Microsoft ended it’s Fiscal Year 2022 per July 1st 2022. The months prior to the closure of Microsoft’s financial year are always very busy, for all parties engaged. Of course for Microsoft itself and their clients. But also for their partners and supporting organizations. This includes us, LicenseQ . Throughout July 2021 up to July 2022 we supported many organizations and we noticed some insightful changes in/from Microsoft’s side throughout the year.

Please find the highlights below of the top 10 things that we noticed in dealing with Microsoft and are insights you can learn and benefit from:

— Erik Hollander, Negotiation Consultant & Co-Owner LicenseQ
Our Top 10 Learnings (random order)

 

  • Price Increases – The market is changing, price increases have been effectuated per last March and the market generally accepted this. Microsoft is of course still the market leader and this is very noticable.
  • Microsoft Internal Processes – Microsoft has outsourced the CPS (Customer / Channel Price Sheet) creation to a new company, they are now making all of the supporting documents. Average waiting time is currently somewhere between 2-3 weeks if there is no urgency from Microsoft’s side.
  • Change in tone – If you are deployed in the Microsoft 365 Cloud and are using most the services from E5; you could have a budget issue for your upcoming EA Renewal.
  • Decrease in discount – Microsoft is internally pushed to further reduce (or ramp down) discounts in EA and EAS. Depending on where you are located geographically and the Cloud saturation of your specific market; we typically see discounts are being reduced substantially.
  • Complexity Licensing – Microsoft is again rebranding their products and product lines. Typically this means new licensing rules and more complex licensing challenges are on the way.
  • On time Renewal – Microsoft has returned the “on-time renewal” metric internally, resulting in even more / higher time pressure from Microsoft’s side which gets pushed towards it’s clients.
  • CSP will replace EA – Microsoft is continuously reorganizing their internal sales. We foresee that in the coming year CSP will start to greatly expand opposed to the EA contract model and platform.
  • Negotiation Different Subsidiaries – If your organization is a global company: it can be of interest to deal with more than one Microsoft subsidiary. There are quite a lot of cultural differences though to take into consideration.
  • Role of the LSP’s – We see more and more that LSP’s are struggling to find SME’s when it comes to Microsoft Licensing. We see a lot of Clients being misinformed or simply be forgotten by the LSP.
  • Microsoft Pressure – Microsoft is changing the tone of the negotiation and is pressuring their customers, more than previous years.
Watch our YouTube video for more context

If you want to learn more about the topics described and touched upon in this post; please watch our video on YouTube. Floris and Erik touch base upon each topic in more depth so you can prepare yourself for an upcoming contract renewal or mid-term new business negotiation in Microsoft’s Fiscal Year 2023.

If you are in need of an unbiased and confidential supporting partner; we look forward hearing from you to see if and how we can support you and your organization to meet your goals and targets.

For even more information

If you want to learn even more: Please visit our YouTube channel and our LinkedIn company page and subscribe to stay up to date. We post regularly free and unbiased publicly available information and video’s. So you can to be prepared as much as possible for your next purchase, contract renewal or other (mid-term) negotiations wit Microsoft.