For many organizations, EA has been the standard licensing model for years — with fixed terms and predictable structures.
With Microsoft phasing out EA eligibility for smaller organizations, businesses must now re-evaluate their licensing strategy and prepare for a transition to CSP or alternative models.
Enterprise Agreements typically come with three-year contracts and upfront license commitments, which can limit flexibility.
CSP offers a different approach:
This allows organizations to align licensing more closely with real business needs.
With EA, organizations often overestimate usage to avoid shortages — leading to unused licenses and wasted budget.
By switching to CSP, organizations can reduce overprovisioning and eliminate duplicate support costs, often resulting in significant savings (typically 15–25% in some scenarios).
Microsoft has announced that organizations with fewer than 2400 devices will no longer be eligible for a new or extended Enterprise Agreement (EA). This means that many organizations will soon have to move to a different licensing model: Cloud Solution Provider (CSP). And that’s actually good news. Let us tell you why.
Whereas an Enterprise Agreement (EA) has a fixed term of three years and requires you to purchase a certain number of licences in advance, the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) model offers much more flexibility. With CSP, you pay monthly based on actual usage: you easily scale up when you grow and reduce your numbers when you need less. There are no minimum purchases and you are not locked into long-term commitments. This makes CSP ideal for organisations dealing with fluctuating needs, seasonality or unpredictable growth patterns. You retain maximum control over your costs and licence management, without unnecessary financial risk or wasted resources.
CSP through Rapid Circle means:
Example calculation: An organization with 800 employees saves an average of 15-25% by switching from EA to CSP, mainly by avoiding overcapacity and duplicate management costs.
Rapid Circle is not just another Cloud Solution Provider (CSP). We combine licence management, support and security within one integrated approach, so that your Microsoft environment remains secure, efficient and well-organised. By placing everything with one partner, you avoid fragmentation and reduce risks. You always work together with a fixed segment team that understands your sector, IT environment and challenges, and that actively thinks along with you about improvements and growth.
Our self-service portal gives you real-time insight into your licence use, costs, capacity and reports. No more surprises, but full control and transparency. This allows you to steer faster towards cost savings, compliance and optimal deployment of your Microsoft environment. We not only support you technically, but also ensure that you can make better-informed decisions. Moreover, you will always retain full ownership of your tenant and licences. We do not believe in lock-ins or complex migrations. Want to switch to another party? You can do so easily and without data migration. We build on trust, flexibility and true cooperation, exactly as modern cloud services are meant to be.
In short: EA is becoming a thing of the past, and CSP is the future. Rapid Circle makes that transition not only logical, but easy and economical. Curious what this shift means for your organization? Watch our on-demand webinar, where Solution Specialist Maarten Visser and Alliance Manager Dong Yun Engels dive into the practical and strategic impact of moving from EA to CSP. It’s the perfect chance to get answers to your questions, and discover how CSP can give you more control, flexibility, and savings.
Curious about what you can do today? Contact us and find out how much you can save or download our free e-book below for a head start!
Download e-book “From EA to CSP”
Watch on-demand webinar “Navigating the transition from EA to CSP”
CSP is a Microsoft licensing model that allows organizations to purchase and manage cloud services through a partner, with flexible, usage-based pricing and integrated support.
Microsoft is shifting toward cloud-first, consumption-based models that offer more flexibility and align better with modern, dynamic business environments.
Organizations should:
