Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
There is one line in your agreement that goes up every time any other line goes up, without a meeting, without a quote and without anybody deciding anything. That is Unified Support, and in most enterprises it is the largest cost nobody actively negotiates. It gets renewed because it is there, it is treated as insurance, and the number is accepted because it is expressed as a percentage rather than as money. I am Daniel, Claire has the arithmetic, and this session is about the line that quietly multiplies everything else in this series.
The mechanic is simple and it is the whole problem. Unified Support is priced as a percentage of your Microsoft product spend, not as a fixed fee for a defined service. So when the discount levels were removed and your licence bill rose, your support bill rose with it, automatically. When the suites went up in July 2026, it rose again.
When you add Copilot seats, it rises again. None of those increases bought you a single extra hour of support. And on top of all of that, Unified Support itself has been escalating around nine percent a year, so the percentage is applied to a bigger number and the percentage keeps growing too.
So test what you are getting, which almost nobody does. Pull your support case history for the last two years. How many cases did you actually raise? How many were genuinely severity one?
How many were resolved by the account aligned resources you are paying a premium for, rather than by the same queue everyone else uses? Then divide your annual support cost by the number of cases and look at the cost per ticket. In many estates that arithmetic produces a number that makes the conversation with your CIO very short, because support was bought as insurance and never measured as a service.
There are three realistic moves. Downshift the tier: the higher tiers buy proactive services and named resources, and if you are not consuming those, the core tier covers most reactive need. Split coverage by workload and risk: full coverage on the systems that genuinely stop the business, a lower tier everywhere else, rather than one blanket percentage across the estate. Or replace it with a third party support provider, which in benchmarked renewals comes in twenty to forty percent cheaper, and thirty to sixty percent on legacy estates.
Those are not exotic options. They are the standard three, and the reason most enterprises take none of them is timing.
That timing point is the practical heart of this session. Changing your support arrangement is not a paperwork exercise. You have to evaluate providers, run a transition, re point your internal escalation processes, retrain your service desk on who to call, and satisfy your risk function that severity one is genuinely covered on day one. That is a year of work if you want to do it without drama.
So the organisations that end up with a real choice at renewal are the ones that started the year before. Everyone else discovers the option in the same quarter they need to decide, which is not a choice at all.
If you keep Unified Support, negotiate the mechanic rather than the number. Ask for a cap on the annual escalation, in writing. Better, ask for the fee to be fixed in dollars for the term rather than floating as a percentage, which severs the link between your licensing decisions and your support bill entirely and is the single most valuable change you can make here. And separate the negotiation from the licence renewal, because bundled together support is presented as a rounding error beside the licence number.
Priced on its own page, next to what you actually consumed, it is a very different conversation.
The move from this briefing: work out your cost per support case for the last twelve months, and put it on one line next to your annual support fee. If that number surprises you, you have found your next project, and you have found it early enough to do something about it before 2027. Next session: the optimisation pass, and the money you take out of the estate before you ever discuss a discount. See you there.
Redress Compliance works on contingency: our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. Nothing saved, nothing paid. Independent, buyer side only, never vendor funded. Want Redress to contact you? Reach out and we respond the same day.
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