Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Most organisations approach a renewal by trying to pay less for what they have. The bigger number is almost always in having less of it. And in this cycle that matters more than it used to, because the discount lever is precisely the one Microsoft shortened when it removed the volume levels. I am Tom, Claire is with me, and this session is the optimisation pass: the work you do on your own estate, before any negotiation, that takes cost out whether or not Microsoft ever offers you a better rate.
Start with why this pass is worth more than it looks, because the arithmetic compounds three ways. A dollar you remove from the estate is a dollar off the licence bill, obviously. It is also a reduction in your Unified Support fee, because that is a percentage of product spend. And it is a dollar removed from the base your renewal uplift will be applied to, every year of the next term.
So a hundred thousand dollars of shelfware retired before renewal is not worth a hundred thousand. Across a three year term, with support and uplift on top, it is worth substantially more, and it is the only saving that requires nobody's permission.
Lever one is the tier mix, and it is the biggest in almost every estate. Organisations standardise on E5 because it is administratively simple, then discover that most of those users never touch the security, compliance or analytics capability that E5 exists to deliver. The test is not whether E5 is nice to have. It is whether this role uses the specific things you are paying twenty one dollars a month extra for.
Run that honestly, per population, and you usually find a large group who belong on E3 and a smaller group who genuinely need everything above it. That single re mix is frequently the largest line in the whole optimisation.
Lever two is the frontline. The F tiers exist for shift workers, shop floor, warehouse, retail, clinical staff, people who need email, Teams and a browser rather than a full desktop suite. Two things happen here. Organisations put those people on E3 because nobody separated the populations, which is expensive at volume.
Or they under license them and end up with shadow workarounds. Get the split right and it is material, because this is your largest headcount. And note the urgency: F3 went from eight dollars to ten in July 2026, a twenty five percent rise, so the population where sizing errors multiply is also the one that just got more expensive per head.
Levers three and four are quicker but rarely done. Duplicates: tooling you buy separately that your suite already includes. Telephony, meetings, e signature, project tracking, endpoint security, backup, analytics. Every one of those exists as a line item in some enterprises alongside an E5 entitlement that already covers it, because the two purchases were made by different teams in different years.
And dormant assignments: the leavers, the dual accounts, the licences assigned to service identities that were never reclaimed. That is the fastest cash of all, it needs no negotiation, and it is sitting in the file you built in session four.
Now the sequencing, which decides whether any of this survives contact with the account team. Do the optimisation before the negotiation, not during it. If you arrive with a clean estate and a defensible count, your renewal is a discussion about the price of what you genuinely need. If you arrive with the mess intact and try to negotiate it down in the room, every reduction becomes something you are asking permission for, and the standard response is to offer you a better rate on the same quantity.
That is not the same deal, and over three years it is not close.
The move from this briefing: take the four levers, tier mix, frontline sizing, duplicates and dormant assignments, and put an annual dollar figure against each one for your estate. That page is your optimisation plan, and it is worth building even if you do nothing else in this series, because every number on it is a saving you control rather than one you have to be granted. Next session: the negotiation itself, when to start it, what to ask for, and where deals leak value at the end. 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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