Buying Microsoft licences through a partner, or direct from Microsoft

Short answer: Through a partner, unless you have someone in-house who genuinely enjoys licensing. The list price is set by Microsoft and most partners sell at or near it, so the decision is rarely about price. It is about whether anyone is watching your tier mix, your unused licences and your renewal dates, because that is where the money actually goes, and nothing in the direct channel is going to tell you.

The assumption worth testing first

Almost everyone approaching this assumes a partner is a middleman taking a cut, and that going direct removes the cut. It is a reasonable assumption and it is usually wrong.

Microsoft publishes list prices. A partner in the Cloud Solution Provider programme buys at a partner rate and sells to you, most often at or very near that same list price, because the customer can check it in thirty seconds and there are thousands of other partners. The margin is funded out of the gap between partner rate and list, not added to what you would otherwise pay.

So price is rarely the thing that separates the two routes. What separates them is whether anybody is paying attention.

Where the money actually goes

Not to a markup. In the estates we review, the recoverable spend is almost always in three places, and none of them are visible from an invoice.

• Wrong tier. People on E5 who need Business Premium, or on E3 when a cheaper F-series licence matches what they actually do. The invoice looks correct because the count is correct.
• Licences assigned to nobody. Leavers, long-term absence, role changes. These bill at full rate indefinitely, and nothing in the direct channel flags it.
• Add-ons already included. Paying separately for something a licence you already hold covers, usually because the two purchases were made by different people a year apart.

None of that is exotic, and none of it requires a partner to fix in principle. It requires somebody to sit down with the assignment list and the tier definitions once or twice a year. The honest question is not whether a partner adds value, it is whether that review is going to happen if nobody is being paid to do it.

What "value added" has to mean, or it means nothing

Value-added reseller is a category that includes both genuine advisory work and simply putting an invoice in the middle. Ask any prospective partner to describe what it does under each of these four headings. Vagueness under any of them is the answer.

• Tier and mix advice. Who should be on what, reviewed as headcount and roles change, not set once at signup.
• Commercial flexibility. Adjusting counts, splitting billing across cost centres, aligning renewal dates. The direct portal is less accommodating on all three.
• One accountable point. A licensing question and a service problem go to the same place, rather than being two queues that each say the other owns it.
• Someone who notices. Unused licences, an expiring term, a new SKU that would let you drop an add-on. This is the one most partners skip and the one worth most.

When buying direct is the better answer

There are real cases, and any partner unwilling to name them is selling rather than advising.

• You already have the capability in-house. Someone who understands the licensing model, reviews assignments and is confident choosing tiers. A partner is a layer you do not need.
• Your estate is small and static. A handful of people, one plan, nothing changing. The review that a partner earns its place with has nothing to review.
• Procurement policy favours the manufacturer. Some organisations, particularly in the public sector, have rules about this. It is not worth fighting.
• The partner will only sell licensing bundled with a managed service you do not want. That is a reason to go direct, not a reason to buy the service.

How this works at Systech, and what we sell

We are a Microsoft partner and we do sell licensing, so treat the section above as something to hold us to rather than as neutral commentary. Three things we would rather state plainly than have you discover.

We sell licensing and managed services separately. You can buy licences through us with no managed contract, and you can buy a managed service with your licences somewhere else. We think the combination is usually better, because the provider managing your estate can see the licensing consequences of what it does, but it is a recommendation and not a condition.

Some of what we resell, we built. EtherApps Forge, EtherInsights and EtherAssist come from our sister company EfficientEther, and they exist because we spent years doing this work by hand: cost attribution, posture analysis, compliance documentation and legacy application capture, all of it slow and all of it repetitive. The tooling is why a review is quick enough to be worth doing before you have decided anything, and we will still tell you where one of them is the wrong tool.

Our licensing and cost review is free and you keep the findings. It is not a sales gate. If it concludes you are on the right tiers with no shelfware, we will tell you that, and there is nothing to sell you.