Latest news on Microsoft licensing, Cloud, and AI
Not much happening in May, this month we saw:
Products in the Core Services lists will store data at rest in the same geo as the service is deployed, part of Microsoft’s data privacy practices.
Microsoft have announced that the “App Governance add-on feature for Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps” will, from June 1 2023, be included in Defender for Cloud Apps at no additional cost.
This means organisations licensed with:
will receive access to what is currently a paid additional license free of charge. It’s not very often that Microsoft (or any software publisher) do things this way round!
Microsoft say they will either proactively cancel subscriptions or do so upon receiving a ticket, depending on the licensing channel.
Microsoft announcement is here.
Windows 365 Frontline is a new licensing option for Microsoft’s Cloud PC offering, aimed at “Frontline” workers who don’t need constant access to their own PC. This can be scenarios such as:
Each W365 Frontline license allows 3 Cloud PCs virtual machines to be provisioned, but they cannot be used concurrently. The maximum active number of Frontline VMs allowed is equal to the number of licenses you’ve purchased i.e. you’ve bought 20 licenses which enables 60 VMs…but only 20 can be in use at any one time.
W365 Frontline introduces the concept of concurrent licensing – rather than licensing ever shift worker, you instead buy enough licenses to cover the maximum number of desktops active at any one time. For example, 300 users who work in 3 shifts of 100 users = 100 licenses needed.
From a management perspective, the licenses will not show as assigned to users (as they are applied at the tenant level) so you will need to use the W365 utilization report to see how many licenses are being used.
Learn more here – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/enterprise/introduction-windows-365-frontline and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/04/06/windows-365-offers-flexibility-from-the-office-or-home-to-the-frontline/
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:
| Quantity | Price | EDU Discount (and Price) |
|---|---|---|
| 500 jobs | $25/mo | $7.50/mo |
| 10,000 jobs | $300/mo | $90/mo |
The standalone license is $4 per user per month.
Learn more about Universal Print here – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/universal-print-or-unlimited-print/ba-p/3788180
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:
Paid features include:
and more.
Defender CSPM protects all workloads across multi-cloud environments but is only chargeable for Server, Database, and Storage resources including:
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.
For more info and to see a complete list of free/paid features, head to the Microsoft site here – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/defender-for-cloud/concept-cloud-security-posture-management#plan-pricing
It’s the Microsoft Product Terms updates for April 2023 and, to paraphrase Puff Daddy and the Bad Boy Family…it’s all about Windows Server baby!
Some key changes that help to harmonise licensing across different platforms, which is a benefit for all of us involved!
Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server changes:
No longer need to allocate 16 licenses as a minimum
No longer have to assign stacked licenses in groups of 8
Confirms minimum of 8 core licenses for AHB VM
Licensing Win Svr by individual virtual OSE:
No longer need to allocate 16 licenses as a minimum
CSP customers with Standard licenses can use Datacenter images as guests when licensing by virtual OSE – but must follow Standard edition use rights
CSP-Hoster:
Customers do not need Windows Server CALs or External Connector licenses when accessing “server software acquired from, fulfilled, and hosted by a Cloud Solution Provider-Hoster”.
It’s been a while since there’s been much to say about the good old VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) – it’s been ticking along for years – but there is an update now. Many of its volume licensing features are being moved to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (MAC), this includes:
Note the latter two will both be found under “Contracts” in the M365 Admin Center.
This means customers will have one place to manage their VL and Subscription licenses…will the MPSA Business Center be merged too?
You can see more info from Microsoft here.
Power Automate has 2 new RPA (Robotic Process Automation) offerings:
which enable you to run Power Automate RPA in Azure to more quickly test, scale, and deploy.
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.
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:
as a base license and then you can purchase the Hosted RPA add-on which includes:
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:
Revenue = $17 billion…up 7%
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.
Revenue = $21.5 billion…up 18%
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.
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.
You can se the Microsoft details here.
Microsoft have announced plans to cut a further 10,000 jobs – a shade under 5% of their total workforce. As with previous rounds of job cuts, Satya Nadella has stated they’ll continue to hire in other “key strategic areas” likely including AI and platforms.
Microsoft will see $1.2 billion in charges in Q2 from these layoffs and also “changes to [the] hardware portfolio”.
This is part of a wider trend of layoffs across the industry recently including:
as the tech industry boom comes to a halt and companies look to re-focus and prioritise. Google have said that they expanded to quickly during the pandemic and now need to rationalise their workforce.
It will be interesting to see which areas within Microsoft see the brunt of these cuts, as that will really give insight into how they’re reshaping their business.
I wish everyone affected by this the best of luck.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 