Public University in Ohio Reduces Microsoft EA Spend with Academic Licensing Strategy
Background:
A large public university in Ohio with tens of thousands of students and staff faced soaring Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) costs. The university’s IT department and procurement noticed that annual Microsoft licensing fees kept climbing, eating into budgets for academic programs.
Multiple colleges and departments bought software independently, leading to fragmented agreements and inconsistent pricing.
With an EA renewal on the horizon and pressure to control costs, the university sought outside help. They engaged Redress Compliance to assess their Microsoft licensing and find savings opportunities.
Challenge:
The core issue was that the university was not using academic licensing models. Despite being an educational institution eligible for substantial discounts, it had been renewing Microsoft licenses under a standard corporate EA structure.
This meant paying commercial rates for products like Office 365, Windows, and server software – an approach that made costs unnecessarily high. The decentralized purchasing also led to overlapping licenses and difficulty tracking compliance. “We realized our Microsoft costs were rising beyond our IT budget’s comfort,” the university’s IT procurement manager admitted. “Every department had its own licenses. We lacked a unified strategy and were paying premium prices.”
Strategy – Switching to an Academic Licensing Model:
Redress Compliance conducted a thorough review of the existing EA and usage patterns. The consulting team discovered that the university could restructure its agreement under Microsoft’s academic licensing program instead of the commercial one. This strategic pivot involved consolidating all departmental licenses into a single campus-wide agreement and leveraging education-specific pricing.
In practical terms, the university shifted from device-based licensing to a user-based Enrollment for Education Solutions model designed for large schools. Under this model, licensing costs would be calculated per faculty/staff headcount (with student access often included at low or no cost), rather than paying for every individual device or full-price corporate user subscription.
The change aligned the license counts with actual usage and took full advantage of Microsoft’s hefty academic discounts to educational institutions.
Redress Compliance guided the university’s Software Asset Management team through the complexities of this switch, from verifying eligibility to mapping each software product to the appropriate academic SKU (Stock Keeping Unit).
The procurement office worked closely with Redress to negotiate the new terms, ensuring that contract language reflected their status as an academic institution.
Results: The academic licensing strategy paid off tremendously.
By the time the EA renewal was signed under the new education agreement, the university had achieved significant cost avoidance and streamlined its license management. Key outcomes included:
- There has been an over 25% reduction in projected Microsoft spending for the coming three-year term. By paying academic rates for Microsoft 365 and other products, the university avoided roughly $1.3 million in costs that it would have incurred under the old model.
- Improved compliance and simplified management by centralizing licenses. All Microsoft usage across campus fell under one agreement, making it easier to track license use and remain compliant. The IT department could now easily see who was assigned what software, eliminating duplicate purchases and unused licenses.
- Reduced administrative overhead in procurement and IT. With a single EA to manage, the software asset management (SAM) team spent far less time reconciling multiple departmental contracts. This freed them to focus on optimizing usage and planning for future needs instead of paperwork.
Importantly, the move did not sacrifice any capabilities for faculty, staff, or students – everyone retained access to the tools they needed for teaching, learning, and administration.
The savings were reinvested into campus IT improvements, from upgraded classroom technology to new research software licenses. “Switching to Microsoft’s academic licensing wasn’t on our radar at first, but it proved transformative,” said the university’s Chief Information Officer. “Redress Compliance helped us navigate the change. We cut our anticipated Microsoft costs by about a quarter while improving how we manage university licenses. It’s a big win for our IT budget and our stakeholders.”
The success of this project also fostered closer collaboration between the IT and procurement teams at the university. Both groups gained a deeper understanding of software licensing nuances, which will benefit future negotiations.
Ohio University now serves as a model for others in the state system to optimize EAs by leveraging academic status. It shows that even large institutions can find creative ways to save when they align their licensing strategy with their unique identity.
