For businesses looking to add more predictability to how they purchase Azure services, a MACC – or Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment – is the ideal starting point. Ready to find out more?
Microsoft’s new licensing offer provides businesses with a discounted price for a fixed period of time, allowing customers to enjoy Azure’s scalability and flexibility, while also meeting their cloud adoption and spending ambitions.
Aside from the variety of commitment levels and durations, customers benefit from access to all Azure services (including reserved instances, premium services, and spot instances), Azure credits to redeem against services, and a saving of up to 72% on Azure services compared to pay-as-you-go prices.
It’s not just customers who are making the most of Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment either. With this new approach to Azure purchasing, Microsoft Partners can simultaneously nurture existing customer relationships while growing their cloud business – all while earning rebates and incentives.
What Challenges Does MACC Solve?
At its core, MACC has been designed with certain challenges mind – common hurdles encountered by both customers and partners when it comes to cloud adoption and spending.
In particular, MACC solves the challenge of navigating the variable and fluctuating nature of cloud costs, which often leads to limited or no budget predictability – and a forecasting headache.
Elsewhere, rigid and complex licensing agreements have become a common feature in the cloud landscape, alongside a flood of generic offerings in response to commoditisation. This is where MACC’s flexibility sets it apart. Compared to licensing options such as Reserved Instances or Enterprise Agreements, MACC doesn’t require upfront payments, long-term commitments, or minimum purchase amounts. As a result, customers are free to scale their Azure resources up or down as needed – only paying for what they use.
How Does Surveil Manage MACC?
Even with the newfound sense of freedom, visibility, and flexibility, it pays to take a smart approach towards monitoring and managing MACC. For Microsoft Partners supporting their customers’ Azure presence, this is particularly important.
With Surveil’s MACC management insights, Microsoft Partners can gain unparalleled visibility into their customers’ consumption commitments. By consolidating multiple MACCs – whether MCA or EA-based – into a single screen, partners can access a detailed view of all commitments. The result is efficient monitoring of all billing account commitments against MACC, including detailed breakdowns.
In comparison to a single MACC, which can have multiple billing IDs and can only be viewed individually through Microsoft consoles, Surveil aggregates all data, providing a consolidated view for ease. Additional to this, Surveil also has the ability to include ACR forecasting to predict eventual MACC Gaps, allowing for organisations to prepare and reallocate resources accordingly.
Elsewhere, Surveil’s MACC management features allow partners to understand more about customer activity, confidently presenting suggested next steps while encouraging proactive management of the cloud estate. As a side effect, the ability to identify over- and under-utilised contracts within a MACC opens the way for optimisation opportunities, saving customers costs and resources. With the inclusion of ACR forecasting, it’s easier than ever to accurately predict eventual MACC gaps – supporting proactive decision-making and optimal resource allocation.
Meanwhile, despite more predictable budgeting, customers can still find a challenge in tracking the MACC vs what’s being spent. Surveil’s MACC module addresses this by providing the value needed to avoid any shortfalls when it comes to renewal.
Finally, Surveil helps partners to do more with their Azure management processes, merging multiple Azure tenants into a single group tenant. With operations centralised efficiently, partners can view provide increased support to their customers, leveraging the platform’s read-only capability to make business sense of underlying detailed expenditure. From here, it’s possible to take corrective actions throughout MACC contracts, minimising turbulence in your customers’ cloud landscape.
Want to learn more? Get in touch today or visit the Track Your MACC page to get started.
