Services

You have a Microsoft quote or a true-up reconciliation on your desk and need an independent check before you sign.

• Renewal or ESU quote. Your licensing strategy against your business plans, the price structure, and bundled versus line-item discounts. If it’s too late to change the price, we show you how to keep the most flexibility after signing: subscriptions, the right to reduce at anniversary, and room to move workloads to the cloud.
• True-up or audit readiness. We test a reconciliation someone else prepared against your agreement and your deployment data. A true-up figure is only as good as the position behind it.

A written readout and a 30-minute call: what’s right, what’s off, what to ask for, and in what order.

The quote or reconciliation, your agreement and price sheet, and any assessment data you already have. If there’s no assessment data, we’ll say so in the findings.

About 2 to 4 hours: sending the documents and one call.

Two business days from complete data. $5,000, fixed.

Building a reconciliation from scratch (that’s the Readiness Review), negotiating with Microsoft, and audit defense.

Your renewal or anniversary is 6 to 12 months out, or a big change is coming: a cloud migration, a VMware exit or a move to the Microsoft Customer Agreement.

Edition mix, core counts, virtualization, Software Assurance, the editions your vendor applications support, your agreement terms and your cloud commitments.

• Entitlement reconciliation. What’s deployed against what’s licensed, with every assumption written down.
• Licensing risk register. Each gap, its size and how to close it. We help you count right, not under-declare.
• Savings plan. Each saving, the clause and date that allow it, and whether it lands now or at renewal.
• Scenarios. On-premises and cloud options compared where they apply.
• Negotiation plan. What to ask Microsoft for, in what order, and when.
• Executive readout. One session for IT and finance together.

Your agreement with amendments and enrollment, your price sheets, your cloud commitments, an instance list or discovery output from Azure Migrate or AWS Transform, plus the output of our read-only script once we’re engaged, how your virtualization hosts are licensed, and the applications that matter most.

About 8 to 15 hours across the engagement: a kickoff, running the script, answering questions and the readout.

Timelines run from complete data. If you sign Optimization and Execution within 30 days of the readout, half the review fee is credited against the success fee.

Below $500,000 a year, the Quote Second Opinion is usually the better fit.

Carrying out the changes, audit defense, and security or regulatory assessments.

You have the plan and want the savings to show up on the invoice.

We direct the licensing work and the Microsoft paperwork. Engineering is done by our partners or by a partner you already work with, and paid for separately. Savings are measured against the compliant baseline we agree at the start.

• Savings milestone reports. Each time a saving locks in: the amount, the date, and the contract or invoice that proves it.
• Quantity change letters. We draft them; you sign and send them to Microsoft or your reseller.

• 15% of verified savings that need no changes to your servers, such as licenses for servers you no longer run. Billed when the savings are signed into your contract.
• 25% of verified savings that need engineering work, such as moving from Enterprise to Standard or moving to the cloud. 15% is billed when the savings are signed into your contract, and 10% once the changes are done and proven.

Fees apply to 12 months of verified savings on SQL Server and Windows Server licensing, measured against a baseline we agree before work starts. Request a call for the full terms.