"If you're moving down the UC path with some of the other players like Cisco, there will be UC overlap and you won't need Skype," he says.

"Skype will probably be part of an Office and Lync CAL [client access license], so customers will have to ask themselves whether or not they need Skype. If the answer is no, they need to know if they'll be able to unbundle it from the CAL. Microsoft will probably make that difficult."

Muscarella notes that enterprise vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP often push back when customers try to unbundle parts of an EA.

"You go back to Microsoft with a list of 10 requests and they'll say no to eight of them," he says.

NPI has hired former Microsoft employees who understand the minutiae of the software giant's enterprise agreements and know the right lingo to use. For instance, many customers are not aware of the free testing and QA (quality assurance) services available to them if they are members of the MSDN or TechNet programs.