Rightsize your Contract

Rightsizing your Renewal Contract means leveraging a detailed understanding of what your company needs and information on lower cost alternatives to negotiate reduced contract pricing. This includes the following steps:

• • Create a detailed baseline of your environment, i.e., establish which products you own, as well as their deployment and usage.
  • Identify any Shelfware on Software Assurance (SA) that can be dropped at the next Renewal.Identify and uninstall software that is unnecessary due to organizational/procedural changes or downsizing to reduce subscription costs.Determine which products are strategic and which products should be replaced or taken off maintenance.
  • Generate lower cost alternatives for high-priced products or find more cost-effective ways to deploy them (e.g Cloud solution). 

Optimize your Cloud spend

• • Analyze your Cloud purchases to see if there are newer or better SKUs or programs that may be more cost effective (e.g., Reserved Instances).
  • Assess your deployments to determine if they can be optimized via architectural changes.
  • Identify unused Cloud resources and eliminate.
  • If you have already begun the move to Cloud, identify and decommission on-premises installations to realize the cost benefits estimated in the original Cloud migration business case.

Leverage any available sales promotions to achieve better discounts

• • Microsoft, like every other software vendor, has certain strategic products--internally called Hero SKUs--that offer lucrative incentives to your sales representatives (e.g., M365 and Azure) that could then benefit you.
  • Purchasing these products may allow you to receive additional discounts not only on the specific product(s), but on your entire deal.

Consider an alternate contract vehicle

• • You may be able to save money on your Renewal by moving to a different contract structure, e.g., Server and Cloud Enrollment (SCE).
  • Another alternative might involve moving a subset of products from Enterprise Agreement/SCE to Microsoft Product and Services Agreement (MPSA).

 Make sure your discounts are consistent with your peers

• • Microsoft does not release information on discounts they have given to other customers; however, we see a range of discounts among our clients depending on the products and services purchased.
  • If your sales representatives have been working with you at set discount, be prepared to push the envelope to achieve a discount that is consistent with those offered to similarly sized companies.

Make sure your deployments are consistent with software usage rights

• • Customers often purchase a specific edition of a product and then unintentionally deploy another. When this occurs, you may overpay for licensing or create the need for an expensive True-up at Renewal; so, check your deployments carefully to avoid overpaying for usage rights or increasing Renewal costs.

"True-down instead of True-up”?

To find out how Clarify can help your organization reduce your Microsoft On-Premises, SaaS, and Cloud costs, on average we see customers decrease their Microsoft spend by 34%. Contact us at to learn more about this subject or to explore the possibility of working with us.