Microsoft Universal Print is a cloud printing service that removes the need for on-premises print servers and printer drivers and makes printing from anywhere easier for users and organisations.
Previously, each user licenses with Windows E3 received 5 print jobs per month which were added to a central pool. Microsoft have now added an allowance of 100 print jobs per month for Microsoft 365 E3/E5 users:
License
Jobs Per Month
Microsoft 365 E3, E5
100
Microsoft 365 A3, A5, F3, Business Premium
5
Windows 10 Enterprise E3, E5, A3, A5
5
Universal Print (standalone)
5
If you have 1,000 M365 E3/E5 licenses, you now have 100,000 print jobs available each month. For organisations where this pooled allowance isn’t enough, additional print jobs can be purchased:
Microsoft have introduced another member of the Defender family – Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM).
Certain features are available free of charge in any environment where Defender for Cloud is enabled, these include:
Asset discovery
Security recommendations & compliance with Microsoft benchmarks
Secure score for posture
Paid features include:
Attack path analysis
Cloud security explorer
Advanced threat hunting
and more.
Pricing
Defender CSPM protects all workloads across multi-cloud environments but is only chargeable for Server, Database, and Storage resources including:
VMs
Storage accounts
OSS DBs
SQL PaaS
SQL Servers
Pricing starts from May 1, 2023 and is $5* per billable resource per month but there are discounts available for Defender for Cloud customers:
Current Defender for Cloud Customer
Automatic Discount
Defender CSPM Price
Defender for Servers P2
25%
$11.25/ Compute or Data workload / month
Defender for Containers
10%
$13.50/ Compute or Data workload / month
Defender for DBs / Defender for Storage
5%
$14.25/ Compute or Data workload / month
*Pricing was initially announced as $15 per billable resource per month but was later reduced to $5. It also appears the above discount structure has been removed.
Power Automate has 2 new RPA (Robotic Process Automation) offerings:
Individual Hosted Machines
Hosted Machine Groups
which enable you to run Power Automate RPA in Azure to more quickly test, scale, and deploy.
Individual Hosted Machines
Currently in preview, these aim to make it quick and easy to test both attended and unattended flows without the need to set up physical machines.
Hosted Machine Group
This provides auto-scaling and auto-provisions additional bots as needed when initial capacity for unattended flow bots isn’t enough. It also provides dynamic load-balancing between different groups, ensuring one isn’t adding more VMs while another has several sitting idle.
To use either of these hosted options, users require:
Power Automate per user plan w/attended RPA add-on or
Power Automate per flow plan
as a base license and then you can purchase the Hosted RPA add-on which includes:
Hosted machine
Unattended desktop flows
5,000 AI Builder credits per month
and costs £162.10 per bot per month.
If you’re using Hosted Machine Groups, you need to assign 1 x Hosted RPA add-on for each bot you want to run in parallel. I’m not currently sure how this works in relation to the auto-scaling feature…do you have to have licenses available for the maximum number of bots you’re willing to run (something you can set as an admin) or is there a “pay in arrears” option where you’re billed monthly?
Furthermore, I imagine there will be additional Azure costs although I’m yet to confirm that.
Microsoft’s financial results for the 2nd quarter of FY23 (Oct – Dec 22) don’t make the usual pretty reading this time.
Revenue was $52.7 billion – an increase of just 2%
Net income was $16.4 billion – a decrease of 12%
That’s the first decrease for a long time, showing even Microsoft are not immune to the impacts of rising costs and global recessions. However, it’s not all doom and gloom:
Productivity & Business Processes
Revenue = $17 billion…up 7%
Office 365 Commercial revenue up 11%
LinkedIn revenue up 10%
Dynamics 365 revenue up 21%
All increases but quite a bit lower than we’re used to from previous quarters. Office Commercial (i.e. on-premises) has dropped 30% as customers continue to move to the cloud.
Intelligent Cloud
Revenue = $21.5 billion…up 18%
Azure = 31% up
In most scenarios, 31% growth is good, great even…but not for Azure after a couple of years of 50%+ growth! Although the most recent quarters dipped just below that 50% marker, this quarter still represents a significant drop. Microsoft do mention higher energy costs as a factor in the decreased margin.
Earnings call
There are now 12,000 Azure Arc customers, a 100% increase in 12 months.
45,000+ Power Automate customers – a 50% increase over last year.
Satya Nadella mentions new functionality to build workflows from natural language prompts…that would be really useful for me!
280 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) for Teams
Teams Phone added over 5 million PSTN seats in the last 12 months and is the market leader
Microsoft Security is now over $20 billion and Nadella states they’re taking market share in all the major categories. He also states that a customer has consolidated from 10 security vendors down to just Microsoft – this is something I often advise that organisations explore.
EMS is now at 241 million seats.
Overall, LOTS of mentions of AI from Satya Nadella (as expected) and a real focus on the future with AI, Platforms, Viva, E5 and more. The expectations for future growth and advances seem to more than outweigh the slight disappointment of these results.
A very quiet month as you’d expect – the 2 main updates are:
Clarification that Microsoft Defender for Endpoint/Cloud/Business products can be used on devices running on-premises, in Azure, and under the control of 3rd-parties
Information added about the EU data boundary service – see more here
The EU Data Boundary is a geographical area within which Microsoft has committed to store and process customer data for the majority of their online services. This is aimed at addressing concerns around data processing/location and GDPR, held both by customers and organisations such as the European Union.
It is comprised of countries in the EU:
and EFTA:
For my fellow Brits, notice the United Kingdom isn’t included #Brexit
Currently, datacentres in the following countries are being used:
although Microsoft may add additional datacentres within the EU/EFTA over time.
How it works
Azure
Regional resources deployed within an EU Data Boundary region will be in-scope. For non-regional services, there is info here on how these can be configured within the EU Data Boundary. Note, not all services have yet been re-architected to allow this.
Dynamics 365 & Power Platform
This is based on the location of your billing address and, this, tenancy.
Microsoft 365
If you have a billing address within the EU/EFTA, you’re in scope…unless you have purchased the Multi-Geo capabilities add-on license.
Which products are in-scope?
According to the January 2023 Product Terms, the EU Data Boundary can apply to these products/services:
The Product Terms also lists half a dozen scenarios where data may still go outside the EU Data Boundary, these being:
Microsoft announced their results for FY22 Q4 and the full year and, as expected, the numbers are big and the percentage increases are (mostly) double digits. For the full year, revenue was $198.3 billion (an increase of 18%) and operating income was $83.4 billion (up 19%).
There were a few different things that negatively impacted the numbers in Q4 including:
Exchange rate changes – many of the “constant currency” growth figures are 5 or 6% higher than actual
COVID shutdowns in China cost over $300 million of Windows OEM revenue
Scaling back in Russia cost $126 million
An interesting one this – due to a “strategic realignment of…business groups”, Microsoft spent $113 million on employee severances.
but let’s take a look at some of the highlights for Q4:
FY 22 Q4
Revenue for the final 3 months was $51.9 billion, an increase of 12%.
Operating income was $20.5 billion, up 8%
Productivity & Business Processes
Revenue = $16.6 billion (up 13%)
Office 365 Commercial up 15%
LinkedIn up 26%
Dynamics 365 up 31%
Intelligent Cloud
Revenue = $20.9 billion (up 20%)
Azure up 40%
Earnings call highlights
Cosmos DB grew 100%+ YoY each quarter in FY22
25 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) for Power Platform
Office 365 E5 is now 12% of the installed base (up from 8%)
Security revenue up 40%
Azure Virtual Desktop MAU almost 60% YoY increase
Office on-premises down over 30%
25% of Fortune 500 using Viva
All these product areas are doing what Microsoft want them to do. As well as them innovating and creating products in the right areas, it also shows that their sales activities – direct and through partners – are paying off.
They said that E5 was strong both for renewals and new additions and Amy Hood mentioned they’re focusing on deployment and increasing usage of the suite. This makes sense as there are so many components of E5 these days that even customers getting value from E5 – typically via Office, Power BI, and a bit of security/telephony – have got some much more they could be using. I’d expect partners will be incentivized to get their customers utilising more of the E5 suite and it may mean that customers can use it to their advantage to extract concessions, POC funding etc. from partners and/or Microsoft.
On a similar note, Satya Nadella mentioned that Microsoft are now incentivizing their field sales teams to ensure that customer’s Azure bills “come down” through optimization efforts. This is a good thing to see from a cloud vendor and will hopefully lead to some legitimate savings for customers.
Announced at Inspire 2022, the Microsoft Digital Contact Center (MDCC) is the latest in a relatively recent line of “Products that are actually bundles of other products and parts of other bundles” – namely the various “Industry Cloud for…” and the “Intelligent Data Platform”.
The MDCC is comprised of:
Dynamics 365
Teams
Power Platform
Nuance
It’s interesting to see Nuance appear in something outside the Cloud for Healthcare…Microsoft clearly had some plans when they made that acquisition! This new offering focuses in all the areas you’d expect such as:
Omni-channel engagement
Customer self-service
AI powered virtual agents
Voice & video engagement
Biometrics and customer security
Analytics
AI powered support & knowledge articles
Microsoft look to be using established partners in this areas to deliver solutions based on MDCC, at launch these include:
Accenture-Avanade
EY
HCL
Hitachi
KPMG
PWC
Avaya
and more. Check out more information from Microsoft here.
A new “Cloud for…” has been announced and this one – Cloud for Sovereignty – is aimed at helping Public Sector organisations make the most of, and thus use more of, the Azure cloud. It does this by offering enhanced capabilities to meet the various rules and regulations around data location and access such as the GDPR.
A key focus for public sector organisations is the location of data and Microsoft say they will soon be adding the “EU Data Boundary” which will ensure all EU & EFTA customer data is not only stored in the EU but also processed there too.
Sovereign Controls
Microsoft say these new protection and encryption capabilities will span the entire Microsoft cloud from IaaS & PaaS through to SaaS such as M365, D365, and Power Platform.
Governance & Transparency
This will give eligible organisations access to source code and the ability to audit Azure compliance processes.
Expertise
Microsoft position this as a partner-led offering and it seems this is, at least partly, related to the recent cloud licensing changes they announced for “European” cloud providers.
