At the end of the day, while EA`s qualified companies can make sense of pricing, they still have to expect to pay upfront each year and don`t have the option to reduce the number of subscriptions in the middle of the year. However, it`s worth having all your products, both in the cloud and in the field, in one agreement. EA is a great option for this, but with distant programmatic reductions, the benefits diminish over CSP. The aspects that used to make ea hard to deny no longer exist, especially for users with fewer than 500 seats. It would be worthwhile for companies to at least do their homework when it comes to alternatives. For companies that employ more than 2,400 people, Microsoft offers an additional programmatic discount that would widen the gap. With the structure of the registration agreement, you can easily add new products and services if necessary: on October 1, 2018, Microsoft removed programmatic discounts for A-level customers on EA (customers between 250 and 2399 seats). While the vendor injects its best-performing R&D, distribution, and marketing resources into the cloud, some of Microsoft`s enterprise customers are still bound by on-premise implementations operationally and contractually. This has led 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 licensing controls (often disguised as software asset management commitments), and increased contractual complexity and inflexibility. A Microsoft Enterprise (Microsoft EA) agreement was once the primary licensing vehicle for large organizations with more than 500 seats.

However, the complex three-year deal, once so popular, is becoming obsolete. As cloud-based services such as Azure and Office 365 become the norm, even large enterprises are changing the way they purchase products and services and are looking with the CSP program for a more flexible Microsoft volume licensing option. . . .