Entrazure
What a direct CSP relationship gives you
One invoice, itemized. Azure consumption and per-seat licensing on a single monthly statement, broken down by subscription, resource group and tag, so a cost center can be reconciled without a data export and an afternoon.
A named person for a billing question. Not a portal ticket queue. As a direct bill partner, we hold the support obligation ourselves for the subscriptions we bill, provide first-line support, and escalate to Microsoft through the partner path when the problem is on their side rather than telling you to open your own case.
Commercial instruments applied on purpose. Reservations and savings plans sized against observed usage rather than optimistic forecasts, Azure Hybrid Benefit applied where the Windows Server or SQL Server licenses already exist, dev/test rates on the subscriptions that qualify, and a written record of which instrument covers which workload and when it expires.
Marketplace as a procurement path. Our offers are transactable on the Azure Marketplace. For an enterprise with an existing Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, that means the work can be purchased against the commitment through a procurement channel that is already approved. For many buyers this is the difference between a six-week vendor onboarding and a purchase order.
Cost visibility that survives contact with the org chart. Azure Cost Management configured with a tagging policy that is enforced by Azure Policy rather than requested by email, budgets and anomaly alerts per subscription, and a monthly report that says what moved and why.
Separation of concerns, in writing. Licensing and consulting are separate agreements with separate prices. You can buy either without the other, and you can see what each one costs.
Where the savings usually are
The first pass rarely needs sophistication. Microsoft 365 seats still billing months after the person left. Compute running in a subscription that belonged to a project which closed. Reservations bought against a workload that has since been resized, so paid coverage sits well below what is being used, or well above. Premium disks attached to nothing. Public IP addresses and idle gateways, individually trivial and collectively not. Log Analytics ingesting verbose diagnostic categories nobody has queried, which after compute is the single most common surprise on an Azure bill.
None of that requires a FinOps practice to find. It requires somebody whose job includes reading the invoice line by line once a quarter, and who has the authority to switch things off. That is the part organizations skip, and it is why the same items appear again on the next review. Where nobody internally owns it, the fractional CIO engagement is usually the cheaper way to solve it than another tool.
How the transfer runs
Week 1, inventory. Every subscription, agreement, license SKU and seat count you currently hold, alongside what is actually deployed and used. Unassigned seats and duplicated SKUs usually surface here, and they are the fastest saving available.
Week 2, commercial review. A written comparison of your current arrangement against the CSP structure, including where an existing Enterprise Agreement should be left in place until its anniversary. If staying where you are is the better answer for the next fourteen months, that is what the document will say.
Week 3, transfer. The billing relationship moves. Subscriptions keep their IDs, resources are untouched, workloads keep running. We schedule it against your billing cycle so you get one clean cut rather than two partial invoices.
Month 2 onward, the operating rhythm. A monthly itemized invoice with a variance note, and a quarterly optimization review covering reservation coverage, rightsizing candidates, orphaned resources and upcoming renewals, with the saving stated in dollars per item.
What you keep
- Your tenant, your subscriptions, your resource IDs and your data, unchanged throughout.
- A monthly itemized invoice with cost allocated by subscription and tag.
- A license and seat inventory reconciled monthly, not annually.
- A commercial instrument register: every reservation and savings plan, its coverage and its expiry date.
- A quarterly optimization report with the saving named per item.
- A written transfer-out procedure, given to you at the start rather than requested at the end.
Who this is for
Organizations spending enough on Azure that the invoice deserves an owner but not enough to negotiate an Enterprise Agreement worth the administrative weight. It suits companies that want a single partner for Azure consumption, Microsoft 365 seats and Copilot licenses, and those that would rather have first-line support from someone who already knows the architecture, particularly where we also run the estate under managed Azure.
It is also the practical answer for organizations with entities in both Canada and the United States. We are established in both countries, so billing can be issued from the right entity in the right currency instead of routed through a single-country reseller.
Who this is not for
If you hold an Enterprise Agreement with two years left and a discount structure you are happy with, do not move. We will read the agreement with you and say so, and the reasonable action is a calendar reminder ahead of your anniversary date.
If your procurement policy requires three competing quotes on every renewal and treats licensing purely as a commodity, that is legitimate, and a volume reseller with no consulting practice will serve you better than we will. We are not the cheapest route to a license key and we do not pretend otherwise.
If you want us to bury consulting fees inside license margin so the professional services line disappears from the budget, we will decline. It makes both numbers unauditable, and the fractional CIO sitting on the other side of that table would be right to reject it.
Related
- Managed Azure and FinOps: the operational half of cost control.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment: what the Copilot licenses on the invoice need before enablement.
- Fractional CIO and IT leadership: who owns the budget these invoices land in.
- All Azure services: the consulting side, priced separately.
Questions we get
What does direct CSP actually mean?
Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider program has two shapes. Indirect providers resell through a distributor who holds the customer relationship and the support obligation. Direct bill partners hold both themselves. Entrazure is direct bill: we transact, invoice and provide first-line support ourselves, and escalate to Microsoft through the partner path when the issue is genuinely on their side.
Do we have to buy consulting to buy licenses from you?
No, and the reverse is also true. Licensing and consulting are quoted, contracted and invoiced separately. Several clients buy only one of the two. Bundling them hides the price of both, and the moment a license margin subsidises an architecture recommendation, the recommendation stops being trustworthy.
Does moving to your CSP change our tenant?
No. Your Entra ID tenant, your subscriptions, your resources, your resource IDs and your data all stay exactly where they are. What changes is the billing relationship attached to the subscription. There is no migration, no downtime and no reconfiguration of workloads.
What happens if we want to leave?
You transfer the billing relationship to another partner or back to Microsoft, and we support the transfer rather than obstruct it. We do not hold tenant ownership, we do not require multi-year lock-in on the licensing agreement itself, and reservations you purchased remain yours. A relationship you stay in because leaving is painful is not a relationship we want.
Can we buy against our Microsoft commitment?
Yes, through the Azure Marketplace. Our offers are transactable there, which means an enterprise with a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment can purchase them against that commitment through their existing procurement path. It removes a purchasing obstacle that a firm without a Marketplace listing cannot.
Will you tell us if we are overspending?
Yes, including when it reduces our own invoice. Reservations, savings plans, Azure Hybrid Benefit, dev/test pricing, orphaned disks and idle gateways are reviewed quarterly and reported with the saving attached. A CSP partner whose incentives run the other way will not raise these, which is precisely why you should ask any partner this question.
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