Purchase Process of Microsoft Enterprise Agreement / Server and Cloud Enrollment (EA/SCE)

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Purchase

Enterprise Enrollment (EA)

Enterprise Enrollment for end-user productivity services and device needs. With Enterprise Enrollment, customer can license Windows for workloads like server access and device management as well as protection for devices and information. Customers can also leverage the new Office capability to provide their End-user with messaging, collaboration and communication along with other productivity tools. Enterprise Products include on-premises licenses for Microsoft PC code and device products, namely Windows Operating System, Office Professional Plus and Client Access Licenses Suites (CAL Suites).

Server and Cloud Enrollment (SCE)

Server and Cloud Enrollment (SCE) for data center and Cloud Service needs. Customers can purchase Azure in one of two ways in the SCE:

  • Azure is automatically available when enrolling in any of the other three SCE components (such as Core Infrastructure, Application Platform, and/or Developer Platform). You will receive an activation email from Microsoft inviting you to provision Azure Services without the need to purchase Monetary Commitment.
  • Azure Monetary Commitment can be purchased without enrolling in any of the other three SCE components.

If you are heavily committed to deploying server technologies on-premises, making an installed base-wide SCE commitment to Windows Server and System Center, SQL Server, or Developer Tools allows you to standardize on or more of these technologies without any upfront commitment to Azure. However, once you are ready to move some of your workloads to the cloud, you will be able to start using Azure immediately and get billed quarterly only for what you use. You also have the option of signing an Azure-only SCE—this means that you purchase Azure only without a commitment to any of the other three SCE components. You will need to sign a three-year contract, but you can increase or decrease your commitment annually (More purchase information please refer to below Azure Commitment section).

Customers purchasing Microsoft Azure through their SCE will be eligible to continue using Azure on a pay-go basis after their enrollment expired.

Azure Monetary Commitment

Monetary Commitment (MC) allows customer to pay upfront for expected usage of Azure Services.

  • Upfront full year payment
  • Customer will be billed automatically each year for the amount of MC that is no less than $12,000, but can adjust the amount up or down prior to their EA anniversary (can all the way down to $0 if they choose to)
  • Customers MC expired annually, and they forfeit any unused amount at the end of each year of their EA;
  • Customers can also add more MC at any time, however, it will always expire at anniversary, meaning if they add an extra MC amount in the 6th month of their agreement, they only have 6 months to spend it.
  • Once a customer consumes all their MC in a year, they will be invoiced for overage, unless they purchase another MC.
  • MC can’t be used on Azure Plans, Support, Store or other Enterprise Agreement products/services
  • Indirect EA pricing comes from the partner
  • Azure Management through Microsoft Azure Enterprise Portal

Benefits

Compare with MOSP, the EA/SCE provide several exclusive benefits to provide a great Azure purchasing experience to customer, including the following benefits.

Price Protection

If Microsoft changes prices, either up or down, EA customers get the best of both worlds. If Azure prices go up for a specific service, EA customer’s pricing will not change. If Azure prices go down, Microsoft will automatically pass on the applicable pricing levels and adjustments to EA customers. Microsoft will inform customers of upcoming price changes by emailing the contact within the customer identified in the portal and enrollment.

Purchasing & Payment Options

EA customers can be utilizing upfront billing or pay-as-you-go options through monetary commitment. They also have additional payment flexibility such as quarterly or annual billing for overage depending on the overage amount.

Azure Support

EA customers receive upgrade support. Microsoft will provide a 12-month support upgrade to all EA customers purchasing Azure (Azure Support). We will introduce Support details in later Support Session.

Azure Plans

In addition to MC, EA customers have access to Azure Plan services, such as the HUB, IoT suites and other Azure plan SKUs. Azure Plans mainly include:

  • Azure Hybrid Use Benefit: If the customer has an existing on-premises Windows Server license with Software Assurance (SA), the Hybrid Use Benefit (HUB) offer provides them the ability to run Windows virtual machines in Azure while only paying base (Linux) compute rates. This drives savings upwards of 45% versus paying for Windows virtual machines hourly.

  • Internet of Things Suite (IOT Suite): For Customers that want to benefit from Internet of Things (IOT) solutions, we have pre-configured Azure suites available to quickly create Internet of Things solutions. Customers can purchase preferential suite services directly.

Azure Enterprise Portal

EA customers receive access to the Enterprise Portal, which allows customers to manage their usage, accounts and pricing. It includes the following features:

  • Displays an annual invoice for monetary commitment and a maximum of four quarterly overage invoices
  • Provides summary-level visibility of service usage and costs across all accounts and subscriptions
  • Sends periodic usage notifications (daily, weekly, or monthly) to inform the customer of their remaining monetary commitment or their quarterly overage
  • Provides ability to download detailed usage records and view costs at the account and subscription levels

Account/Subscription Management

Customer Onboarding Experiences

As we mentioned previously, Enterprise Portal (EA Portal at www.ea.azure.com) is one of the benefits we provide to Enterprise customers who can manage their billing, usage report, notification at different level as well as setting multiple roles per organization purpose. EA portal is the entry portal for customers to create account and subscription. New customers can get the onboarding training to help them get started. Like global, China also have Enterprise poral which have exact same functionality as global portal does. If you already have China Enterprise Portal access and already use the portal to manage your billing and report, there would be no issue to use global EA portal directly.

Administrative Roles

To administer your Microsoft Azure services under your Enrollment, there are four distinct administrative roles: The Enterprise Administrator, The Department Administrator, the Account Owner and the Service Administrator. Users are required to authenticate using a valid Microsoft Account (LiveID http://signup.live.com) or School or Work Account (Azure-based Active Directory). Please ensure the ID entered is associated with a monitored mailbox as enrollment and account notifications will be sent to this mailbox.

The roles complete tasks on three different Microsoft Azure portals: The Enterprise Portal, the Account Portal and the Management Portal (or Ibiza Portal ).

For more training video and documents, please refer to Azure EA Training Video Center.

Manage Subscription

Basically, there is no difference to use EA Azure subscription and PAYG Azure subscription or other type of Azure subscription to deploy and use services. One key point to address is all Azure subscriptions can switch to EA subscription once customer sign EA agreement, including PAYG, BizSpark, Visual Studio, Dev/Test subs.

Switch Subscription offer

As mentioned above, if customers have other types of Azure subs and want to convert to EA paid subs, they can sign in EA portal and add those subs as Account Owner. However, it is important to know that the Azure credit left in those subs cannot carry over to their converted EA paid subs.

EA will forfeit any unconsumed Azure credits. To avoid any potential forfeiture of credit, it is recommended that customers consume all credit prior to adding the account to their EA; or take further action to submit support ticket and request manual handle the remaining balance credit.

The specific steps are as follows:

  • The user will receive an invitation email after conclusion of the EA. The enterprise administrator should visit Enterprise Portal and log in with the email address set out in the invitation email to activate the services. The specific steps are as follows:

    • Step 1: Click the link in the invitation email or log in to Enterprise Portal to visit Microsoft Azure Enterprise Portal.

    • Step 2: Select "Authentication Mode" and click "Sign in" on the registration page of Enterprise Portal.

    • Step 3: Enterprise administrator can enter account email and password to activate online services.

    • Step 4: Click "Sign in" to complete the operation.

  • Once the EA account is activated, the enterprise administrator can associate the existing Azure account to the existing agreement. All the subscriptions under the Azure account will be automatically transferred to EA subscriptions. The specific steps are as follows:

    • Step 1: Log in to the Enterprise Portal with the account owner's email address.

    • Step 2: Click "Manage" and select "+Add". Add the account needing migrating here.

    • Step 3: Fill out the form and click "Add" to complete the operation.

  • When the transfer is completed, if original account has subscriptions with special price (including free services), such subscriptions will be charged according to the Azure costs specified in the contract.

Cancel and Reactive Subscription

Like PAYG customers, EA customers can cancel their subscription on Azure portal or Account portal.

However, if customer wants to re-activate the cancelled subscription, they need to submit support ticket and request backend engineering team to help. EA customer cannot re-activate the subs by themselves.

Subscription Life Cycle

Once customers cancelled their subscription, their data will be protected for 90 days. During this 90 days’ period, customers can request re-active the subscription and retrieve their data. However, once exceeding this 90 days’ period, customers’ data will be de-provisioned and cannot be retrieved any more.

Agreement Renewal

At the end of 3-year enrollment term, customer has the option to renew for another 3-year cycle. In terms of Azure EA agreement renewal, the renewal order should be in place up to 30 days prior to the end date of enrollment. Also, renewal order should include a future coverage start date.

Currently, once a 3-year Azure agreement completes, customer will have an infinite grace period, which allow customers to continue using Azure services and intend to give customer more time to renew their new agreement. However, please note that during this grace period, there will be no price protection and customers will be charged overage for the gap months on time.

Once customer renews their next 3-year agreement, they can submit the ticket to request transfer their existing account and subscription to their new agreement. This transfer is seamless and customer has no need to re-build their services one more time but need customer request.

FAQ

  • Q: How many subscriptions should I create?

    A: Need to create more than one subscription, depending upon the business needs. Typically you may want to create two subscriptions:

    • Enterprise Dev/Test – This offer is for team of Visual Studio subscribers to run dev/test workloads on Microsoft Azure, providing discounted rates on Windows virtual machines and access to exclusive images in Azure Gallery.
    • Microsoft Azure Enterprise – This restricted offer is for customers billed separately through our Enterprise Portal. Please refer to your Volume Licensing Agreements and the price list displayed on the Enterprise Portal to view your rates associated with this offer.

  • Q: When do I split up into multiple subscriptions and what is the impact of that (technically and financially)?

    A: There is no financial implication of creating multiple subscriptions. Billing/Invoicing is done based on the usage. Technical implication could be if you accidentally deleted a subscription which was in use and as a result services under that subscription may stop working and can have business impact.

  • Q: What cost controlling/management features are in place?

    A: EA Portal provides facility to create "Spending Quota" at Department level and customer will get notified at 50%, 75%, 90% and 100% of the quota consumption. The notification is non-action based meaning. There won’t be any impact to the services which will continue work as usual.

    In addition to this EA Portal that provides facility to create "Cost Center" at Department, Account and Subscription level can also be used to track the cost/usage.

    Customer can also use Power BI to perform offline analysis and steps to integrate with Power BI are available on EA Portal under Reports menu.

    Customer can also use Tag(s) and Resource Group(s) to manage/track usage at individual service level. The link https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-using-tags/ explains how one can consume Tag(s) and use them for cost management.

  • Q: How to change Enrollment/Subscription owner ID email?

    A: If you're enrollment admin then you can simply go to https://ea.azure.com and change the owner email ID. If not (considering owner left company) then you will have to submit support ticket at http://aka.ms/AzureEntSupport.

  • Q: How to manage Admin/Co-Admin in a subscription?

    A: Login to https://portal.azure.com using the admin email ID. Click on the "Subscriptions" menu and select the subscription you want to update. On the next blade select "Manage" on top menu which should open new window for managing subscription. Click on the "Edit Subscription Details" menu to add service administrator by default subscription owner is listed as the administrator.

  • Q: What is an Azure region?

    A: Azure region is normally referred to countries where Azure services are offered. You can find details https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/.

  • Q: What can and can’t be moved between subscriptions, what needs a support ticket?

    A:

    • Movement of a subscription from PAYG outside of the EA Portal to an Account owner in the EA Portal. Azure Subscription Management (ASM) must do an offer conversion in the process
    • Most subscriptions with Marketplace services attached

    ASM is sometimes able to move subscriptions between accounts in the EA Portal but some Marketplace services still block a subscription transfer.

  • Q: Can I use my MSDN offer in EA?

    A: Yes, you can use MSDN offer:

    • By having your Enterprise Admin enable you to create EA Dev/Test Offers by selecting the Dev/Test box when editing your EA Account profile.
    • By the conversion of an MSDN/VS subscription in a PAYG account when the account is added/activated in the EA portal
    • You cannot use your monthly subscription benefit of $50- $150 in the EA Portal. As soon as the subscription account is added to the EA Portal all subscription credits are lost and all usage becomes billable at EA negotiated rates.

  • Q: What is the best way to connect my on-premises network to Azure?

    A: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/guidance-connecting-your-on-premises-network-to-azure/ provides detailed information about connecting your on-premises network to Azure here.

  • Q: Can I associate my existing Azure Account to Enterprise Enrollment?

    A: Yes, you can. Important point to note, all Azure subscriptions for which you’re the account owner will be converted to your enterprise agreement. This includes subscriptions which include monthly credit (e.g., Visual Studio, Azure Pass, MPN, BizSpark etc.), meaning you will lose monthly credit by doing so.

  • Q: Can you explain this jungle of subscription-admins, co-admins, service-admins, the other admins again please?

    A: Enrollment admin – has complete control at the enrollment level, (s)he can create/update/delete existing admin at all levels. Enrollment admin have complete view on usage, billing and subscriptions. Enrollment admin can add co-admin who will have same rights as original (first) enrollment admin.

    Department admin has ability to do the following:

    • Create Department Administrator
    • View/Edit Department properties such as name or cost center
    • Add an Account on the Department they administer
    • Remove the associated Accounts from the Department they administer
    • Download usage details of the Department they administer
    • View the monthly Usage and Charges associated to their Department if Enterprise Administrator has granted permission to do so

  • Q: I accidently associated my existing Azure account with Enterprise enrollment as a result I lost my monthly credit. Is it possible to get my monthly credit back?

    A: Not in every case, however, to recover your individual Visual Studio Subscription Azure Benefit after you authenticate as an EA Account Owner (having used the same login for EA as your Visual Studio subscription) you must either:

    • Delete this Account Owner from the EA Portal (after removing or moving any Azure subscriptions they own) and have them sign up for their individual Visual Studio Azure benefits anew, OR
    • Delete the Visual Studio subscriber from the Administration site in VLSC and reassign the subscription, having them use a different login this time — then they can sign up for their individual Visual Studio Azure benefits anew.

  • Q: What type of subscription should I create?

    A: EA Portal offers two types of subscriptions for enterprise customers:

    • Microsoft Azure Enterprise – ideal for:
      • All Production usage
      • Best prices based on infrastructure spend
      • You can find more details at here
    • Enterprise Dev/Test - ideal for:
      • All team dev/test workloads
      • Medium-to-heavy individual dev/test workloads
      • Access to special MSDN images and preferential service rates
      • You can find more details at here

  • Q: Is it possible to transfer subscription ownership to another account?

    A: Yes, it is possible to transfer subscription ownership to different account. For example, if an Account A has three subscriptions, the enterprise admin could transfer one subscription to Account B, one to Account C and one to Account D or all to Account E.

    You can go to EA and click on Manage  Account, hover over Account (extreme right) and you will see Transfer Ownership (headshot icon) and Transfer Subscription (list icon) option.

    Note: This option will show only for Active accounts.

  • Q: I see subscription name defaults to offer name, should I change the subscription name to something meaningful to my organization?

    A: Any subscription created will default to the offer type you choose; we recommend that you change the subscription name to something which makes it easy for you to track the subscription.

    To change name logon to https://account.windowsazure.com

    • Click on subscription list
    • Select Subscription
    • Click on Manage Subscription icon
    • Edit subscription details

  • Q: How can I track cost incurred by "Cost Center"?

    A: To track cost by "Cost Center" you need to define "Cost Center" at any of the following levels:

    • Department
    • Account
    • Subscription

    Based on your need you can use the same "Cost Center" to track usage and cost associated with "Cost Center".

    For example, to track cost for a special project where multiple departments are involved you may want to use the "Cost Center" at Subscription level to track the usage and cost.

    Note: You cannot define "Cost Center" at Service level, in case you want to track usage at service level you can use "Tag" feature available at the service level.

  • Q: How can I track usage and spend by different departments in my organization?

    A: You can create as many departments as you need under your EA enrollment. To track the usage correctly you need to ensure that subscriptions are not shared across departments.

    Once department and subscription creation is done, you can see information flow in the usage report which will help in tracking usage and managing cost/spend at department level.

    You can also access the usage via API, detailed information and sample code is available at https://ea.azure.com/helpdocs/reportingAPI

  • Q: Can I set "Spending Quota" and get alerts as I approach near my limits?

    A: You can set spending quota at department level and system will automatically notify you as your spending limits meet 50%, 75%, 90% and 100% of the quota you define.

    To define spending quota, click on the department you want to add spending limit to and click on edit icon. Click on Save to save details.

  • Q: I used "Resource Groups (RGs)" to implement RBAC and track usage, how can I view the associated usage details?

    A: Information like "Resource Groups" and "Tag" if used is tracked at service level and the information is available in the detailed usage download (CSV) file, which can be downloaded from EA Portal (https://ea.azure.com/report/downloadusage).

    You can also access the usage via API, detailed information and sample code is available at https://ea.azure.com/helpdocs/reportingAPI.

    Please Note: You can only apply tags to resources that support Resource Manager operations. If you created a Virtual Machine, Virtual Network, or Storage through the classic deployment model (such as through the classic portal or Service Management API), you cannot apply a tag to that resource. You must re-deploy these resources through Resource Manager to support tagging. All other resources support tagging.

  • Q: How does my bill work, I don’t see any $ - is there anything more usable?

    A: You can check usage with potential charges in "Usage Summary" under "Reports" section. You should be able to see details like:

    Alternatively, you can use detailed usage API to get detailed usage with cost, you can find more details at "Reporting API’s" under "Help" menu.

  • Q: Can I use Power BI to perform analysis?

    A: Yes, with the Microsoft Azure Enterprise content pack for Power BI, you can quickly import and analyze Azure consumption for your enterprise enrollment, find out which department, account or subscription consumed the most usage, which service your organization used most, or track spending and usage trends.

    Navigate to the Power BI Website

    • Log in with a valid Work or School Account
      • Work or School account can be the same or different than what is used to access the enrollment through the Enterprise Portal
    • Choose on the Dashboard of services
      • "Microsoft Azure Enterprise" tile
      • Click Connect
    • Choose on the "Connect to Azure Enterprise" screen
      • Azure Environment URL: https://ea.azure.com
      • Number of Months: choose between 1 and 35
      • Enrollment Number: enter the enrollment number
      • Click "Next"
    • On Authentication Key Box, enter the API Key. You can get the API key here in the Azure Enterprise portal, under "Download Usage" tab above, click "API Access Key".
      • Copy and Paste the Key into the box for "Account Key"
    • Data will take approximately 5 minutes -30 minutes to load in Power BI depending on the size of the datasets. Power BI Reporting is available for EA Direct, Partner, and Indirect Customers who can view billing information.