How to choose an Azure managed service provider: licencing & support

In this two-part series, you’ll learn about some important things to think through when looking for and selecting a managed service provider partner for Microsoft Azure. First up, let’s talk about important considerations for cloud licencing and support.

Microsoft Enterprise Agreement vs CSP programme – what is the difference?

The primary way that people buy Azure is through either a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) or a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) agreement. The EA is an existing agreement that an organisation may have in place that they can then add Azure cloud services on to, or they buy an EA for Azure when they buy new. Alternatively, the CSP is much more of a flexible agreement, with no commitment levels, and you can buy as and when you want.

One thing that most people wouldn’t know about a Microsoft enterprise agreement is that you must have a 500-user commitment up front, which covers products that aren’t necessarily Azure. With the CSP, you don’t have that level of commitment; you buy what you need when you need it.

In addition, the CSP programme gives you the ability to have a relationship with a reseller that can provide provisioning, technical support, pricing, auto billing, and other value-added services. Microsoft is there to provide the infrastructure and platform services; they rely on the CSP programme to be able to deliver that layer of additional support to their customers.

How to choose your Managed Service Provider?

When deciding between an EA and a CSP agreement, the thing that people need to think about is the support levels that they are going to get from their partner. The price is will always be very similar, but the support package, the provisioning, the additional services to provide agility and cost optimisation – those are the things to be thinking about when looking for a partner.

SoftwareOne is Microsoft’s #1 channel partner globally. We operate in over 60 countries, and through our network of global delivery centres we’re able to provide support service 24/7 in multiple languages.

We are one of very few cloud solution providers that can help you both technically and commercially. We have a portfolio of advisory, professional, and managed services, as well as commercial offerings that can help you right-size and right-cost your instances and licences. What’s more, Gartner recognises us as a leader in the IT asset management space.