A pan-European telecoms operator entered its EA renegotiation with a vendor proposal modelled around full E5 conversion, Power Platform tenant licences, and a Defender suite uplift. We rebuilt the entitlement baseline from scratch, removed shelfware that had been re-purchased twice across three subsidiaries, and landed a three-year renewal $8.7M below the position Microsoft tabled in the first round.
The client was 11 months out from a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement renewal covering 32,000 seats across the parent organisation and three subsidiaries acquired between 2019 and 2023. Two of those subsidiaries had retained their own Microsoft entitlements during integration, then been folded into the parent EA without ever reconciling the per-user licence stack. The result was textbook: the same users held Microsoft 365 E5 from the parent EA, legacy E3 + EMS E3 from one subsidiary, and a Defender add-on from another, all renewing on different anniversaries.
Microsoft's account team had spotted the upcoming consolidation as an opportunity. The renewal proposal landed in month nine, modelled on 32,000 E5 seats, full Power Platform per-user tenant adoption, Sentinel into the Defender stack, and the new Copilot for Microsoft 365 SKU layered on top. Total contracted value: $28.4M over three years, a 41% uplift on prior run-rate.
In our experience across 340+ engagements, Microsoft EA proposals tabled inside the final 120 days of an agreement are designed to bundle, not to right-size. The account team works from a wall-to-wall E5 footprint as the default and treats every cost-takeout conversation as a degradation of the buyer's security posture. In this case, the proposal assumed three things that were not true: that every seat genuinely consumed E5-level capabilities, that Power Platform licences would convert to active use, and that subsidiary entitlements would lapse cleanly without overlap credit.
None of those assumptions survived an independent baseline.
Talk to a senior advisor before the proposal goes to your executive committee.
We pulled licence allocation data from the parent's Microsoft 365 admin centre, the two subsidiary tenants still active under their original agreements, and the EA true-up history going back four years. Cross-referenced with Active Directory and the HRIS, the data showed 11,400 users assigned E5 who had never used an E5-exclusive feature in the prior six months — no Power BI Pro, no Audio Conferencing, no Defender for Endpoint Plan 2, no Compliance E5 features. Those users were paying for capabilities they would not miss.
Microsoft's proposal included Power Platform per-user licences for 18,000 seats. The actual maker community was 280 people, and the consumed-API request volume was less than 6% of what the proposed licence stack would have entitled. Similarly, Defender for Cloud Apps and Sentinel were being proposed as net-new spend despite the client running Splunk Enterprise Security for SIEM and not having any plan to migrate.
Two subsidiary EAs were running on different anniversaries with their own discount stacks. We mapped every overlapping SKU, calculated the dollar value of redundant entitlement (it came to $1.6M annually) and negotiated a consolidation amendment with the parent EA effective on co-termination — not on Microsoft's preferred date, which would have left a four-month overlap.
With the right-sized seat counts, the Power Platform consumption data, and the consolidation timeline, we tabled a counter-proposal nine weeks ahead of renewal. Microsoft's initial response was to argue that an E5 step-down was a security-posture downgrade. We countered with the consumption data showing the E5 capabilities in question were not in active use, plus a list of competitive alternatives in the relevant security categories. Two negotiation rounds later, the seat mix and Power Platform position held.
Two things made this engagement land where it did. First, we started the entitlement reconciliation at T-9 months, not T-3 months — by the time Microsoft tabled its proposal, the client already had a defensible counter-position. Second, we treated the security narrative head-on: Microsoft's most effective EA argument is that any step-down weakens the security posture, and the only way to neutralise it is to bring actual consumption data, not generic procurement push-back. The client's CISO sat in the negotiation room with us and signed off the position before it went to Microsoft.
If you are inside the final twelve months of a Microsoft EA — or you have just received a Copilot proposal layered onto your existing footprint — we can start the entitlement reconciliation immediately and have a defensible counter-position in place before your renewal window closes.
The Microsoft EA Negotiation Guide covers every clause we used in this renewal.
Our Microsoft practice is led by former EA negotiators. We can reconcile your entitlement, model the right-size renewal, and counter Microsoft's first proposal — usually inside 90 days.
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