1. Microsoft Volume Licensing
Customer Solution Case Study
Two Global Firms Save More Than $500,000
through Virtualization and Volume Licensing
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Professional services
Customer Profile
FranklinCovey Company, based in Salt
Lake City, Utah provides training and
consulting services in 147 countries and
has more than 600 employees. Global
retailer, FranklinCovey Products, also
based in Salt Lake City, employs 300 and
sells productivity products.
Business Situation
FranklinCovey Company and FranklinCovey
Products wanted to improve efficiency and
reduce costs by separating their operations
without doubling their IT budgets.
Solution
Each company set up a separate
virtualized environment on Windows
Server® 2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V™.
Both also used Windows Server 2008
Terminal Services to host remote
connectivity applications.
Benefits
FranklinCovey Company saved U.S.
$500,000 in IT costs
FranklinCovey Products saved $150,000
on call center setup
Minimized startup costs
“The savings achieved with Terminal Services, Hyper-V
technologies, and the Enterprise Agreement is used to
fund other IT projects that will help further increase
productivity and reduce costs.”
Travis Peters, Director of IT, FranklinCovey Company
Global training and consulting firm, FranklinCovey Co., and global
retailer, FranklinCovey Products, took advantage of a Microsoft®
Enterprise Agreement and Hyper-V™ virtualization software to
reduce software licensing costs while expanding capabilities. They
upgraded to the Enterprise CAL Suite and used Windows Server®
2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V to create separate virtual
environments for each company’s operations. Each used Windows
Server 2008 Terminal Services to host remote connectivity
applications without a virtual private network. As a result,
FranklinCovey Co. saved more than U.S.$500,000 in hardware,
licensing, and energy costs. FranklinCovey Products saved
$150,000 on call center setup and more than $90,000 on
hardware and licensing for its internal domain. Both reduced
software testing time by 70 percent and expedited deployment and
training with Software Assurance benefits.

2. Situation
FranklinCovey Co. was formed in 1997 from
the merger of Franklin Quest—creators of the
Franklin Day Planner—and Covey Leadership
Center—the company formed by Stephen R.
Covey, author of long-time best seller The 7
Habits of Highly Effective People. The
resulting enterprise, FranklinCovey Co., has
grown to be a global provider of training and
consulting services in the areas of leadership,
productivity, strategy execution, customer
loyalty, trust, sales performance, government,
education, and individual effectiveness.
Clients include 90 percent of the Fortune
100, more than 75 percent of the Fortune
500, thousands of small and mid-sized
businesses, and numerous government
entities and educational institutions. The
company is headquartered in Salt Lake City,
Utah, and employs 600 people who serve
customers in 147 countries.
FranklinCovey Products, also headquartered
in Salt Lake City, is a global retailer and the
exclusive licensee of consumer products for
FranklinCovey Co. These products help
individuals and organizations achieve greater
productivity, effectiveness, and success, and
are sold throughout Europe, Asia, Australia,
and the Middle East, and in more than
15,000 retail outlets across North America,
including 70 FranklinCovey Products stores.
FranklinCovey Products has 300 employees.
As part of its ongoing move to reduce costs
while enhancing communications,
productivity, and compliance with federal
regulations, FranklinCovey Co. upgraded its
communications infrastructure to Microsoft®
Exchange Server 2007 and integrated its
corporate voice-mail and e-mail messaging
systems through that software’s built-in
unified messaging component. About a year
later, it deployed a unified communications
solution based on Microsoft Office
Communications Server 2007.
In addition, the FranklinCovey Co. finance
and legal departments wanted to upgrade
their line of business applications, which
required additional server hardware. The IT
department thought it would be wise to
separate the file and application servers for
each of those departments to make it easier
to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and other
federal requirements. On top of that, the
company was going to upgrade its building
security software, which was going to require
additional servers.
“Between the finance, legal, and security
system requirements, we were going to need
five or six new servers, which would have cost
more than $40,000 just for the hardware,”
says Travis Peters, Director of IT for
FranklinCovey Co. “We wanted to add the
capabilities but reduce costs wherever
possible, so we needed to look at alternatives
other than just buying a bunch of servers.”
Building a New Infrastructure for
Retail Products Affiliate
In addition to expanding its core Organiza-
tional Solutions business unit, FranklinCovey
Co. had built a growing Consumer Solutions
business unit for selling planning products
and other business accessories and tools. In
July 2008, FranklinCovey Co. split off its
Consumer Solutions business unit to form a
new company—FranklinCovey Products—
which continues to sell products through
franklinplanner.com, FranklinCovey retail
specialty stores, catalog call centers, and
through third-party retailers worldwide. The
original FranklinCovey Co. organization now
focuses on the continued expansion of its

3. training, consulting, content-rich media, and
thought leadership businesses.
When FranklinCovey Products became a
stand-alone entity, it had to build an infra-
structure for its internal operations. The
original plan was to implement a domain with
19 physical servers.
In addition to the internal domain,
FranklinCovey Products was setting up a
catalog order call center in Pune, India, where
50 call center employees could enter orders
into their corporate ordering system. The
challenge was that the call center was set up
on a separate corporate network with a
firewall that blocked outgoing virtual private
network (VPN) traffic.
To get around the VPN issue, FranklinCovey
Products looked at implementing the same
third-party connectivity solution in Pune that it
was already using in its Mumbai call center.
However, the cost—not to mention the testing
and setup time required—made the solution
impractical. So it turned to Microsoft Gold
Certified partner EDS, which handles IT
management for the company.
“FranklinCovey Products estimated that for
the call center it was going to need eight
servers for 50 people,” says Rick Gordon,
Senior IT Systems Technician for EDS. “I
knew there had to be a more cost-effective
solution.”
Solution
FranklinCovey Co. had signed a Microsoft
Enterprise Agreement several years earlier
and has continued to renew it every three
years. That Enterprise Agreement includes
the Enterprise Platform offering, which
means it can license components from the
Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) Suite,
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, and
Windows Vista Enterprise under a single
platform license.
FranklinCovey Co. also takes advantage of
many Software Assurance benefits included
in the Enterprise Agreement. For example,
the company is using the Packaged Services
benefit to plan its deployment of Microsoft
Office SharePoint® Server 2007. It also takes
advantage of Training Vouchers for IT staff, E-
learning sessions for end users, 24x7
Problem Resolution Support, and a TechNet
subscription to maximize the value of its
technology investment. “Through the Training
Vouchers available through Software
Assurance we got training on Hyper-V,
Microsoft System Center, and Windows
Server 2008 Terminal Services included in
the cost of the Enterprise Agreement,” says
Peters.
Another advantage of the Enterprise Agree-
ment was that it offered FranklinCovey Co.
the option to upgrade its Core CAL Suite to
the Enterprise CAL Suite. This move added
seven server product CALs under a single
multiple-product CAL for about the cost of just
three product CALs if acquired separately. By
the time the company fully implemented its
Exchange Server unified communications
solution in early 2008, it was already using
five of the seven additional products licensed
by the Enterprise CAL suite, so it made
financial sense to upgrade.
FranklinCovey Co. then continued to expand
its use of the Enterprise CAL Suite by
activating a subscription to Microsoft
Exchange Hosted Filtering, which routes
inbound and outbound e-mail through
multiple filters to help block viruses, worms,

4. and spam from reaching the FranklinCovey
Co. network.
Remote Connectivity without a VPN
The next challenge was for FranklinCovey
Products to quickly establish secure, cost-
effective connectivity between the Pune call
center and the corporate ordering system in
Salt Lake City. As the company evaluated
alternatives, Gordon saw a presentation on
Windows Server® 2008 Terminal Services
and Hyper-V™ virtualization technologies.
Seeing the potential to create a virtualized
environment in which call center employees
could access the corporate network without a
VPN, Gordon recommended running a proof
of concept.
Gordon set up a test environment to dupli-
cate the proposed Pune call center. The envi-
ronment consisted of a single IBM x3850 M2
server with four 6-core processors running
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, which
features Hyper-V. The call center applications
are published through Terminal Services
RemoteApp™ using Terminal Services
Gateway, TS Gateway, and Terminal Services
Web Access.
After seeing the success of the proof of con-
cept, Gordon deployed the solution in produc-
tion for the Pune call center. “It took only a
couple of weeks to set up, so we met our
target date, which we never could have done
with the other solution we considered,” says
Gordon.
“Once we knew that we could get the call
center connectivity solution with Terminal
Services for $150,000 less than other solu-
tions we considered, there was no question
about which one we were going to choose,”
says Mike Connelly, Vice President of IT for
FranklinCovey Products. “And beyond the
cost savings, the solution also makes it
easier for end users to access applications
and tools from any Internet Explorer® browser
without the configuration headaches of a
VPN.”
Gordon, in his role as server administrator,
uses Terminal Services with the Remote
Desktop Protocol (RDP) to troubleshoot and
manage both FranklinCovey Co. and
FranklinCovey Products environments, as
well. “Using Terminal Services and the RDP
client gives the IT department a lot flexibility
because I can get anywhere I need to on the
network even when I’m away from the office,
which is extremely valuable with the
combined offices of both companies in more
than 147 countries,” says Gordon.
Following FranklinCovey Products’ success
with the Pune call center solution,
FranklinCovey Co. extended the new solution
to its internal help desk in Pune. And,
FranklinCovey Products then converted its
Mumbai call center from the third-party VPN
solution to Terminal Services technologies.
Building a Virtual Domain
Having resolved the call centers’ connectivity
challenges, Gordon saw the potential of using
Hyper-V virtualization technology for the new
FranklinCovey Products internal domain. ”I
saw that I could save quite a bit of money on
hardware by using Hyper-V to virtualize a wide
variety of servers and deliver the perfor-
mance they needed,” says Gordon.
FranklinCovey Products set up the new
internal infrastructure on Hyper-V in July
2008. The domain consists of one IBM
X3850 M2 quad processor server running
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, provi-
sioned with 18 virtual servers. The virtual
“Once we knew that we
could get the call center
connectivity solution
with Terminal Services
for $150,000 less than
the other solutions…
there was no question
about which one we
were going to choose.”
Mike Connelly, Vice President of IT,
FranklinCovey Products

5. servers run all the company’s services
including file and print, FTP, e-mail, data
management, network management,
security, and business applications. “Getting
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter up and
running and provisioning the virtual machines
only took about a week,” says Gordon.
The Pune call center solution eventually will
be moved to two virtualized servers on
Hyper-V to provide load balancing and
redundancy.
With its upgraded Microsoft Enterprise
Agreement, FranklinCovey Co. only incurs
additional licensing cost if a new application
is deployed or the company adds desktops.
“We count the actual number of CALs just
once a year during the annual “true-up”
process, which saves us a lot of management
time and streamlines the procurement
process,” says Peters.
More Servers, Less Hardware
When FranklinCovey Co. saw the savings that
FranklinCovey Products achieved with
Hyper-V, it began to devise a plan to move
much of its internal domain to Hyper-V also.
In so doing, FranklinCovey Co. expects to
consolidate from a total of 50 physical
servers to about 30 virtual servers running on
10 physical servers. As of July 2009 it was
running 23 virtual servers on Hyper-V on 15
physical servers.
FranklinCovey Co. also connected its Tokyo
office on Hyper-V. The project consolidated
eight physical servers to two physical servers
running five virtual machines on Hyper-V.
Benefits
By acquiring Microsoft software through an
Enterprise Agreement and employing
Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization and Terminal
Services technologies, FranklinCovey Co. and
FranklinCovey Products are able to enhance
connectivity and productivity while saving
hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard-
ware, software licensing, and energy costs. It
also expedites software deployment with the
help of Software Assurance benefits.
Saved $500,000 on IT Expenditures
FranklinCovey Co. estimates that it saves
approximately 65 percent on licensing by
standardizing on the Microsoft Enterprise
Platform through its Enterprise Agreement,
and gains the benefit of predictable licensing
costs and the ability to centrally manage all
licenses, which saves management time. In
addition, by virtualizing its environment on
Hyper-V, the company estimates that it has
saved approximately U.S.$225,000 on server
hardware, and has realized additional savings
on power and cooling costs. In total, the
company estimates that those measures
have helped save FranklinCovey Co. more
than $500,000 in IT costs.
Avoided $150,000 on Call Center Setup
By employing Microsoft technologies,
FranklinCovey Products achieved seamless
connectivity for its order-entry operations and
realized significant savings on hardware and
licenses compared to the alternative. By set-
ting up its Pune call center solution on
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and using
Terminal Services to connect users to the
corporate network, it reduced the required
physical servers from eight to one, and short-
ened deployment time significantly. “Not only
did we get the solution with Terminal Services
and Hyper-V for $150,000 less than the other
solution we considered, but we were able to
get the call center up and running in less
than three weeks,” says Connelly. “With the
“We save about 25
percent on licenses with
the Enterprise
Agreement, and we
saved at least another
$15,000 on licensing
with Windows Server
2008 Datacenter.”
Mike Connelly, Vice President of IT,
FranklinCovey Products

6. other connectivity solution, and without
Hyper-V, it would have taken two to three
months.”
Minimized Startup Costs for New
Operation
FranklinCovey Products also saved licensing
costs through the Microsoft Enterprise
Agreement and by deploying virtual servers
on Windows Server 2008 Datacenter with
Hyper-V. “We save about 25 percent on
licenses with the Enterprise Agreement, and
we saved at least another $15,000 on
licensing with Windows Server 2008
Datacenter,” says Connelly. “We only pay for
four processor licenses even though we have
18 virtual servers.” The company will realize
additional licensing and hardware savings as
it deploys more virtual servers.
“Moving to Hyper V allowed us to cut
$75,000 off our hardware expenses for the
new company right off the bat, and we expect
to double that savings when we’ve completed
deployment of 30 virtual servers,” says
Gordon.
Reduced Testing Time by 70 Percent
With its Hyper-V-virtualized test lab, both
companies can quickly provision new servers
and test new technologies or changes to the
network without risking damage to the
production network. “The performance of the
virtual machines on Hyper-V is incredible, and
if you have to reboot, it only takes about two
minutes,” says Gordon. “So, if I try out a
change in the test lab and it causes a
problem, I can just go to the last snapshot
and start over. Based on the recent testing
we did with Office Communications Server,
we estimate that building the test
environment on Hyper-V reduces testing time
by about 70 percent.”
Expedited Deployment
The combination of Hyper-V and Microsoft
System Center server management tools
makes it possible for Gordon to manage two
separate environments—one for
FranklinCovey Co. and one for FranklinCovey
Products. Rather than waiting weeks for a
physical server to arrive and taking several
hours to make sure the server image has the
right drivers, he can provision a virtual server
on Hyper-V in just minutes.
“Splitting the two companies almost doubled
the number of servers, but I’ve been able to
manage both domains because I use System
Center Configuration Manager for updates
and management, and Hyper-V to set up a
server in 20 to 30 minutes whenever some-
body needs one,” says Gordon.
FranklinCovey Co. notes that the Software
Assurance benefits included in the Enterprise
Agreement, such as Training Vouchers and
Packaged Services help expedite software
deployment. “We expect that SharePoint
Deployment Planning Services will help us
deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 much
faster than without that extra guidance,” says
Peters. In addition, the Microsoft self-paced
E-Learning sessions available through
Software Assurance have reduced training
costs.
By expediting server provisioning with
Hyper-V, and by simplifying the process and
reducing the cost of licensing with a Microsoft
Enterprise Agreement, both FranklinCovey Co.
and FranklinCovey Products are able to
quickly respond to the changing needs of
their employees as the companies grow and
evolve. “The savings achieved with Terminal
Services, Hyper-V technologies, and the

7. Enterprise Agreement is used to fund other IT
projects that will help further increase
productivity and reduce costs, which helps
create a continuous circle of benefits,” says
Peters.
Microsoft Volume Licensing
Microsoft Volume Licensing offers
customized programs that are designed to
meet the needs of your business. Tailored for
companies of different sizes and purchasing
preferences, these Volume Licensing
programs provide simple, flexible, and
affordable solutions that can help you
manage your licenses with ease. Whether you
have five or thousands of desktop PCs,
Microsoft Volume Licensing has the right
program for you.
To acquire the latest Microsoft technology at
a significant cost savings through Microsoft
Volume Licensing, contact your Microsoft
Partner or local reseller.
To learn more about Microsoft Volume
Licensing, visit:
www.microsoft.com/licensing
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 426-
9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-
2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-
hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about EDS products
and services, visit the Web site at:
www.eds.com
For more information about FranklinCovey
Co. and FranklinCovey Products, visit the
Web site at:
www.franklincovey.com
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Document published September 2009
Software and Services
 Microsoft Office
 Microsoft Office Communications Server
2007
 Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
 Windows Server 2008 Datacenter
 Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Enterprise Edition
 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise
Edition
 Microsoft System Center Configuration
Manager 2007
 Technologies
 Hyper-V
 Terminal Services Gateway
 Terminal Services RemoteApp
 Terminal Services Web Access
Hardware
 IBM X3860 M2 quad processor servers
Partners
 EDS