Help justifying Win7 Ent over Win 7 Pro

My company is looking to upgrade to Windows 7. We are struggling over the justification to go with Windows 7 Enterprise over Windows 7 Professional.

Currently we have over 50,000 clients that will be migrated over the next three years. We no longer have an EA agreement with Microsoft and our new growth/lease replacements are requiring a "OS upgrade with SA" to get Enterprise License shipped on them from HP. This amounts to 4 million dollars a year.

So far we have the following reading all the forum topics:

• Aero glass remoting (don’t see benefit)
• Windows Media Player multimedia redirection (don’t see benefit)
• Audio recording over Terminal Services (not sure how this benefits us)
• Multi-display terminal services (not sure how this benefits us)
• Enterprise Search Scopes (not sure how this benefits us)
• Federated Search (not sure how this benefits us)
• AppLocker (may look into third party for manageability)
• BitLocker Drive Encryption (still open for use, may go with third party)
• BitLocker To Go (still open for use, may go with third party)
• Direct Access (currently using third remote access software)
• BrachCache Distributed Cache (don’t know if this works for us)
• SubSystem for Unix-based Applications (use case?)
• Multilingual User Interface (can this be purchased for Pro? )
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Enhancements (benefits?)
• Virtual Hard Disk Booting (not sure how this benefits us)
• No VDA Licensing without OS upgrade SA no EA (added point by our team)

As you can see we don’t have much of a leg to stand on. I am hoping someone can help justify our case for going with Enterprise.

Thanks in advance to all that respond.

Tom

Tews said:

Without a LOT more information than you have provided, there is no way that anyone here can justify that type of an upgrade...

What type of information would help open the topic of conversation?

We cant be the only corportion looking to justify Enterprise over Professional. I am not looking for a specific business case just an idea of how others have justified the added expense to move to Enterprise over Professional.

Why do you need to justify it? If it costs more, then get Pro, especially since it doesn't seem that you will need any of the features included in Pro.