A Microsoft licensing assessment is the diagnostic engagement that produces the executive view of the entire Microsoft estate. Where the spend is. Where the exposure is. Where the optimization is. What the next renewal will actually need to do. The assessment is the engagement that comes before strategy. It is the document the CIO and CFO read to decide what to do next.
Most enterprises lack a single, current, executive ready view of the Microsoft estate. The information exists. It is fragmented across procurement files, partner produced reports, the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Azure portal, the SCCM extract, and the heads of three or four teams who each hold a partial picture. The licensing assessment consolidates the fragments into the single document the executive team needs to make the next decision.
The assessment describes the estate as it is. Current spend by product line, current entitlement, current deployment, current consumption, current variance, current commitments, current renewal calendar. Where there are issues, the assessment quantifies the issue. Where there are opportunities, the assessment quantifies the opportunity. The output is decision ready, not directional.
The assessment is the input to the next decision. Whether to run a compliance review. Whether to begin renewal posture work. Whether to restructure the Azure commit. Whether to engage on M&A inheritance. The recommendation comes after the assessment, against the assessment, with the assessment as the shared evidence base.
The licensing assessment is the right move at three triggers. New CIO or new procurement leader who needs the estate brief. Twelve to eighteen months before EA renewal, where the assessment becomes the input to the strategy engagement. Post material M&A, where the assessment scopes the inherited estate. Outside those triggers, the assessment still pays as a contract hygiene discipline run every 24 to 36 months.
The cost of being current with the estate is materially less than the cost of being wrong about it during renewal, audit, or M&A integration. The assessment is the diagnostic that says where you are. It is not the engagement that gets you somewhere else.
The assessment looks at the estate through six lenses. Each lens produces a section of the final document. Each section is independently consumable but the value compounds when read together.
Current Microsoft spend across EA, MCA E, CSP, and standalone agreements. Trailing twenty four month run rate. Forward twelve month forecast against current commitments. The number the CFO needs and the question of whether it is in the right ballpark.
Every Microsoft right currently held. Product, edition, quantity, term, expiration. The right to deploy record reconciled against the procurement file. Gaps and overlaps surfaced.
Current deployed footprint across the estate. Active users, active devices, active tenants. The actual consumption that the entitlement is meant to cover. The variance versus entitlement quantified.
The over assignment, the shelfware, the edition mismatch, the inactive license pool. The opportunity to reduce footprint with no change in capability. Quantified per product line.
Where the audit risk lives. Server cores, multiplexing, persona mismatch, capacity overrun, Dynamics shared access. The compliance posture quantified at variance band level.
The next EA anniversary, the next MCA E rollover, the next CSP renewal, the next Visual Studio cycle. The contract events in the next 24 months and what each one needs to be prepared for.
The assessment is a finite six week engagement. It does not become a recurring service. It produces the document and exits, leaving the customer with the artifact and the decision space to choose what comes next.
Estate map, contract record, stakeholder interviews, data access. The information collection plan and the scope decisions on what to include and exclude.
Data collection across procurement, admin telemetry, SCCM, Azure portal, partner extracts. Reconciliation against contract record. Variance surfacing.
The six lens analysis. The quantification of opportunity and exposure. The renewal calendar mapping. The first draft of the executive document.
The CIO and CFO briefing. The recommendations memo. The handoff to whatever engagement the customer chooses to run next.
The assessment produces one document with three intended readers. Each reader gets the section they need without having to read the rest. The document is structured for executive consumption first and analytical depth second.
Every enterprise that engages us for the first time should start with the assessment. It scopes everything that follows. The renewal posture, the audit defense, the optimization work. The assessment is the document they should already have and almost never do.Managing analyst · Assessment and advisory practice
The same four questions surface at the discovery stage of every engagement in this service line. The short answers are below. The full conversation happens against the customer specifics on the first analyst call.
A reseller earns margin on what you buy from Microsoft. Our economics are inverted. We are paid by the customer to reduce or restructure what the customer commits to Microsoft. No SKU we recommend produces revenue for the firm. No customer outcome we deliver compromises a reseller relationship the firm does not hold. The advice is buyer side without qualification, and the engagement structure is built around that posture.
This is the reason most reseller produced analyses recommend keeping the SKUs the reseller earns the most on. Our analyses do not have that incentive. The recommendations follow the customer interest, full stop.
The engagement is buyer side and confidential. Analyst access to customer data runs against a signed NDA with the engagement entity, not against any Microsoft visible data sharing arrangement. The artifacts produced for the customer are not shared with Microsoft unless the customer chooses to share them in negotiation. The methodology footnotes are designed to be defensible if surfaced and silent if not.
The engagement does not surface to the customer Microsoft account team. The seller will see the customer producing better counter analysis than the seller proposed pricing accounts for. The seller will not see the source of the counter analysis unless the customer chooses to disclose it.
Most engagements run as a fixed scope, fixed fee, fixed timeline structure. The fee is set on day one against the scope agreed in the engagement letter. Success based or contingent fee structures are available for specific engagement types where the outcome is cleanly attributable, but they are the exception rather than the default. Buyer side advisory works best when the analyst incentive is to do the right thing rather than to maximize a contingent number.
The first two analyst calls are scoped at no fee and produce the engagement letter only if the fit is right. We do not propose engagements we cannot deliver the outcome on.
The customer provides access to the contract record, the procurement file, the relevant administrative telemetry, and a single point of contact who can authorize the data access and the stakeholder interviews. The engagement does not require dedicated customer resourcing beyond the point of contact. The analyst team runs the work and surfaces findings into the customer cadence.
The data access is scoped tightly. Read only telemetry is sufficient for most workstreams. Where elevated access is required, the engagement scopes the access against a specific runbook with the customer security team in the loop.
Two analyst calls. No pitch. We tell you what we would do, what the leverage actually is, and whether we are the right firm for this engagement.