Microsoft Premier Support End of Life is July 2022. What Happens Next?.

Microsoft Premier Support End of Life (EOL) is July 1, 2022.

CIOs and IT Leaders need to understand what happens when their Premier Support ends.

Procurement and Sourcing Leaders tasked with IT cost optimization and future cost avoidance should explore alternatives for MSFT support with 30-50% savings possible.

Initiatives: Microsoft Contract ROI | Strategic IT Cost Optimization
Audience: CIO and IT Executives | Sourcing, Procurement and Vendor Management

Microsoft Premier Support End of Life (EOL) is July 1, 2022, which aligns with Microsoft’s fiscal year end. The Microsoft Enterprise Support Lifecycle provides consistent and predictable guidelines for support throughout the life of a product, helping customers manage their IT investments and environments while strategically planning for the future.

MSFT Premier Support is the consumption-based support model where enterprises buy the number of support hours they anticipate they will use in the following year. In general, Premier most closely maps the support spend to an organization’s specific Microsoft technology support requirements.

At least with Premier we could only pay for the support we needed.
— Jane M., Procurement Officer, Fortune 500 Manufacturer

As of February 2022, Software Assurance Benefit (SAB) Problem Resolution Support (PRS) credits have been retired and are no longer available to offset Unified Support transition costs.

Once Microsoft Premier Support is retired in July 2022, any remaining Premier Support subscribers will be transitioned to the new Unified Support model. MSFT Unified Support is the new on-demand support model which covers the entire organization and all Microsoft technologies.

In many cases, the cost increase from Premier to Unified is significant in year 2 and beyond. Some enterprises are reporting they only want to pay to support the Microsoft products they actually use. In addition, many are finding the support quality diminishing as the Unified Support load increases with Microsoft’s steep Cloud growth.

And on the relationship management side, some enterprises are losing their highly-valued TAM who intimately knows their organization’s team and IT challenges. Under Unified, Customer Success Account Managers (CSAM) are replacing Technical Account Manager (TAM) and typically have about half a TAM’s experience.

3rd party Microsoft support is available for those seeking an alternative to Microsoft OEM support. Gartner has recognized US Cloud as the only viable option to completely replace Microsoft Unified Support.

Most enterprises save between 30-50% with US Cloud and report a better support experience than Microsoft Unified. US Cloud provides global 24/7 support delivered entirely by US domestic engineers ensuring enterprise and agency support sovereignty and compliance.

Switching to US Cloud for Microsoft support does not impact your Enterprise Agreement (EA) or relationship with Microsoft. Transition risk is further mitigated via Proof of Concept, SLAs for response time and ticket escalation, and Fortune 500 client reviews.

The end of sale date of June 30, 2022 for Premier Support is currently not applicable for government organizations, academic and non-profit institutions who have not yet transitioned to Unified Support.

Per Microsoft:

Premier Support will be retired for Public Sector at a future date. More information on the end of sale date for this segment will be shared in early 2022.

Microsoft’s official end of sale notice can be found here.