When two large organizations merged, they brought two Enterprise Agreements, two tenants, and two sets of overlapping entitlements into one company. The integration closed on a single agreement that captured combined volume leverage and shed the duplication. This is how the merged estate was rebuilt rather than simply added together.
A merger of two organizations of comparable size, each carrying its own Microsoft Enterprise Agreement on a different renewal calendar, its own tenant architecture, and substantial overlap in productivity, security, and Azure commitments. The default path was to run both contracts to term and reconcile later, which would have locked in duplicate spend and surrendered the one advantage the merger created. The practice was engaged to design the combined commercial position.
The merger created a single organization overnight, but the Microsoft estate stayed stubbornly plural. Each predecessor company brought an Enterprise Agreement negotiated independently, anchored to its own history, and timed to its own renewal calendar. One ran a heavy security footprint; the other had standardized on the premium productivity tier. Both carried Azure consumption commitments sized to their separate growth assumptions. The tenants were architected differently, the entitlement counts overlapped, and nobody on either side had a consolidated view of what the combined company actually used.
The integration team's instinct was the common one: let both agreements run to their natural end dates and reconcile when the later one came up for renewal. That path felt orderly, and it was the most expensive option on the table. It would have locked in duplicate entitlement across the overlapping populations for the full remaining term, preserved two sets of unfavorable terms, and forfeited the single largest commercial advantage a merger produces, which is the combined volume the merged entity can now put behind one negotiation.
The merger had created leverage that was quietly draining away with every month both contracts ran in parallel. A merger gives you combined volume exactly once. Run the two contracts to term and you spend that leverage on nothing.
The practice reconstructed consumption across both predecessor estates and merged them into a single picture of the new company's real usage. That reconstruction surfaced the overlap immediately: populations double covered by security entitlements from both sides, productivity seats licensed at the premium tier on one side and the standard tier on the other for equivalent roles, and two Azure commitments that, combined, exceeded the merged trajectory. The data turned a vague sense of duplication into specific, negotiable numbers.
From that baseline the practice designed a single consolidated agreement rather than a reconciliation of two. The productivity footprint was rationalized to one coherent tier structure aligned to role and adoption. The security stack was deduplicated against genuine coverage. The two Azure commitments were collapsed into one resized to the combined trajectory. And the whole position was anchored to the combined volume the merged entity now represented, with peer pricing for an organization of the new size establishing where the consolidated agreement should land. Microsoft was negotiating with one large customer, not two medium ones, and the pricing reflected it.
Timing the consolidation early, rather than at the later contract's natural expiry, was what preserved the leverage. The integration was treated as a new negotiation the combined company was entitled to run, not a housekeeping exercise to be deferred.
The integration closed on a single consolidated Enterprise Agreement at $95.4M against a $124M combined footprint, a reduction of roughly a quarter delivered inside eighteen weeks. The savings came from three reinforcing moves: eliminating the duplicate entitlement the parallel contracts would have preserved, rationalizing the productivity and security footprints to one coherent structure, and resetting the pricing baseline against the combined volume the merger created.
The structural outcome was a single coherent estate the merged company could actually manage. One agreement, one renewal calendar, one consumption baseline, and a tenant strategy aligned to the combined organization rather than stitched together from two. The company entered its first post merger renewal cycle from a position of clarity, with a contract sized to what it had become and leverage it had captured rather than let expire.
The engagement reflects the firm's broader record across Microsoft contracts: more than $420M in cumulative client savings, over 340 engagements delivered, and an average 79 percent reduction in audit financial exposure, built on 20+ years of combined practice depth across the Microsoft estate. The figures above are verifiable on a reference call arranged through the practice.
The practice supports merging enterprises on consolidating overlapping Microsoft estates into a single agreement, eliminating duplicate spend, and capturing combined volume leverage before it drains away. Two analyst calls, no pitch, and an honest read on the integration.