and migrations that align with their business goals.
• Protect their business from security threats posted by unsupported software.
• Meet their industry regulations.
• Make smart decisions about the right IT investments and environment modifications for their business.

Additional resources:

• Documents to share with the customer so they can learn about why they should review their IT environment and use the Analyzer.
  • APEx customer datasheet
  • IT assessment and planning presentation for customers
• Discussion guides to help drive conversations with your audience:
  • APEx Cloud and Server Discussion Guide
  • Discussion guide for devtest environment
• Customized email template for your customers about why doing an IT assessment will help to maximize their software investments and optimize their environment:
  • Getting Started Email template

• Pull data from their own environment using the MAP Toolkit or other assessment tool
• Consolidate, anonymize, and encrypt their raw inventory results using an app they download
• Provide additional information as needed

• Access the WorkSpace to organize your customer engagements
• Provide guidance on how to run an environment query
• Send an .exe application so the customer can consolidate their raw inventory data into just one file
• Collect additional information and confirm results

• Email template about “How to run an environment scan”
• APEx Technical User Guide – contact APEx support
• MAP Toolkit download and information
• WorkSpace – The online data collection tool

Reviewing inventory results can be a cumbersome and confusing task. Using the APEX Analyzer will help.

What is the Analyzer?
It is an Excel-based application that helps you to make more sense of the data by summarizing the customer’s IT inventory results into easy-to-read tables, charts, and visualizations.

To use the Analyzer, download the workbook onto your hard drive, choose the product environment or scenario you want to analyze on the Start Here tab, and upload the Established Deployment Position file that was created in the WorkSpace.

• SQL Server Environment - Get the data you need to have discussions with your customer about their virtualization plans, consolidation and investment optimization, plans for version upgrades, and regulatory compliancy.
• Cross Product Views - Analyze a customer’s full server estate, identifying cross product interactions.
• Windows Server and System Center - Analyze a customer's infrastructure and product use patterns for Windows Server, System Center and Hyper-V. Results can help your customer structure ways to optimize their software investments, plan migrations from old technology and take advantage of software rights like Hyper-V.
• Visual Studio and MSDN - Analyze a customer’s dev/test environment, identifying cross product interactions that can help them make more informed decisions on how they use Visual Studio and MSDN.
• Azure Modeling - Help your customer identify the 3-5 environments where they could save money by migrating and/or deploying new environments to the cloud such as dev/test, virtual machines, backup servers or disaster recovery facilities.

• Use charts, visualizations, and summaries from the Analyzer to build your recommendations for your customer.
• Make a compelling case for upgrades, new products, Server migration, consolidations, or licensing modifications.
• See a full customer deployment summary on one worksheet with the Full Assessment Report tab in the Analyzer.
• Present findings and insights that provide value to the customer.

• Use the Environment Summary Template to consolidate the results. Copy and paste key charts from the Analyzer and Full Assessment Report and summarize your findings.
  • Customize the APEx results summary presentation template
• Use the discussion guides to help with the conversation around the results and recommendations.

Get answers to the most frequent questions about APEx and learn more about the program in general, the process, WorkSpace, the Analyzer, presenting data to the customer, and terms and definitions.

• Download the full FAQ
• Learn how to get started with APEx by reviewing the APEx datasheet for partners