Clarity on Cloud - The truth about Microsoft MACCs
A Clarity on Cloud blog by our CEO, Helen Gerling
If you’re a CIO or CFO buying Microsoft cloud at scale, you’ve probably come across a MACC.
A Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment.
On paper it looks simple:
Commit to spend a certain amount on Azure over a few years, and Microsoft gives you commercial incentives in return.
Discounts. Funding. Strategic alignment. Executive attention.
Sounds good.
And when it’s done properly, it works very well.
Microsoft gets predictable Azure growth. Customers get commercial advantages. Partners help deliver transformation.
Everyone aligns around a clear cloud roadmap.
But here’s the reality I see repeatedly: organisations sign MACCs without a clear plan for how they’ll actually consume the commitment.
And that’s where things start to go wrong.
What a MACC is supposed to do
A MACC is designed to:
Give organisations predictable cloud pricing
Encourage strategic Azure adoption
Align Microsoft, the customer, and partners around a roadmap
When it works well, it’s powerful.
The business commits to Azure. Microsoft invests in the relationship. Partners help deliver the transformation.
Everyone wins.
Where it starts to break
In my experience, the issue is never the MACC itself.
The issue is how organisations forecast cloud consumption.
I recently reviewed a £10m, three-year Microsoft commitment for a large organisation.
At the halfway point, they'd consumed less than 25% of the commitment.
At first glance that sounds like the commitment must have been unrealistic.
It wasn’t.
Nothing was technically wrong and the commitment itself was reasonable.
A reasonable commitment: Alongside existing consumption, an entry into Fabric, and some tactical marketplace purchases, the organisation had planned a migration to Azure that should have generated roughly £3m of consumption over three years.
The problem was simpler.
The programme to deliver it never properly started.
They had:
Begun exploring modern services
Delivered one meaningful change (Citrix → AVD)
But the broader migration programme never materialised and the procurement of business systems had never been aligned with the MACC strategy.
Instead, the organisation tried to design the migration programme internally before engaging a delivery partner.
The result was sadly predictable:
uncertainty about the right migration approach
repeated technical debates
questions about whether the move to Azure still made sense given reducing time remaining for EOL infrastructure
very limited delivery progress
The MACC wasn’t the problem. The lack of an executable programme was.
A MACC doesn’t deliver workloads.
Programmes do.
There’s another reality organisations sometimes overlook.
Azure migrations aren’t new anymore.
Partners have spent more than a decade refining how to migrate workloads efficiently into Azure - from landing zones and security baselines through to tooling, sequencing, and purpose-built squads of specialists.
Trying to rediscover all of that internally rarely saves money.
More often it pulls internal teams away from running the business while the migration slows down.
A good partner shouldn’t be seen as an added cost.
They’re an insurance policy that the migration happens properly, stays on budget, and leaves internal teams free to keep the business moving.
The three things that kill MACC plans
In almost every underperforming MACC I review, one of these shows up.
1. A plan without a delivery programme
Many organisations sign MACCs with a high-level migration or transformation plan.
But plans don’t generate Azure consumption. Workload programmes do.
Without clear delivery ownership, architecture decisions, migration waves, and execution partners, progress slows quickly.
And consumption stalls.
2. Trying to design everything up front
Another common pattern is organisations trying to fully design the cloud strategy internally before starting delivery.
It sounds sensible.
In practice it often leads to:
months of architecture discussions
internal disagreements on approach
analysis paralysis
Cloud programmes tend to work better when strategy and delivery evolve together.
3. Waiting for the “big transformation”
Some organisations assume MACC consumption will be driven by a future large modernisation programme.
"All of that's going to be replaced by SaaS"
Application re-architecture. Large data platforms. AI programmes.
Those things absolutely impact consumption and can reduce on-premise footprints.
But they also take time.
In the meantime, the MACC clock keeps ticking.
Where MACCs work brilliantly
The organisations that get the most value from MACCs usually have three things in place:
a clear migration roadmap, with the resources to deliver it
a defined data and analytics programme, with a clear leader who knows what good looks like
someone actively managing consumption against the commitment, with the ear of a decisive exec
When those exist, MACCs can unlock significant value - commercially and technically.
Microsoft funding programmes, architectural support, and partner ecosystems all become easier to activate.
The commitment becomes an accelerator rather than a risk.
What good MACC management looks like
The organisations that manage MACCs well do three things differently.
1. They treat it as a commercial programme
Not just a contract.
They actively track:
Azure consumption
forecast vs reality
workload pipelines
It’s run almost like a financial portfolio.
2. They align technology roadmaps
MACCs work when they align with actual delivery plans:
migration waves
application modernisation
data platforms
digital services
Not just ambition.
3. They use partners strategically
Microsoft funding programmes - including ECIF - exist to accelerate real workloads.
The organisations getting value from MACCs actively use them.
Those that don’t often end up simply watching the commitment clock tick.
The hard truth
A MACC isn’t free money.
It’s a commitment to a cloud strategy.
And that strategy needs to translate into real workloads, delivered on a real timeline.
Sometimes that works beautifully. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The difference usually comes down to one thing: whether the commitment was aligned with reality.
Straight talk
If you’ve signed a MACC and nobody in your organisation is actively managing the consumption plan…
you don’t really have a cloud strategy.
You just have a commitment that still needs delivering - and potentially a very large future liability.
And one more truth worth remembering:
"A good partner isn't an added cost. They’re an insurance policy that the migration happens properly, stays on budget, and leaves internal teams free to keep the business moving."
If your organisation has signed, or is considering a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, ensuring the commercial agreement aligns with a realistic delivery programme is critical. At Shaping Cloud, we help organisations bring clarity to complex cloud commitments, aligning technology strategy, commercial models and delivery programmes to unlock real value.
Learn more about how we support organisations with Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments and executive commercial clarity.