The Redmond Company's Software Assurance maintenance plan is far from ubiquitous, although Microsoft strives to achieve just that, as its competitors SAP and Oracle are successfully marketing their similar products to a 90 and 95 percentage rate among their customers. Despite a report coming from research company Gartner that Microsoft will implement SA as a mandatory maintenance service sometime in the next three years, the US software giant has denied this course of action stating that the program will remain optional.

In an effort to make the product more appealing, Microsoft has added new features and upgraded offerings the past week. The Software Assurance maintenance plan first debuted as a five-year-long program that aimed at offering businesses guaranteed upgrades on its software products to companies that agreed to payments of 29% of their license fees for desktop applications and 25% on server products, on an annual basis. When Microsoft began missing its deadlines it also implemented additional features into SA only to keep the maintenance plan alive.

But statistics show that SA'a popularity is scarce with only 50% of Microsoft's customers using more than 1.000 desktops having acquired the maintenance plan for office or Windows, and out of that percentage, more than 35% had renounced the program altogether.

Software Assurance has grown to comprise more than software upgrades. It contains Microsoft Product Licensing Advisor to guide customers on their purchase options, plus another 18 features added in March of this year, among which access to the enterprise edition of Vista and 24/7 product support. The new benefits added refer to the Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs program meant to offer a helping hand to businesses running older machines.