View Recording: Preparing for Your Microsoft Renewal: How to Optimize Your Licensing

Nathan Lasnoski 0:14 Good morning or good afternoon, wherever you’re coming from, we’re gonna have a great conversation today about your Microsoft renewal and what to think about it. I think this is a conversation that a lot of companies are having. They’re going through a period where they are need to look at the future of their infrastructure, the future of their above the line application development, the way they’re using AI and all these things impact the Microsoft renewal. And we’ve had a lot of experience going through that with. Companies. So I’m really pleased to have the opportunity to spend some time with you today. I’m going to try to go at A at a fairly brisk pace, but I also want to have this period where after each section I give you a second to ask any questions that you have. So let’s liberally use the chat and as you have questions, drop them there and I’ll try to pause at each section to answer diverse questions about those sections. I’ll also have a period at the end where I’ll take questions too. Feel free to come off mute if you want to. But certainly. Put your questions in the chat. To introduce myself, I am mithal lozanowski. I’m concurrency’s chief technology officer. I’ve spent 20 plus years leading companies around how they’ve strategized their infrastructure. Their above aligned capabilities, their data state. Their executive tech direction, and I’m really happy to spend some time with you. The QR code is mine for LinkedIn. I would love to connect with you. On LinkedIn. In and chat about what your organization is doing. I produce a lot of content online, especially on AI topics and leadership topics. I have a newsletter every single week on AI topics and about 25 historical newsletters out there that I think you get a lot of value from. So check me out. Love to have some conversations with you. I also am a dad and a husband and a father. Triathlete. I love extreme skiing, so life’s adventure. Is a huge part of what I love to do, and these two things together have made just an awesome opportunity to be able to live life. So really looking forward to spending some time with you today and getting to know you better. So what are the outcomes from this discussion? The first thing we’re gonna do is talk about what is happening in the market, that impacts licensing, and for each of those sections, we’re gonna talk about what to focus on in the context of your renewal. So I’m gonna try to try to brain dump essentially so this may not be the most exciting content presentation, but it certainly will be feature rich. Presentation. If you know what I mean. There’s gonna be a lot of just sort of general brain dump information here and I hope you are able to walk away with at least one thing at the end of this. You’re gonna be asked to fill out a survey about how we can help you. There’s really. Two ways that we’re gonna be seeking to help you at the end of this. The first is we’re offering a free licensing renewal conversation. We’re gonna go through your licensing renewal. Talk about each of these topics. Help you to make some appropriate choices. And have a really impactful conversation with you and that’s on us. The other option is we have a 10 workshop full road map conversation and road map strategy engagement that we do. Typically I do that myself. So it’s a great opportunity for us to engage you around where you’re going with your Technology Strategy. How do we optimize it? How do we leverage your licensing to the best effect and where are some opportunities to be able to really implement an outcome that benefits your business? In all these diverse areas we’re talking about, I think you’ll get a ton of value from that. Every single one of those has been something that companies have gotten gotten value from. They had great remarks at the at the end, so love you to inspect both of those options and we’ll talk through all these different things today. So what are the mega themes? Like what are the things that we’re seeing in every organization? I’m not gonna talk through each of these right now because I’m gonna go through them one by one, but I’ll give you a second to scan this. There’s a lot up here, from AI to fabric to this. Whole CSP or not to CSP conversation and I left that at the end. The reason I left it at the end is because everything that we talked about before it kinda impacts it. So it’s a good opportunity for us to really cover something that broadly is a licensing discussion and and impact area that you probably have some questions about. Certainly many of the companies that we’ve done Rd. maps have had questions about that topic like do we go to the. MCA from our EA that’s now ending. Do we go to acsp? Do we combine two different options? There’s a lot of opportunity for us to be able to make some appropriate choices between each of those. O good opportunity for us to dig in and please ask questions as we go along. OK. So for the first topic, I’m gonna talk about what is on everyone’s mind and that is how you’re driving AI adoption across your business. Now this is one of the few areas I’m gonna do a little bit of intro into how to frame it and some of you have been at my previous presentations. You may have seen a little bit of this content before. For I promise you 95% of the content in this presentation is new to you. But this one little section I think is a good intro for people starting to think about how they adopt AI in their business. So many companies are at different stages, but there’s one thing that I think everyone is understanding is that there’s an impact that’s happening as a result of artificial intelligence in every business. And the data from the World Economic Forum is proving that it’s communicating that well over 80. Percent of organizations are prioritizing artificial intelligence as part of their Technology Strategy, and right behind it is robotics and autonomous systems. I was at Microsoft last week for the Microsoft MVP Summit and I can’t share with you the non disclosure information that I received there. But what I can tell you is that the this was the topic. This was the topic is how are we adopting AI to be able to change and implement? Progressive impact within our organizations. How we force multiplying the nature of our business and the mission of our business in the hearts and minds of our customers and right behind that was this idea of autonomous systems, whether they’re digital systems or the upcoming age robotics, that’s gonna impact many manufacturers and other organiz. As well. So what are organizations doing about it? What they’re doing about it is 3 principal things. The first thing they’re doing about is they’re implementing and re skilling plan within the context of their workforce. The second thing they’re doing is they’re hiring people to help them select the right tools. In the third is they’re hiring people that augment their existing team. They may not be able to depend upon entirely reskilling program, so they’re hiring individuals that impact that team. So why am I communicating on this one communicating it? Because this is a big component of how we’re thinking about the licensing changes this year. So one way to break that down is by thinking about it between two sectors, commodity and product engineering. But if you take these two domains commodity meaning. How every employee within your organization adopts artificial intelligence to be more and product engineering which is in building systems in building systems in the nature of your products, there’s four different domains that are sort of subcomponents of that and each of these have a licensing component. So there. The Microsoft Copilot or right off the right off the shelf. This idea of taking advantage of copilot that comes with your M365 licensing. There’s M365, copilot, and copilot, which is leveraging grounded information within your tenant to be able to provide you real and capable impact based upon that knowledge. Whether it’s summarizing a meeting and action items, it’s answering a question from the corporate corpus like finding the last. Meeting you had with someone or finding an answer to something, or creating themes across recorded meetings or scheduling a meeting on your calendar. Or it’s creating agents so agentset interact with. Uh ServiceNow in teams, it’s agents that perform task automation. It’s agents that interact with the business system and perform tasks for you. All of that is happening within semi custom automation as well as fully custom automation where you’re bringing something right in front of your customers. I was talking with a company yesterday where they’re launching a full customer service agent for every single one of their customers that has to. Be highly accurate and highly accurate across. A widely diverse set of products. They build. So it’s this opportunities to be able to leverage artificial intelligence across the stack at each one of these are impacted by your licensing choices. So a couple of things that you’re gonna wanna think about in the AI sector, the 1st is, have you rolled out the free Microsoft Copilot or called copilot Chat. This is actually a recent announcement from Microsoft that used to be you can only have the copilot. The free copilot inside of the web browser experience. And then after that you had the M365 copilot, which made it show up within your team’s experience. That’s not the same anymore. So now this can be inside your team’s experience and is then an opportunity for you to start building agents even if the user doesn’t have M365 copilot. So why does that impact your licensing? Well, you might find that not everyone in your organization needs M365 copilot. Many of them. Are perfectly capable of just using Microsoft Copilot because they don’t have a lot of grounded information. But you still want them to have access to a corporately secured tool like you don’t want them going out to ChatGPT or other platforms. You want them operating within a commercial data protection bounded environment. And that’s where you’ll be. If Microsoft will probably bring this up with you as well, the idea of pushing out Microsoft Copilot chat with every user, but then beyond that, you need to make an intentional decision to roll out whatever X is. The number of copilot licensees, 7365 copilot LIC. To your users, this is a really good time to make that decision. The reason why is because of this bottom line. There’s funding that’s available from Microsoft to help accelerate that deployment. And that’s something that we’re taking advantage of in virtually every customer. This idea that Microsoft is helping, not necessarily funding the whole thing, but they’re helping with the initial deployment of M365 copilot. And when you make larger decisions to be able to buy the M. 265 copilot licenses. There are different levels of funding that you get at different tiers, so you wanna make decisions that are attached to those tiers so you don’t miss out on that particular licensing. Another thing that you’re gonna wanna be aware of. Is that when you start using AI agents? Either those AI agents in attached with the free Microsoft Copilot or an attached with the M365 copilot. So imagine your teams. You’ve spun up an agent, such as a customer research agent. That could be done in only a matter of minutes. You spin up that customer research agent and you want to start using it. Well, if you have the M365 copilot license, that agent’s consumption is included in that license. If you do not have the M365 copilot license, but you’re using the free license, then you start to pay consumption against that agent. Now that consumption cost is really low. But it starts to add up as you release agents that are used by huge diversity of employees, right? So there’s two options. One is just pay as you go, which as we know like sometimes is the is the right choice because you’re only using a little bit. But what we’re finding is that organizations that they start to adopt A lot of AI agents especially. Ones that are not attached to M365, copilot. They’re ones that are a copilot user. That’s not spinning up an agent. You can start to purchase these consumption agreements or agent packs that essentially like lower the average cost of the consumption. So it’s a good time to say, OK, like is part of my strategy to enable every employee in my organization to leverage AI as part of their daily work if so? You should identify what percentage are going to be copilot free. For maybe the next year, what component, what percentage of my targeting that are gonna be M365, copilot. And then let’s think about the number of agents. I’m gonna start to be creating and whether I can buy agent consumption packs that start to lower that average. Cost of running those agents as they’re build, that’s also something that kind of attaches to the modern app story. But I’ll talk more about modern apps in a second. So this is a good a good point for you to be thinking about this story now. Also realize. That the next step is copilot studio, right? So as people start building agents, they naturally start building more capable agents. And I can tell you another thing. There is so much innovation coming in this copilot studio. I’m so excited about it from man. I was just busting a bunch of things I shouldn’t say. So there’s a bunch of really awesome things coming to Co PIL studio. Among what’s already there. So you’re gonna find a need to start using copilot studio as a means to build agents that are more capable. Environment, but maybe don’t step all the way into fully custom. Azure agents. So it’s a good opportunity for you to be thinking about where that sort of agent packs story comes into play. All right, I’ll pause. Here a second. Just checking to see if there were any questions. I don’t see any yet. Feel free to drop them in there as we’re going. I’ll be happy to loop back around. OK. So this naturally connects to the architecture approach for building and modernizing. Apps, as you’re moving down the road and you’re thinking, OK. Not only am I building these copilot agents and I’m adopting copilot studio, but I’m starting to build apps that I might be leveraging things like Azure AI Foundry for. So the most important this is a like we could talk all day about this topic, but I think the most important thing to understand is that if you’re in the game of building applications, the architecture of app development is simply changing. Is simply changing. Now I’m gonna talk about get up copilot in a second, but the architecture building those apps is changing and why that’s so important is because I’m going to be building applications that leverage AI agents as part of the story. Microsoft calls us an AI design win or a. Design where, like encompasses all the components of the AI model, but one other way to think about it is. You’re building applications that are not just forms over data. So as you’re starting to go through processes like your Microsoft Azure commit, so good opportunity to start thinking about what does this mean to the impact of my Azure licensing agreement both in the context of the data lay. And in the context of the greater story, so good opportunity for you to be thinking about that. Also understand that this is impacted by the Low Code building of apps as well. These two things connect. So if I’m building a set of agents that are sort of pro code agents that are built on semantic kernel that are operating with the Kubernetes cluster, maybe I want to start to design that in a way that can hand off to low code agents because maybe some. Of these, things might be cheaper to do on the low code side, so the architecture story here this is a great place for enterprise architecture to get involved. The architecture story really has an impact on cost. And there’s many opportunities for you to be able to apply. Reserves and such into this particular space, so. Without going into too much more detail on the development side, it’s really important that this be a part of your Mac agreement and we thinking about the pivot you’ll be making and how not only how you build applications, but also the context of building those applications. So this connects to the data strategy and this is one of the bigger changes that you’re gonna see in your agreement this year. So as we talk about data in the context of. Of your environment, you’re probably somewhere on this maturity curve. So you may be in a spot where like you never built a data estate, you’re still just dumping stuff out of your ERP system to excel. And doing pivot tables on it. Or maybe you built an on premise data stay, but it struggles to perform. Or maybe you kind of went down the road of, like, getting into an Azure data warehouse or you you implemented a snowflake instance. But maybe that’s gotten too expensive. Or you’re struggling with it. So there’s these different stages that you might exist and where we’re all trying to get to is kind of here, right? We’re all trying to get into the space of predictive, prescriptive and storytelling. What we’re seeing is that companies are starting to adopt fabric now. Most of you are probably power BI users. If you’re not a power Bi user, you’re likely a tablet user looking to be a power BI user. And even if you’re using Snowflake or something else for the actual data state itself, The thing is most of individuals who most of the companies are in power BI are now becoming fabric organizations. If in name only. And why is this super important? Well, it’s super important because first we’re all trying to cross this particular chasm. To get to a point where we actually have one trusted data environment, but we’re also then trying to drive insights on top of that data. So the first question I was asked is do you have a plan to get to that second stage if you’re still down in this sort of first three spots? Have you crossed that? And then are you in a position where you can start to build on that data because you have trusted data to drive those insights? Why this impacts your data state as these things. First, fabric licensing is the key change. Your P power BI capacity that you have in your environment is going to move whether you like it or not to fabric capacity. So there’s a couple licenses that don’t. I’ll show you that in a second, but if you are currently purchasing power BI capacity, it will move to fabric capacity. And there is a price change that is a component of that. So as a result of that, you should already be thinking like, OK, I’m a power BI user. I’m paying for the capacity. How do I start to leverage this? This infrastructure. That’s a software as a service infrastructure to be able to drive impact, because I’m probably already paying for it. It’s kinda like if you’re a company. I’ve seen this before, like when Microsoft moved the on premise licensing for M3 like Office 365 like People would buy exchange licenses and things like this and they kinda got forced into buying M365 licenses or. Office 365 licenses. And then there was companies that never, like, made the hop, right? Like they never went from the on premise exchange. To the cloud license they’re already paying for. It’s gonna kind of be somewhat similar to that, even though Power Bi is still cloud like you will be paying for fabric capacity even though you were previously only paying for power BI capacity. So what that means is like if you have. Data that you’re trying to bring into the cloud and make available for people to be able to view in a in a consolidated way. And you don’t wanna mess around with like deploying? As your synapse and figure out how to put a resource group out there and the Azure governance all that stuff, that’s what fabric is really there for. It’s like the OneDrive of data. Now if you already have a snowflake environment or a Google environment or whatever, and you’ve already invested in that, there are shortcuts from fabric into those environments that ease the process of keeping the data there. But surfacing it in power BI without having that intermediary hop. And I’ve just experienced the same thing with a dynamics environment. Like moving it out of dynamics into Azure Synapse and then out to power BI. It’s like Nope, you don’t need to do that anymore. It already got a connector into not just a connector like a live connector into that other data source called shortcut. So this is a really good time to be thinking about fabric and the context of that story. And another thing that’s changed is that this fabric capacity is now part of your Azure commit. That wasn’t the case with Power BI before. Now, fabric can like. So if you’ve made an Azure commit, you can use the fabric capacity to kind of decrement from that. And take advantage of other cost savings. So good opportunity to actively plan your fabric strategy in this context. And one other thing is that there is Microsoft funding for fabric deployment. So when you’re thinking about walking down this road, let’s investigate where Microsoft funding can augment that a little bit. Remember, none of these Microsoft funding’s like replace the cost of the project, but they do augment it and they are useful assets, especially if you’re making a pretty significant commitment. I’ve seen big, big opportunities in that that context. So this is a little bit of a view of how the power BI capacity moves in the fabric. So you can kind of probably find your licensing level and then how it translates into fabric capacity. These are F SKUs. One change that happened yesterday. So if anyone was paying attention to Fabcon, which is like. Sort of sounds like the fabulous conference, but it’s fabric. It is. They announced that every F SKU now has access to fabric copilot, so previously it was just at the F64 level in which made sense, right? That was the premium capacity level, but it also was a really big pain in the **** ’cause people below that couldn. Use it so you had to make a significant commit. Now you’re in a position where you could take advantage of that capability at these other skews so. If you’re starting to test fabric, you’re starting to go down the road and you don’t wanna make the big commit yet. There is an opportunity to start playing around with some of those features pretty early on in the story, so take advantage of that as well. Just check and see if there’s any questions. I don’t see any. Again, feel free to drop them in the chat as you have some questions that you want to ask. Oh, OK. Next topic, the end user computing. You can see this is like a menagerie, right? Like there’s you have to stick with me because it’s like, not particularly. It’s pretty dry, but it’s also a hopefully interesting content. So the next topic is your end user computing ecosystem, OK? So this is a. This is an interesting one. Well, they’re all interesting, but this is also like a different pivot. So the first question you have to ask yourself is like, what is the state of my unusual computing ecosystem? Have I moved to cloud? Joined from hybrid. Joined I was just contacted by a Microsoft Guy today who said, hey, I’ve got a company that has over 10,000 devices and they’re having all sorts of problems with startup times and how long it takes to do work and their boot times stink. And there’s a lot. Of different challenges with the end user device. They have to be connected to the VPN stuff, right? There’s all this like, it’s just a really. Crunchy, not great. Environment to to, and many of you have that like. Many of you have this long boot up time. Difficult experience. So the first question I ask you is what operating model am I running my intrusion computing environment in? Have I moved to cloud join from hybrid? Joined we’re in a position now where the Bell curve, if you had everybody’s had a bell curve right, you know there’s like the very early bleeding edge. And then there’s the early adopters. And then there’s like early fast followers. And then there’s kinda like this mainstream, right? The mainstream zone. Where you’re like, you’re able to say hey, like most people are doing this now. That’s kinda where we are with cloud join. You can pretty much do everything you want to do on Cloud joined that you previously had to be on hybrid joined for. So if there’s one step that you can make to kind of overall improve your environment and then start to optimize your licensing is to move to cloud joined? There’s even tools that can facilitate the movement from your hybrid joined devices. Man, I went through a project where like we tried to do that 3-4 years. Go and it was like a pain in the buttuck. Us, but now it’s actually pretty easy to move from hybrid joined to cloudjoin via some third party tools or just to deploy every new device that way. So this is a good opportunity to decommission those old configuration manager servers. Get those servers off your licensing count. Move to intune. Only simplify the third party licensing that exists in the end user computing stack. It’s also an opportunity for Autopilot, so if you have people. Or even external service that you’re paying for that images. Those devices you can actually ship them straight from a CDW or somewhere like that, or wherever your hardware provider is directly to. That, that individual that’s that’s being onboarded and it would be cloud managed. So again, there’s there’s opportunity here. If you’re moving, this is one where, like if you already own E5, there’s not a lot of funding, but like if you’re moving from E3 to E5 because you’re adopting the full stack. And we’ll talk a little bit about security in a second. This is a good opportunity for you to look at some Microsoft funding there as well, though in full opinion in mind like this is just a good move in general, like even if it doesn’t impact your your licensing directly, it’s a good opportunity to say like what do. I own. Why am I not using cloud managed? Is there some like stick in the mud in my IT organization that thinks you can’t move off configuration manager? He’s probably talking about oh, no. Or is the old or it’s a. A feature that’s like nice to have but not really really required. So it’s a good opportunity to move to Cloud joined. OK. This is also a good opportunity in the engine computing space to think about your frontline workers as first class citizens. This is particularly the case with like manufacturing and healthcare, where you have a whole diverse set of individuals that use devices every day. But probably use a shared account and often times use a shared account in a really unsecure way. Because of how those SECU, those shared accounts have like domain user access across the environment. So they’re big security risks to probably the most important environment inside the business, like a manufacturing environment like as long as manufacturing is happening, we’re probably OK. But if all of a sudden I shut down my frontline, I’m in trouble. So good opportunity to enable the frontline worker log on for endpoints or at minimum, simply make them a first class citizen for communication and collaboration. That means that the identity that they receive, they get from the HR system, the HR system traverses through into the business systems that they’re accessing, or at minimum they join the company. The HR system tracks that they’re in the system. It’s facilitated in an automation from onboarding into them. Being a worker, you give them collaboration and communication from their device. Or maybe an AI enabled endpoint that exists in the manufacturing environment? Maybe even one enabled by voice and video. Maybe not something they even have to deploy on their phone, and there’s even capabilities like log in through QR code now. So there’s quite a bit that like when people think about logging on to manufacturing devices, they’re they sort of have in their mind of what that means. And a lot of that has changed and especially been modernized and with cloud joined devices it facilitates more secure OT environ. Than what we had been doing in the past. We’re like, you know what, my OT environment. Is safe only because I basically don’t connect to anything, which is probably still a good strategy for many parts of the environment, but as our manufacturing environments become increasingly digital, the nature of the identity of the individual that’s using that system, you want to know who it was. You want to be able to track it and you, but you also want to have a fast experience where you can move from user to user and sometimes that can be accomplished through like kiosk mode on the frontline device with the user being able to auth. To different types of applications. So something to think about is like what is the place of this in the context of your environment and looking at the frontline skew, there is a couple scenarios where like an E1 license is actually a better buy than the frontline S. So it’s a good opportunity to kind of think about that part of the comparison of the what license, the right pick then like an F3 for example. Like sometimes it goes F. 1E1F3. Depending upon the environment. OK. Let’s move into talking about your existing data centre. This this has come up quite a bit with companies recently, and quite the topic as of late. So the first thing about the existing data center is man like if I was, if I was an individual trying to figure out a way to kill a company, I’d probably be doing everything that Broadcom is doing with VM Ware right now. Like and I know they’re just trying to like SAP as much value out of that deal as possible. Possible, but it’s it’s basically like impacting every single organization that’s on VMware at the moment. So the Broadcom to Azure virtual. The ABS Azure VMware services is really really hot topic right now and I would recommend you get that study done. So it’s it’s free to you. Microsoft will come in and do it. They will give you a really nice report. It will give you the contrast between. What you’re doing now, and what you’ll do in the future, we can help get that queued up for you. It’s worth doing. In fact, you can get a quick version of that done just by dumping out the information from your VM Ware environment and they’ll do it in about like a day. So it you can do like really low impact versions of this that sort of give you the proof that you should do a bigger version of it. And it’s a it’s a good opportunity to kind of understand the environment better. What I’m seeing companies doing is they’re really strongly looking at things like Azure Local and Avs is a hot topic, meaning what do I have to do to reduce the impact of licensing from broad? My environment or it means like I’m just gonna move out to AVS and be done with my on premise data center. For the most part. So that topic really important, the next piece of this is, are you using your free arc benefits? This was a change that kind of passed over people’s head a little bit and is something that you can take advantage of. So Azure Arc is now available to all licensed devices, whether they’re in the cloud or not. So you it’s not really a licensing renewal thing as much as it is an opportunity for you to take advantage of a free feature. So it’s for update management inventory. It becomes part of the Azure resource graph. So you can interact with the Azure resource graph, kind of like a CMDB, in a way that you’re able to retrieve information about the devices and get health and status as well as security analysis of the devices. Really helpful. So take advantage of that feature and then the fourth thing. Here you can see is extended licensing. Now whenever I bring this topic up, someone will be like, well, we can just upgrade the server I. Yep you can. But why haven’t you? So as you get to end of support for your Windows Server 2012 and R2, one of the things we’re seeing pretty frequently when we do that Broadcom ABS study is there’s a pretty significant number of operating systems that are going to need. That extended support. So there’s a couple options that you can do. One is you can upgrade the OS of course. And that, of course, that’s the most recommended strategy do that. If you can’t do that because you don’t have time or you’re you’re dragging a whole bunch of servers along, or not even sure who set up this application. You have a couple other options. One is you pay for extended support and you keep it on your on premise environment. That’s fine too, but you pay it for extended support. The other option is when you put it in AVS or Azure. Native. You get. I think it’s three years of extended support as part of that license. So it gives you a little bit more time. I guess is the point. So if you’re thinking about the whole Broadcom abs thing and you have this extended licensing scenario, it is a good opportunity to think like, OK. How do I kill the two birds with one stone quickly and then go toward modernization as a strategy? So then you get to this like when to migrate to native instead. So like some people are thinking like cool abs is cheaper. I’m just gonna move to abs. Great. That’s the strategy. The problem with ABS is it’s just like virt VM. Ware it is VM Ware. So it may be fine for now, but it also doesn’t really do a lot to educate your team on how to operate in the cloud. So many organizations wanna take that next step of migrating it into native virtual machines. Cost a little bit more, but it’s also a great strategy to normalize the operations of the environment between the virtual machine ecosystem and the native native cloud deployment ecosystem. It’s all using the same language, same whether using Terraform. Arm or bicep to deploy. It’s all using the same kind of language for the deployment and structures versus ABS, which has got a little bit not in common with that. I mean, it has some in common, but it’s essentially operating in a VMware environment. My main point here is that staying as is doesn’t really work, and it’s a good opportunity to to inspect both options. OK, checking for questions. Don’t have any. OK, driving cloud efficiency. So moving from your on premise data center into the ideas around your cloud environment? So first thing is, man, oh man, have I seen a lot of inefficiency that exists in cloud environments as a result of the lack of fin OPS competency. That’s not saying anything negative about anyone. It’s just this takes time and effort for organizations to really put the right to get the right fruit out of. So it’s a good opportunity to impact in a fin OPS efforts. Why do I say that first? Will I say that first? Because most of the time Microsoft’s trying to get you into an Azure Mac. Or to apply reserves and optimization. Both of those are really healthy things to be doing, especially your licensing renewal. You should be buying reserves 3 or one year depending upon the lifecycle of the device or server, or like aggregate servers really because you can move them around. It’s also an opportunity for you to do some optimization to discern what kind of reserves you’re buying, and then based on that plus the things that you well, good thing to remember is that you can’t combine reserves and the Mac. So like things that are in Microsoft Azure commit so you can’t take a reserve for the most part. A reserve is like a big discount, right? It’s like 66% for a three-year reserve on a virtual machine. So it’s a big impact. You can’t also take a Mac discount, but there’s other things in your portfolio that you may not have a reserve on, but you’re spending a lot on. And that’s where the Mac is gonna provide additional benefit. So typically you’re gonna combine those two things together. You’re gonna have. The reserves you’re going to have, Matt, the covers everything kind of like an umbrella and then you’re going to get a benefit from that and why you do a phen OPS effort sort of ASAP before doing that is because that gives you an ability to say, do I? Even need this server anymore. Like what? Can I shut off? Like, that’s the big story. Like we’ve lifted huge environments to the cloud and then the next step is always what do I gotta do about this? Like, what do I gotta do to like, do I need the server? Do I need the application? Should I cut this back? Should I like really be keeping backups at this like cycle? A lot of opportunity for optimization, so you haven’t done anything there yet. Well, certainly we can help you. That’s something that we love to talk about, but it’s an opportunity also for you to think about. Like, how does this all relate to my Microsoft renewal? Hopefully that reserve conversation helps you out. OK, your security story. Man, has this been something that companies have had plus and minus conversations on. So what I did for this is there’s an organization in Microsoft called DART. It’s hopefully an organization you’ve never heard of. It is the organization that responds to compromise like ransomware, compromise or other kinds of major compromises that get pulled in to help customers recover. OK. And they have done some really nice write ups on lessons from dart. One of them’s a little old, but it’s really the same. The same like has Windows 10 in and stuff, but like it really is the same topics across the stack. So all of this are things that you should be thinking about in the context a we talked about some of these on the way here, but be there. Things you should be thinking about as you are getting into this licensing renewal. So the first is like how well does my environment represent Azure trust architecture? What I mean by that is like go back to the cloud joined story like are my devices. On the CORPNET or on like essentially a guest net and the only way they’re on a guest net is if they’re not Windows Active Directory joined their enter ID join cloud join only and cloud managed. And even if they’re VPN ING in, it’s better than me being on the actual Corp net. And then how do how have I isolated my OT environment but still given them a digital? Advantage. So that whole architecture all relates to like how am I using these modern technologies? Have I started to take advantage of privileged identity management as part of my story? So as I think about what? The the authentication approach is to any of my applications. Have I taken advantage of PIM and Pam as part of my apps or my administrative environment and take advantage of licensing that I likely have as Azure or? Enter IDP two or my E5 investment that relate into that. Also the identity story. So most organizations have a pretty weak identity provisioning system. So like, they’re starting with like a manual script or they load them up individually and into Windows Active Directory and syncs to enter ID. Or maybe they have like a very basic script from their HR system, but other stuff comes in from the side. It’s a good opportunity to look at that reason why is enter ID has a series of. Of different licensing components to it. As you’re thinking about the provisioning process, why is it so important? Well, your identity is the baseline for how every system operates within the environment. Why is DART bringing up? Because the way they recover many of these on premise active directories is resyncing from the cloud back on premise. Like the the Windows Active Directory is torched and they need to leverage the enter ID environment to get everything back. So it’s a good opportunity to know like, well, if that happened, like how do I get my identity ecosystem back and how dependent am I actually on my Windows Active Directory domain controllers? Because that’s probably one of my biggest threats in the environment is the exposure that those have. This is also a conversation where every user has an identity. It’s also so it goes back to that, like frontline workers story, this was a big topic, the simplified environment. So it mean this this is I think where the Azure arc component comes in. It’s where have I standardized the end user computing fleets on cloud managed? Have I optimized the operating system so I don’t even need extended support in this last piece? Is lapse what you probably are using? Or hopefully you’re using on the workstation side. There’s now a cloud laps version, so like things like that are things that people come up with like oh, I can’t go to Cloud joined because I print. I can’t go to Cloud joined because I have laps. Well, there’s cloud. Lapse. There’s Cloud Print. There’s a whole diversity of, like other options. And then I would recommend the report from DARP DARP. Sorry. That describes how they standardize, modernize in the architecture stories around it. It’s not so much a licensing story as like a thing to know and think about in the context of how I’m simplifying my environment. I really think that simplification story in the licensing optimization that comes along with it, especially with E5, is a is an undervalued piece. Of this, simply because it’s a place to, like, make the way things work together. A more seamless environment and one that the users. Have a better experience with than having like 13 agents on every device. So good opportunity to kinda think about that, OK. So we picked our last topic and then I’m really gonna dig into any additional questions that you have, which hopefully you’re storing them up. So this question is to CSP or not to CSP a lot of text on here. I didn’t do a good job of making this very readable. So let’s talk about CSP. CSP we used to be. Just for the small companies. So if you were an SMB company, you know 250 users or less, you know, your your probably an organization where CSP licensing cloud was was the option that you had access to. You didn’t have access to enterprise agreement that then went up to 500 users, OK. So like, it’s incrementally gone up, but even at that point for us, even was like, OK. Yeah, that’s a small we worked mostly with some larger organizations. So like it wasn’t really. For us, for many of the customers we’re working with was for some of the smaller customers we worked with, but not for most of them, that changed. That’ll change this year, so CSP is now becoming a normative licensing model for. The sort of medium business space, if you had a, let’s say 2000 users or less enterprise agreement, you’re probably getting like maybe not pushed into a CSP. But at least offered a CSP. I would recommend. And competitively looking at the CSP market as a way to determine if there’s opportunities for you to save. But I want you to understand some of the context around this and where you might not use it. So first the move to MCA Enterprise is so like if you are a EA customer, you will either move to CSP or you’ll move to MCA Enterprise. OK, like there is no EA anymore. Like you will move to one of those two things. So if you move to an MCA enterprise, it can unlock certain funding vehicles. That partners. Use. It can have a decreasing discount. It can have a discount level associated with it, just like you have with enterprise agreement. So you can, if you’re offered the MCA enterprise, you can stay on the MCA enterprise. If you’re moving to MCA Enterprise, now can be a good time. If you are just starting on your Azure story because the Azure tenant is one of the hardest things to move off of when you are a CSP. When you’re on CSP, so like if you had made a big CSP investment. And you had moved into Acsp owned Azure tenant? It’s difficult to move off of that tenant into another agreement type and that’s just neither here nor there. It’s just a. It’s just a fact of that. It’s actually hard then to move the reverse direction too. So like if you run MCA Enterprise Azure tenant, you can’t just move to a Azure CSP tenant like they are tenants that would require an actual migration as part of that move. So if you’re like. I don’t want any other organization. Having ownership over my Azure tenant, I wanna be able to switch my licensing relationship whenever I feel like it. Then you’re probably better off, at least on the Azure side. Being on the MCA agreement if it’s offered to you. However, if you want additional discounts and you want to take advantage of some like competitiveness in the market, then MCA for Azure can be a great move. So. You can mix and match actually, so you can mix and match MCA and CSP. So for instance, you could have an MCA for Azure, but the CSP would be on M365. So like if you’re making a huge Azure commit like you’re saying, well dude, we’re gonna spend like $10 million in Azure this year like you should be on an MCA. Like, don’t be on a CSP for that. But maybe your Office 365 licensing, you’ve got 500 users and you’re like, I just wanna get the best deal. Good opportunity to be looking at this CSP licensing for your M365 in agreement. The M365 licensing is easy to move it in renewals between CS, PS. Essentially they terminate and then you can move to wherever you want. For the MCA, you need to wait for it to end. There is some ability to transition within that space. Also know that Mca’s. Excuse me the Csps have a lot of I think they actually have more. Licensing discounts available than the MCA enterprise. So if you are a moderate M360. 365 environments and you’re trying to get the best deal possible. Ci is robably for you. Or if you have a small Azure environment and you are anticipating growing it, but you don’t anticipate it being huge, maybe CSP is also for you in that space. Or you might mix and match, so if you’re getting through this and you’re like, oh man, I’m as confused as I was when I came in. I’m not that surprised because there’s a ton of options, but know that both are available to you and both have different options. So CSP. Let’s just do a quick summary again, CSP. Lot of flexibility in M365, less flexibility on Azure. A lot of opportunities for discounts on the M365 licensing, a lot of flexibility on the M365 licensing and there is some funding available that you can take advantage of if you’re a larger organization, you may be able to mix and match even. Between those two on the MCA side, it’s only for larger organizations. And you’re going to have access to different types of funding vehicles that the CSP will not. Big commits are gonna. You’re gonna wanna go toward the MCA enterprise on the Azure side. CSP is a little bit more flexible on the O365 between the two. And you sort of lose between the two. One thing on the other thing to know is that your Microsoft reply doesn’t care per SE like they get paid on both. If you’re smaller and you don’t have a Microsoft Rep, then you they really don’t care. Because they’re not part of the story. So you’re working with like a, you know, a bigger licensing provider if you want to dig into this more. This is exactly why we have that one hour follow up. We work with Csps, so we have like a partner CSP, Pax eight that we work with. We love to dig in more and talk about how we make this an optimized story for you. So that’s a good opportunity for that one hour follow up is if you just want to hey, dig into the CSP story at minimum like this is a good opportunity for us to really dig into that part of the story. Or dig into the whole story and really have a great conversation. So I’m happy to answer more questions about this part of it as well as we get to this. So OK. So this is the next steps I talked about at the beginning. We would love to do that complimentary one hour Microsoft licensing review. We will send you some asks for homework in conjunction with that review. So we can make it really effective and meaningful for you. So it’s not just a conversation, it’s actually us reviewing your licensing. So I think that would be a great. A great one step like. Hey, we’re offering it as a complimentary thing. The four week road map engagement have I think is super valuable for organizations trying to figure out where they go from here, especially in the context of this entire story. Why, of course I do. Because I’m the one delivering it or partially delivering it. So it is, but I’ve found organizations have seen tremendous value from being able to get all this put together into one story that they can tell to their executive leadership, understand how they prioritize from here, what efforts should come first, second. And 3rd. And then align that with their licensing recommendations. So a lot of opportunity for you to be able to paint that picture appropriately for your executive team and know where to go from here, OK. So I hit you with the firehose. Hopefully that was interesting and now I’ve got a good 10 minutes for for questions. So I’d love to you feel free to come off mute or drop in the chat. I’m here for the next 10 minutes. Unless you guys don’t have any for me to answer questions for you so. Feel free to feel free to drop them out. Let’s talk. See a few people typing. So I’m just gonna wait a second while they’re typing. Should have like a whole music at this point. OK Azure discounts. Is there any financial advantage to making it Azure commit versus entering a Mac? Or is a Mac the cost advantage? Yeah, great question. It’s really a combination of the the Mac and Azure commander are basically the same thing. So like the two things that you would want to do, first, reserves are usually a larger discount level than the Mac itself. So you’re gonna wanna use reserves as the first vehicle to reducing the cost within the environment if you can. However, let’s say you’re not sure how to apply all those reserves, and you do it up to a like percentage of the spend. Then the consumption above that is a great place for that Azure commit, and that’s where you can say, hey, Microsoft, we’re gonna have this, like, rowing cost over the next two or three years. That’s gonna go from this to this to this. How can I get a better discount level on the whole thing even when I’m not using a reserve? It’s also an area where you can get other funding, so when you make those kinds of agreements, they can throw in things like esif partner funds or if you’re doing a big migration. There’s a lot of partner led funding that’s available to help augment that. Of course, it’s always a *** for tat, right? Like you’re if you’re doing one thing, you get the other right. So that’s where the Microsoft funding comes from. But that’s that’s the story with the Azure funding now. Note there’s a lot of different reserve types, so like most people, when they think reserves, they think virtual machines like that is one of them. There’s like 16 other types of reserves. So like that might be that might be a stretch. There’s like at least 16 other optimizations. But there’s a lot of other reserve types and more everyday, especially around the AI workloads. So take advantage of that. Like, really look through the reserves that are available to you. So you’re not overspending for what you are gonna already be having an environment out there for. That was a great question. Thank you. Any other questions? No. OK. All right. Well, don’t forget to fill out the form. Oh, I’ll stick around. Wait to see if there was another thing. Don’t forget to fill out the form. I’m thankful for the opportunity to spend some time with you. I hope you have a wonderful day and we’ll look forward to checking you next time. Thank you for spending some time. Have a great day.