Beginning in January 2024, ECL has made a strategic decision to discontinue the resale of cloud services from leading providers, especially Microsoft. This move is driven by our concern over perceived unfair practices and biases exhibited by numerous cloud vendors, including heavy administration costs, excessive billing, forced upgrades, mandatory bundling, arbitrary censorship, service denial, high costs for change management, vendor lock-in, and security vulnerability concerns. As a firm that values impartiality and trust, ECL can no longer endorse these biases or bear the administrative burden associated with interacting with these cloud vendors.

This strategic shift will enable us to provide unbiased recommendations for the most suitable public and private cloud providers for your company, along with assistance in managing these vendors. For new clients, we encourage you to engage directly with the cloud providers. However, we will assist you with the signup process, offer support, and manage the cloud service providers on your behalf to reduce costs once you've registered. For our existing clients, you will change the payment method to ECL via monthly checks or other means to directly pay cloud providers like Microsoft using credit cards.

While our peers in the IT infrastructure industry may favor Microsoft due to its market dominance, significant profit margins, and self-interest in the small business market, we believe that many other public cloud providers competing with Microsoft, such as private clouds, Amazon, Google, Carbonite, Cloudflare, and OpenAI may offer superior solutions. This decision reflects our commitment to serving our clients' best interests and ensuring a level playing field among cloud vendors.

However, there are exceptions to our new policy. For small businesses without access to credit cards, such as small non-profit organizations, or those whose credit cards are not accepted by certain cloud vendors, ECL will accommodate their needs. In such cases, we will continue to resell cloud services, invoice the organization directly, and manage the cloud vendor relationship on their behalf. If your organization falls into this category, please contact us, and we can advise whether establishing a direct relationship with the cloud vendors or going through ECL would be more suitable for your circumstances.