Mike Austin warns that Microsoft licensing renewals in 2026-27 will cost significantly more and outlines a counter-strategy: move from Microsoft 365 E5 to E3, eliminate unnecessary Windows Enterprise licenses, run pilot programs with price-hold protections, and retain flexibility to shift between Enterprise Agreement and Cloud Solution Provider models.
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organization by, you know, by IT and praying for the best, right? And what I would say is, if you're— even if your renewal isn't until later in 2026 or even in 2027, you may want to be starting to look at this because you're going to want to start figuring out what are we going to do to impact this, you know, how are we going to avoid these, these impacts, right? And if you got a renewal in June of this year and you're not talking to Microsoft currently about this, you really should be because you may be looking to do some acceleration of that renewal to avoid this potentially. So what's your counter strategy going to be in 2026? So again, I'm just going to reiterate this: expose your waste, get your leverage, flex your mix, right? Move E5 to E3. Think about going back to O365 if it makes sense. We got a lot of clients that makes absolute sense. Like the Windows, um, the Windows that's in M365, we got a lot of clients that are just using the OEM version of Windows paying for Windows in M365, right? And so, you know, they're not using Windows Enterprise. And, you know, so there's a, there's a very simple low-hanging fruit if you, if you, if that's the case for you. You know, I talked about piloting, right? You know, so making sure that You're not committing to massive volumes that you can't get out of if these pilots don't go right. You're going to want to negotiate protections. You know, Microsoft's not doing NTEs, but you can get some price holds on certain products around those pilots and things like that. You want to flex your rights, the ability to move down. You want to flex your rights to move between EA and CSP and, you know, move to these hybrid benefits of moving the between the, the different programs to force competition. That was a mouthful for me for some reason. Okay, coming up to the end. So, you know, again, I, I highly recommend getting ahead of this this year. Don't let Microsoft dictate the terms of your renewals. So get ahead. Everybody's going to pay more in 2026. Make sure you're budgeting correctly. We can help you expose this hidden these hidden costs. We can help you build the leverage, and we help you negotiate smarter, you know, figuring out DEA, CSP, how to leverage Copilot and other things into, into your agreements. And so we do have a little bit of an
