There are different ways to license and/or subscribe to Microsoft products. The licensing solution provider or representative of a particular company may not be aware of all the options available. However, they are well trained (and motivated by incentives) to guide customers on the path to higher licensing costs. Be sure to ask Microsoft licensing specialists how they can better structure licenses to reduce expenses, and consider gaining unbiased expertise to help the procurement team review recommendations. Customers and channel partners can view their current enrollment prices by signing in to the Azure Enterprise portal and visiting the enrollment pricing page. If you purchase Azure indirectly through one of our channel partners, you must receive your pricing updates from your channel partner, unless they have enabled marketplace travel display for your enrollment. Microsoft`s best-offer discounts are rarely the best in their class. The difference between the discount a customer receives and what another customer receives with similar requirements can be significant. When a below-average discount becomes the basis for EA`s future renewals, overspending increases exponentially. Customers should perform a price benchmarking for all facets of their Microsoft fleet to ensure they are getting a fair deal and to ensure they are paying a price that matches the market or is better. As a publicly traded company, Microsoft`s job is to accurately predict revenue.
To achieve this, the company must have a clear view of its sales pipeline and be able to finalize purchases and renewals faster and earlier in the quarterly sales cycle. A limited number of legal resources and licenses are available to process these transactions, and it is almost impossible to process documents less than two weeks before the end of a calendar year, fiscal year, or quarter. Dealing with these spikes in transaction volume is a challenge for Microsoft`s business operations, and delays in this pipeline can have a domino effect on quarterly and annual revenue, share price, and overall market perception. Customers should take advantage of the supplier`s desire to avoid overflows and use purchases and renewal times accordingly. Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft can be more flexible in off-peak supply negotiations. This article provides an overview of pricing for Azure enterprise customers. Microsoft may reduce the current Enterprise Agreement price for individual Azure services for the duration of a registration. We will extend these discounted prices to existing customers as long as the lower price is in effect. If these rates increase later, the price of your subscription to a service will not exceed your rate protection limit defined above. However, the rate may increase compared to the previously lowered price.
In both cases, we will notify customers and indirect distribution partners of upcoming price changes by sending an email to the company and partner administrators associated with the registration. The price of an EA is staggered by the number of computers to be licensed and consists of a three-year contract that gives you the ability to license almost any Microsoft product you need. Everything in the EA comes with Software Assurance, Microsoft`s term for maintenance. Thus, you will receive all future updates and versions during the contract period. At that time, the only improvement came from the monthly pricing type, which allowed customers to add new users in the middle of an agreement, pay only for the number of months remaining until the anniversary of that agreement, and then pay the annual amount for subsequent years. Interestingly, Microsoft didn`t offer the option to reduce the number of users in the middle of a deal, which meant that in the worst case, customers would have to pay 12 full months for licensed users on the first day, even if those licenses were no longer needed at any time before the next anniversary. So far, there is no indication that the Enterprise Agreement program offers such flexibility, even though it has been available to CSP customers for five years. If Microsoft wants to continue to evolve toward a more consumer-centric business model, as it puts it, it needs to better “connect” operations and pricing to provide the flexibility enterprise customers need.
In the meantime, ISG can help enterprise clients align costs and value realization to make the right decisions for their business. Visit ISG Insights to learn more about the latest news and announcements from Microsoft. And contact us to find out how we can help you. While the vendor`s cloud-based offerings may be the future of its enterprise business, most Microsoft customers are still operationally and contractually bound to on-premises deployments. Join our EA review today: www.pcconnection.com/brand/microsoft/microsoft-ea-assessment overview of what makes Microsoft`s offerings fairly priced is the first step to reducing EA`s costs. But that`s only half the battle. To effectively reduce costs, customers need to understand how their individual business needs align with standard conditions (especially for cloud offerings), dozens of license/subscription swaps, and the options available to them. With more options available, it`s important for customers to understand which licensing and subscription programs best meet their technology, enterprise, and cost management needs. and details on compliance and costs related to migration from current to future states. In addition, companies need to understand where Microsoft is willing to be flexible when it comes to the terms that govern price protection and usage elasticity – especially given economic volatility – and incorporate these terms into their EA accordingly. When the regionalisation of a service is introduced for the first time, basic price protection applies to those new regions.
However, if additional regions are introduced for the same service at a later date, they will be considered as new services and will be offered at their own individual rates, regardless of basic price protection. Microsoft launched the Cloud Service Provider Program (CSP) in 2014 to enable the reseller community to sell Microsoft`s online services to the masses. CSP is currently the only license program available that offers the ability to increase and decrease the number of Office 365/Microsoft 365 users on a monthly basis. Unfortunately, CSP caters to small and medium-sized businesses and its prices are negotiated by Microsoft`s reseller community, meaning customers are limited in their ability to negotiate prices and can`t negotiate business terms. In addition, it presents administrative complications associated with more than one license agreement to cover a company`s license inventory. Ea renewal: When it`s time to renew an EA, you can review your entire investment and make adjustments to ensure the new agreement is aligned with current and future needs. Microsoft is committed to moving its enterprise customer base from traditional on-premises software to its subscription-based cloud services. Revenue from its commercial cloud offerings is growing significantly, while revenue from traditional software is declining and the mix is weighing on Microsoft`s ability to support a multi-faceted business. Microsoft`s success will be measured by how well it achieves this mission, and customers will be under greater pressure to move to the cloud or pay the price of higher contractual and pricing complexity for on-premises solutions. Most customers have made the leap to 365 and are experimenting with at least azure.
The good news is that the agreement window is always open for all new cloud spending with Microsoft. While the vendor brings its most powerful R&D, sales, and marketing resources to the cloud, some Microsoft enterprise customers are still operationally and contractually bound to on-premises implementations. This prompted the vendor to take aggressive steps to migrate these customers to the cloud. The results include several price and licensing changes, an increase in formal and informal license reviews (often disguised as software asset management commitments), and increased contractual complexity and rigidity. .