Another relatively quiet month in Feb 22 but there are a couple of things to note:
Microsoft have added a number of education and government SKUs to the eligible SKUs for a range of add-on licenses. This includes Office 365 A1 being an eligible pre-requisite for Business Voice and bringing the Privacy Management SKUs to government.
The Azure “Hosting Exception” is now called the “Azure Customer Solution”
Microsoft have added another Industry Cloud to the Product Terms – this time it’s Microsoft Cloud for Retail.
I’m still working through some of the info and it doesn’t necessarily all seem complete yet but here’s the overview I can give so far.
Licensing
It is available as an add-on SKU, currently only Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is listed as an eligible base license to purchase the add-on. The Microsoft Docs site lists other licenses that are required in order to use certain elements of the retail cloud solution, these are:
Retail cloud feature
Required license
Omnichannel for Customer Service
Dynamics 365 Commerce / Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Microsoft 365 for Frontline Workers
Microsoft 365 (F or E SKUs)
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents
as well needing an Azure subscription to use:
Synapse Analytics
Cognitive Search
Intelligent Recommendations
Pricing
The Microsoft datasheet lists it as being $20,000 per tenant per month but also states that you “only pay for what you don’t already own“.
This makes sense as they won’t want to penalise customers who are already investing in some of these products but does suggest negotiations will be needed to get pricing…leading to the potential for different rates at different points of the year.
Availability
Available only via EA/EAS, Microsoft Cloud for Retail can currently be deployed from:
USA
Canada
United Kingdom
Singapore
Australia
and is available in English and French – the latter only being an option in Canada at the moment though.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 