The Strategic Shift from Enterprise Agreements to CSP: Navigating the New Microsoft Licensing Landscape
Pieter du Toit, Head of Channel at Mint Group
No time to read? Snack on these:
- Microsoft is transitioning from Enterprise Agreements (EA) to the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) model, changing how businesses procure and manage licenses.
- CSP offers businesses flexibility, scalability and real-time cost control but also expects strategic oversight.
- Many companies risk cost sprawl due to underutilized or unallocated licenses, especially during the transition.
- Strategic partners are essential to CSP success, offering architecture, governance and AI-aligned licensing expertise.
- Mint helps enterprises navigate the shift with smart assessment, cost-saving strategies and continuous optimization support.
The cloud has transformed the way companies think about software, infrastructure and scalability. Yet, the procurement models that once governed IT investments aren’t keeping pace with the change or customer cost expectations. Organizations like Microsoft, with its Enterprise Agreement (EA) model, are changing the structure of licensing so companies have deeper control over their costs and usage. EA was built for an era of predictable planning, fixed infrastructure, and multi-year stability. But today’s tech environments are dynamic, fast-moving and shaped by agile delivery models.
In response, Microsoft has been gradually phasing out the EA model in favor of the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program and it’s becoming something of a strategic shift for the organization, Gartner’s analysis of the differences and the impact of the move from EA to CSP highlights how companies need to carefully assess contract differences and risk exposure before making the move, while IDC’s research has found that customers can find value in how CSP simplifies scaling, cost management and the solutioning of the IT stack.
Why CSP? Why Now?
The EA model has become challenging for a lot of companies as new tools, services and licensing tiers are introduced almost daily. CSP, by contrast, is designed for a world in constant flux. It allows organizations to scale services up or down as needed, pay on a usage basis, and adapt costs in real time to suit evolving business goals. It’s a modern model for a modern IT reality.
But the shift won’t happen overnight. Microsoft anticipates a three- to five-year window for most organizations to transition fully to CSP. That gives companies the breathing space to develop a strategy, but they will need to move now to make sure the transition is as easy as possible.
EA vs CSP: The Key Differences
While EA is about committing to a fixed set of licenses for a fixed term, CSP introduces month-to-month flexibility. It replaces static planning with adaptive control, allowing IT leaders to optimize spending, respond to changes, and align licenses with actual user behavior. Instead of being locked into an inflexible three-year cycle, CSP enables organizations to provision, reallocate, or retire licenses as needed.
However, that flexibility comes with new responsibility. Under CSP, cost management becomes a daily discipline. Without visibility and oversight, it’s easy for license sprawl to quietly drain budgets and for companies to miss unallocated license costs. It’s not uncommon for 30% to 40% of cloud subscriptions to be unused, which is a significant waste. And without proper tooling, companies can struggle to identify which licenses are underused, redundant, or misaligned with user needs.
Best Practices for Success
Successful CSP adoption depends on three critical principles:
- Real-time visibility into licensing usage, user activity and application health.
- Strategic optimization based on data, such as downgrading unused services, reallocating licenses or consolidating users.
- A strong channel partner who brings technical depth, business insight and the ability to future-proof the environment with compliance, AI integration, and smart architecture.
From Microsoft Teams to Azure to Copilot licensing, organizations need an optimization ally and to make a plan for their transition that meets their unique needs. This means starting at the beginning, with a roadmap and a structured plan. Start with conducting a current state analysis of licensing and usage and then identify waste, misalignment or duplication. Once this is done, develop a phased transition strategy that aligns with budgets, strategic initiatives, and user demand. These steps need to then be followed by regular health checks and optimization cycles, so you are always ahead of any potential waste or unnecessary spend.
Mint: Your Strategic Guide Through Licensing Transformation
Taking all these changes on board can be daunting, especially when you really just want the time to focus on your business. Considering choosing a partner who understands Microsoft’s evolving ecosystem inside out – Mint.
At Mint, we understand that CSP is a catalyst for better cloud performance and business agility and have refined our SurveilMint platform to provide you with deep analytics on license use, security, user behavior and cloud health, delivering savings of up to 70% through intelligent license optimization.
Whether you’re just beginning the shift or already deep into the process, Mint can support your transformation, so your cloud journey delivers measurable returns, every step of the way.
