The Microsoft Negotiations advisory team

How we are organized

We are a senior practice, not a generalist consultancy. Every engagement is led by a practice partner with direct Microsoft commercial experience in the relevant SKU family, supported by a small team of senior practitioners. There is no analyst leverage, no pyramid staffing model and no junior practitioner running the Microsoft negotiation. The economic model is fixed fee or success fee paid by the buyer, with no second revenue stream from Microsoft, no LSP referral kickback, and no Microsoft Partner Network rebate. The legal entity behind Microsoft Negotiations holds no Microsoft Partner status of any kind. This is the same structural pattern as a buyer-side M&A advisor or a fixed-fee employment lawyer.

The five practice areas plus the research function are described below. Each practice is led by a senior partner with 15+ years of operational Microsoft licensing experience in that SKU family and has cross-trained backup across the other practices. Practice leadership is described by role — we do not publish individual photo galleries or named author bylines on this site, which is a deliberate decision: in adversarial Microsoft negotiation the named buyer-side counterparty creates a personal attack surface for Microsoft's account team and a relationship-management vector we will not concede. The org-level expertise and the firm-level track record are what you are buying; you will meet the named practice partner during the scoping call.

Practice areas

Expertise matrix

The expertise matrix below maps the Microsoft commercial topics our team practices to the senior depth available in each. "Senior" means 15+ years of operational Microsoft licensing experience in that domain. "Working depth" means 5–15 years. We publish this matrix because in the LSP and Big-4 procurement market many firms claim broad Microsoft licensing capability without senior depth in any specific SKU family; the question we get asked most often by enterprise procurement leads is "who actually owns Copilot or who actually owns MACC in your team" — and the answer is in this matrix.

How we recruit

We hire from three pools and we do not hire from any other. The first pool is LSP commercial veterans — practitioners who have spent 10+ years inside SoftwareONE, SHI, Insight, Crayon, Computacenter, CDW or comparable Microsoft channel partners and who understand from the inside how Microsoft constructs partner incentive plans, attach quotas and rebate structures. The second pool is former Microsoft Software Asset Management specialists — practitioners who have run Microsoft Verification engagements from Microsoft's own side and who know the audit playbook before the audit letter arrives. The third pool is Fortune 500 enterprise procurement operators — practitioners who have personally signed EAs of $20M–$100M+ on the buyer side and have lived through True-Up cycles, renewals, audits and tier-pricing fights in a senior in-house role.

We do not hire generalist Big-4 consultants who have rotated through "Microsoft licensing" as one of many cloud topics. We do not hire from current Microsoft commercial roles — there is a 24-month cooldown for any candidate moving directly from a Microsoft commercial or account-team role into our practice, because residual Microsoft confidentiality obligations and account-team relationships interfere with adversarial negotiation. We do not hire on commission or revenue-share — every senior practitioner is salaried plus practice-level success-fee distribution.

Engagement governance

Every engagement is run under a written engagement letter signed by the firm's managing partner. Conflict checks are run before scoping. We refuse engagements where we hold any concurrent advisory relationship with a Microsoft channel partner that would touch the same EA, and we publish a conflicts register internally that is reviewed quarterly. We accept no LSP referral fees, no Microsoft Partner Network rebates and no commission income from any Microsoft channel partner. The firm carries professional indemnity insurance appropriate to large-EA negotiation engagements.

Every Microsoft commercial document we produce — counter-proposal, level-pricing defense brief, audit response letter, True-Up reconciliation, MACC structure recommendation — is reviewed under a two-partner sign-off rule. No senior practitioner files a buyer-side document under their own name without a second partner's review. This is the same governance pattern used in legal opinion drafting and is the structural reason engagement quality stays consistent across the practice.

How to meet the team

The 30-minute scoping call is the introduction. On that call you will meet (i) the firm partner who runs the relevant practice — usually EA Negotiation or Audit Defense — and (ii) a senior practitioner from the supporting practice if the engagement crosses practice lines. The scoping call is free, includes a one-page engagement-shape memo within five business days, and is independent of whether you proceed. There is no sales team in between; the partner who would lead your engagement is the partner on the scoping call.