By now, your team has seen the headlines. The Microsoft licensing shift is real. The volume-based discounts that once helped finance transformation projects and offset growth? They’re disappearing.
The question is no longer “Will this impact us?” but “How prepared are we?”
Some organizations are still standing still. Others are quietly getting ahead and creating significant financial and strategic advantages in the process.
Here’s what the best-prepared enterprises are doing right now.
1. Getting a Complete, Accurate View of Their Usage
Smart IT and procurement leaders know that Microsoft Admin Center alone doesn’t provide the insight needed to make high-stakes licensing decisions. They’re going deeper: mapping entitlements to actual usage, identifying dormant workloads, and looking at license-to-user alignment across departments.
They’re not just counting licenses. They’re validating value.
2. Benchmarking Their Contract Against Actual Consumption
Enterprises that are ahead of the curve have already run internal benchmarks:
- What did we buy versus what are we using?
- Where are we overprovisioned?
- What are we entitled to but not consuming?
By comparing licensing data to financial and operational usage, they’re identifying where spend can be optimized before renewal. That data becomes leverage at the negotiation table.
3. Running EA-to-CSP Transition Scenarios Now
Prepared organizations aren’t waiting for Microsoft to present options. They’re building their own scenarios by testing CSP pricing models, simulating workloads across SKUs, and identifying licensing combinations that match their real needs.
They’re not moving blindly into CSP. They’re modeling it, department by department, to understand the financial impact now and over the next three years.
4. Aligning Finance, IT, and Procurement Around Shared Metrics
The smartest companies have brought finance into the process early. They’re connecting technical data to financial outcomes and using shared dashboards to run scenario planning and track renewal risks.
This creates alignment across stakeholders and eliminates the last-minute scrambles that usually happen in the final 30 days of a renewal.
5. Creating a 90-Day Action Plan — Not Waiting Until Q1
Every organization has renewal timelines. The proactive ones have renewal strategies. They’re setting timelines, assigning owners, and activating optimization projects now (not in 2026.)
They’ve accepted that waiting until 30 days before renewal will leave them with one option: pay more.
Where Surveil Fits
Surveil is helping enterprises do all of this with clarity and confidence. The Surveil platform was purpose-built to support EA transitions with:
- Real-time usage insights across Azure, M365, and Copilot
- EA-to-CSP scenario modeling based on actual consumption
- Microsoft Contract Center for contract simulation, BoM generation, and renewal readiness
- Dashboards for finance, procurement, and IT to align around optimization, not guesswork
Ready to Catch Up?
If you’re not doing these things yet, you’re not behind yet, but you do need to move.
You still have time to prepare. You still have time to optimize. And you still have time to influence how your organization lands after the November 1 pricing shift.
But that window is closing.
Let Surveil help you open it back up.
âś… Take Control of Your Microsoft EA Renewal
Microsoft’s November 1st licensing change is just weeks away. Whether your renewal is near or months out, the window to build leverage is closing.
👉🏼 Book a Microsoft Licensing Readiness Session to:
- Uncover usage-based savings that can fund your transition
- Run EA-to-CSP scenarios using your real tenant data
- Navigate Microsoft’s new pricing model with confidence
- Get a clear action plan — no fluff, no pressure e
🎥 Not ready to talk yet? Watch our executive briefing on-demand: “Microsoft’s New Pricing Model: How to Respond with Precision, Not Panic” It’s a must-watch for CIOs, procurement, and finance leaders preparing for renewal.
đź“š Still have questions? Visit our Microsoft Licensing FAQ Hub for answers to common EA and CSP transition concerns.