A US professional services firm closed the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement through Microsoft EA renewal, Microsoft 365 license optimization, and Microsoft Azure commit.
The Microsoft EA Preparation Playbook: The Work That Wins the Renewal
Five workstreams in order: the license position, the usage file, the demand forecast, the benchmark and alternatives files, and the ask list drafted before Microsoft drafts theirs, with the executives aligned before the first meeting.
A US professional services firm with roughly twenty thousand employees renewed its Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. The estate covered Microsoft 365 E3 and E5, Azure and the surrounding Microsoft stack.
Professional services firms are Microsoft heavy by nature. The work is documents, mail and meetings, so the platform is genuinely central rather than incidental.
That makes the SKU mix the decisive question, because everyone needs the platform and only some people need the expensive version of it.
Around twenty thousand employees across US operations, with a workforce split between client facing professionals, support functions and a smaller technology group.
Client confidentiality drives genuine security and compliance requirements for some populations. Extending those requirements to everyone is a licensing decision dressed as a security posture.
Microsoft's renewal position carried the existing mix forward with an uplift, priced against the agreement rather than against measured feature use.
A renewal quoted from the previous agreement never examines whether the previous agreement was right, which is exactly why it is comfortable to issue.
We segmented the population by actual security, compliance and analytics need, then measured how many people genuinely consumed E5 capabilities.
The answer, as it usually is, was a minority. Client facing populations handling sensitive matters had a real case. Support functions largely did not.
We then sized the Azure commitment on trailing consumption, staged Copilot against measured uplift rather than a coverage target, and built the renewal calendar the firm had never had.
The uniform E5 estate is the most common and most expensive default in Microsoft licensing. Segmenting the population is unglamorous work and it consistently outperforms arguing about the discount.
The eleven moves, SKU segmentation, staging Copilot against measured uplift, Azure commitment sizing, and the buyer side position at every step of an EA renewal.
Used across more than five hundred enterprise clients. Independent. Buyer side.
Microsoft framed the Microsoft 365 E5 as the immediate Microsoft uplift across the broader Microsoft. Redress reframed the approach around the customer's actual Microsoft 365 utilization. Microsoft EA renewal closed at material commercial saving.
Confidential consultation. No follow up sales call unless you ask for one.
Microsoft EA signals, Microsoft 365 signals, Microsoft Azure signals, and the broader Microsoft licensing leverage signals across the practice.
