I put out a LinkedIn post and tweet the other week to se who’d be interested in joining me on a Microsoft-focused podcast…and it turns out quiete a few people would! The response was fantastic and means that the CWACOL podcast will definitely be happening – and soon. I’ve got a few things to get out of the way first and then I can start recording some awesome podcasts with some awesome people 😁
If you’ve already been in touch, thank you! If not, and you fancy chatting about anything and everything Microsoft – licensing, new products, hardware, the partner channel, working with Microsoft, Surface, development, ISV, etc. – drop me a comment/tweet/LinkedIn DM/email etc. and we’ll get something setup.
Look out for the first episode in the coming weeks!
Project Embrace is a new initiative from SAP to help their customers move to the cloud, and digitally transform, quickly and easily. Microsoft are a key part of this, particularly around SAP S4/HANA running in the Azure cloud. The 2 vendors have created a joint roadmap with guidance to help organisations move from on-premises to the cloud. This new phase takes things further whereby Microsoft & SAP will align their partner ecosystems and collaborate around customer support.
This seems similar in many way to the partnership Microsoft announced with Oracle earlier this year, continuing the trend of “co-ompetition” between some of the largest players in the new cloud world. It can also be seen as a revival of the SAP/Microsoft “Duet” partnership – a joint product they launched many years ago to facilitate collaboration for companies using SAP and Microsoft SharePoint.
It’s interesting that Microsoft talk about being the first global cloud provider to support Project Embrace, although the SAP statement includes Amazon AWS and Google Cloud alongside them.
You can see more from SAP, and the others involved, here.
In a move that could be seen as a way to anger asset managers across the world, Microsoft have decided to allow individual users to purchase licenses for Power BI, PowerApps, and Flow via self-service – that is, without any level of central admin oversight.
This move can easily lead to license non-compliance, software over-spend, and a weakening of data security and GDPR compliance. Microsoft say it is “based on customer demand” but I’m sure that pretty much everyone except the users will be against this as an idea. No IT admin, asset manager, procurement manager, or budget controller has ever wished it was easier for users to buy licenses off their own back!
As it stands, there is no way to turn this “feature” off although I feel this might be another one of the increasingly frequent scenarios where Microsoft “listen to feedback” and make some changes. It’s clearly an attempt to reduce the friction at the point of adoption for Microsoft’s Power Platform versus competitor products (such as those from Salesforce) and while the final users may welcome this change, it will only serve to stoke ill will with many in the corporate world I’m sure.
The licensing for Power BI, Flow, and PowerApps has a number of potential pitfalls and allowing decentralised purchasing by people where licensing isn’t a concern is a recipe for disaster. Equally, there will be plenty of cases where users don’t realise that they’re already licensed for some/all of these components, leading to companies paying for more licenses than required. Concerns around data also seem fair – this move will make it more likely that company data is stored in places that can’t be seen by the company overall.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 