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.
Microsoft have announced a new way for Azure Stack HCI customers to license their Windows Server guest VMs. The snappily titled “Windows Server subscription for Azure Stack HCI” (WSSASHCI) allows organisations to purchase Windows Server licenses via their Azure subscription.
Currently the versions available are:
Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition
Windows Server 2022 Datacenter
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2012 R2
Pricing
WSSASHCI is currently free in public preview but once it hits General Availability (GA) it will be $23.6 per physical core (in your Azure Stack HCI cluster) per month.
Microsoft’s financial results are, once again, fantastic. For Q2 FY22 (Oct – Dec 21) their headline results are:
Revenue = $51.7 billion, an increase of 20%
Operating Income = $22.2 billion, an increase of 24%
Net Income = $18.8 billion, an increase of 21%
That’s over $51 billion in 3 months – a single quarter bigger than recent annual revenues for companies like Oracle, Nike, and Coca Cola.
Looking at the separate business units we see the following…
Productivity & Business Processes
Revenue = $15.9 billion, up 19%
Office 365 Commercial up 19%
“Continued momentum” for E5
LinkedIn up 37%
Dynamics 365 up 45%
Power Apps up 161%
Office Commercial (i.e on-premises) down 17%
Intelligent Cloud
Revenue = $18.3 billion
Azure up 46%
“Significant growth” in long-term contracts (again)
Enterprise Mobility up to 209 million+ seats
Yet more strong double digit growth across all these product divisions, as we’ve seen so many times before over the last few years. Although the growth is still very strong with Azure, it’s perhaps worth noting that the % increase is dropping slightly over time…from 50 in Q1 to now 46…although this makes sense – as the base grows, maintaining the same % increase becomes more difficult.
We also saw that the security business surpassed $15 billion in revenue, up almost 45% YoY.
“Digital technology is the most malleable resource at the world’s disposal to overcome constraints and reimagine everyday work and life.”
Earnings Call
There is always plenty of great info in the earnings call and this quarter was no different.
Azure Arc has tripled its user base YoY as organisations expand hybrid environments.
New Azure customers include:
CVS Health
Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices
Kyndryl
Wells Fargo
Cosmos DB transactions increased 100% YoY
Industry Clouds are driving “significant usage” across Microsoft Cloud
Teams has 270 million+ monthly active users
Microsoft Viva has over 1,000 paying customers already
Microsoft Sentinel has over 15,000 customers – a 70% increase YoY
Satya Nadella also discussed “Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces” (currently in preview) which is focused on automating and managing physical processes. This is part of their “Metaverse” play for business.
Note that many of the new “exotic” products are being name checked here:
Azure Arc
Cosmos DB
Industry Clouds
Power Apps
Microsoft Sentinel
This really helps to highlight Microsoft’s future plans and the successful growth they’re seeing there already. It also seems that there’s plenty of room for growth over the next few years so it doesn’t seem that Microsoft’s growth will be slowing any time soon.
It’s the first Microsoft Product Terms of 2022 and, as expected, it’s a very quiet one.
A statement re: the end of Open Licensing confirms that:
“…commercial, government, education, and non-profit organizations won’t be able to buy new or renew software licenses, Software Assurance, or online services through the Open License program”
Another name change: “Phone System” is now “Microsoft Teams Phone Standard”.
Microsoft Viva Insights is an employee experience product from Microsoft that provides insights into how employees are spending their time – are they in too many meetings, are their meeting productive, do they have the time needed to focus on tasks, who do they collaborate with and plenty of other areas.
While it provides a range of pre-built views into that data, organisations are able to build their own too – known as queries. Users, known as analysts, are able to create queries against the vast amounts of data collected by Viva Insights in order to gain more specific…insights into their organisation.
This introduces a range of new metrics and price considerations for organisations. Viva Insights queries are licensed based on capacity credits and every query costs a certain amount of credits, based on factors such as:
The number of measured employees included in the analysis
The number of weeks of data included in the query output for each measured employee
The number of metrics used in the query
The type of metrics used from the different price tiers
Within the query designer it will give an estimate of the required credits:
How is it priced?
You’ll be pleased to know that Microsoft have introduced some low-level algebra to help calculate pricing, the formula being:
A*B*C*D/1000
Where:
A = measured population i.e. number of employees included in the query
B= metrics – there are a range of metrics to choose from
C = price tier cost – yep, there are different price tiers
D = week i.e. the length of time covered by the data being analysed
Price tiers
There are 3 price tiers:
Tier 1 = 1.25 credits
Tier 2 = 2.25 credits
Tier 3 = 6 credits
Tier 1 includes a total of 68 metrics (at the time of writing) such as collaboration hours andlow quality meeting hours
Tier 2 includes “advanced metrics” which, at the time of writing, is the “network query” group which includes 10 individual metrics dealing with connections and levels of influence between staff.
Tier 3 includes metrics with CRM data
An example of a query calculation is shown here:
I think it’s interesting that, although they have this formula, Microsoft state:
“The cost shown is only an estimate. The estimate might vary from the query’s actual cost, which can be seen after the query is successfully ran”
What if you run a query with multiple metrics at different tiers? You calculate as above for each metric and then add the totals together.
How do you get credits?
Each Viva Insights license includes 1 capacity credit per month, pooled across the tenant. If an organisation requires additional capacity credits, they are licensed in increments of 5,000 credits and costs $5,000 per month.
Unused credits expire monthly.
Insights v Workplace Analytics
Viva Insights is the replacement for Workplace Analytics but the latter doesn’t appear to have disappeared completely – the SKU still seems to be available and the Microsoft documentation talks about the differences between Viva Insights Consumption tenants and Workplace Analytics tenants. Analysts working in a Workplace Analytics tenant won’t see query usage or consumption units.
If you have eligible M365 licenses, you can receive a grant of up to 5MB per user per day for free data ingestion from certain sources. Microsoft say this will save $1,500 a month on a standard 3,500 user deployment.
Microsoft have announced that they’re launching a new add-on SKU “Teams Phone with Calling Plan”, which will replace the SMB focused “Microsoft 365 Business Voice” SKU as well as adding some Enterprise capabilities.
It can be added onto:
Microsoft 365 Business Basic
Business Standard
Business Premium
Microsoft 365 F1, F3, E3, A3
Office 365 F3, E1, E3, A1, A3
What’s included
Microsoft have stated the new SKU will include:
“A phone system and a domestic calling plan. Domestic calling plan includes 3,000 minutes for the US and Canada, 1,200 minutes in other available markets.
Adding toll-free numbers and additional minutes can be paid per use through Communications Credits and an optional international calling plan that includes 600 minutes/user/month can be purchased as an add-on.
Timeline
January 1, 2022
“Teams Phone with Calling Plan” SKU is available for purchase via partners.
Direct purchases via web will be available January 3 for US, UK, and CA and mid-January for all other markets where available.
March 1, 2022
Business Voice no longer available.
Customers who purchased Business Voice before this date will continue with their Business Voice subscription until its expiration date.
June 30, 2022
Last day to renew existing Business Voice licenses
Amongst the various elements of the Power Platform, Microsoft offer AI Builder credits. These are used whenever a creation needs to use the power of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence offerings – say for translating or scanning documents. Historically, these have been included with the Power Automate per User w/Attended RPA plan but an additional charge for all other Power Automate and PowerApps licenses.
However, according to a tweet* from Ryan Cunningham – the product lead for Microsoft PowerApps – they are now including AI Builder Credits with all per User and per App licenses…including those already purchased.
We're also now including AI Builder credits with every Per User and Per App license – and yes, that includes everyone who's already purchased.
AI is no longer a luxury. We believe it will quickly become table stakes for all business apps. Now it's easier than ever to build.
He also states that the API request limits are being increased from 5,000 per user per day to 40,000 per user per day.
*I know that tweets aren’t exactly the most legit of sources for licensing information and I will definitely be looking for this to be reflected in product documentation, licensing guides, and the Product Terms…but you’d hope it’s accurate!
Update December 9th, 2021
The new Power Platform licensing guide confirms the AI Builder additions:
Power Apps per App = 250 credits
Power Apps per User = 500 credits
Interestingly, there is a cap on accrued credits of 1,000,000…that equates to 4,000 Per App licenses or 2,000 Per User licenses and is worth $500 per month. This means large organisations will still find themselves spending money on AI Builder credits.
During their Ignite 2021 conference, Microsoft announced a range of name changes across their security portfolio – these are:
Old name
New name
Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS)
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
Azure Security Center + Azure Defender
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Azure Defender for IoT
Microsoft Defender for IoT
Azure Defender for Storage
Microsoft Defender for Storage
Azure Sentinel
Microsoft Sentinel
These are, I believe, all the changes but there may be some other “Azure –> Microsoft” changes that have taken place!
Whenever products change names, there’s the potential for confusion among partners and customers. While many of these are fairly straightforward, I can definitely see people getting confused between “Microsoft Defender for Cloud” and “Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps” 😂
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 