Microsoft lowers price of Office 365

Microsoft has announced on the Office 365 blog that it would be cutting the prices of most Office 365 subscription plans by up to 20%.
While the Small Business & Professional plan (aka P1) as well as Kiosk plans 1 & 2 (aka K1 & K2) remain unchanged, most of the other product prices have been lowered.

Also as part of the announcements – Microsoft is making the A2 plan (academic version of E2) free for both students and faculty at educational institutions.
The big change here? Previously only Exchange Online & Lync Online were free for schools. If they wanted SharePoint Online, the A1 bundle or higher the faculty licenses came at a cost.
Effectively this means that the A1 plan is no longer available and that educational institutions can go straight onto the high productivity A2 plan for free.

The question now – is when will these new prices be reflected throughout Microsoft’s subsidiaries and syndication partners?
Also what does this mean for IT partners who receive commission fees from Microsoft for reselling Office 365?

It’s amazing to see pricing of cloud solutions such as Office 365 come down due to increased efficiencies and economies of scale. I hope there will be more to come in the future.