2025 Highlight 8: Helping Scottish Local Authorities save on Microsoft Licensing

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, collaborative procurements have become a powerful tool for driving efficiency, cost avoidance and innovation across the public sector. The Digital Office, Scotland Excel and Crown Commercial Services (CCS) have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach by joining forces to offer councils the opportunity to renew their Microsoft Enterprise Agreements through aggregated procurements.

In 2025, we partnered with 12 councils on two collaborative procurement exercises, with another 6 councils already invited to the next round. These efforts delivered above-baseline cost avoidances of 3.5 to 3.6% for the 7 Scottish local authorities that took advantage of those results.

Looking ahead, we continue to work together to explore opportunities to improve Azure consumption savings. We have identified a commercial lead for a unified multi-organisation Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment agreement for Scottish councils. This could enable 24% cost reduction on Azure - double what is currently available through Strategic Partnership Arrangement 2024 (SPA24).

Through these efforts, we aim to build on the success of the current initiative, ensuring that Scottish Local Authorities continue to benefit from the collective strength of their use of Microsoft 365 as a common platform.  

If you would like to get involved or find out more information about our upcoming collaborative procurement initiatives, please get in touch at info@digitaloffice.scot.