Microsoft Customer Agreement

The Microsoft Customer Agreement is an evergreen agreement that is digitally accepted by a customer through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Any customer can preview the terms of the Microsoft Customer Agreement here, where you choose the relevant geography, language and purchasing channel of the MCA that you want to see. You can use a (very small) button at the bottom right of the screen to download a copy of the MCA if you want to. The MCA was last updated on March 1, 2023 and if you want to see a January 2022 version, then there are samples on the Licensing Resources and Documents site.

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, Microsoft plan to make the Microsoft Customer Agreement the single agreement that customers sign as part of the New Commerce Experience initiative which supports purchasing through CSP, direct from a Microsoft salesperson, or from a Microsoft website.

Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program basics

The Cloud Solution Provider, or CSP, program is designed to enable partners to sell licenses for Microsoft software, Online Services, or Azure services, along with their own services, to customers. As a purchasing framework it’s more flexible than a Volume Licensing agreement and a partner is free to set the purchasing rules for customers. For example, they could set any payment terms for Online Services that suit the customer: upfront annually, monthly in arrears, upfront quarterly, best prices for upfront payment for 3 years etc. There are different sections for the programmatic rules for purchasing on-premises products, the Online Services, and Azure through CSP.

There are some geographical restrictions within CSP, namely that a partner can only sell to a customer within the territory that they are authorized as a partner. The US and Canada are each separate territories and many European countries form another. This means that a partner based in the UK, for example, couldn’t sell directly to the subsidiary of a UK customer based in the US.

Buying direct from a Microsoft salesperson

The Microsoft Customer Agreement is also used when a larger, more strategic customer buys direct from Microsoft. This was introduced for customers in March 2019 and enables customers to buy the Azure services. The rules for that are covered here.

Microsoft call this way of buying through the New Commerce Experience the Microsoft Customer Agreement for enterprise motion or MCA-E. Note that this doesn’t imply that it’s governed by a different flavor of the MCA – the Microsoft Customer Agreement is the same whether customers are buying through this channel or CSP.

Buying direct from the Microsoft website

Any business can buy licenses for Online Services or pay for the Azure services directly through Microsoft’s websites. There are a couple of desktop software products that you can purchase too, but we haven’t made this way to buy licenses and services a focus of LicenseVerse.