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Hello!

It's too late to say Happy New Year at this point but the thought is there 😂 I hope you had a great break and that 2022 is off to a great start?!

Even though January is generally a pretty quiet month, there are still some good additions to take a look at. As well as the updates below, there are 2 more things I want to mention:

Azure bill issues - Troy Hunt, of Have I been Pwned, recently posted about an Azure issue he experienced which caused his bill to be much bigger than expected. He goes into great depth around how it happened and also the steps he has taken to prevent it from re-occurring. If you are (or will be) dealing with cloud bills - definitely read up on it here.

Manage licenses in AWS - Continuing the cloud theme, I want to make you aware of AWS License Manager. It's designed to help with BYOL compliance for vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and SAP in AWS - I'll be diving into it more in the future but for now - check it out here.

If you've got any specific questions/thoughts about Microsoft/Cloud - feel free to drop me an email on rich@cloudywithachanceoflicensing.com - I'd love to hear from you!

See all the rest of the news below.

Have a good week 😁

Cheers
Rich

ps: Remember you can check out previous newsletters here if you want to catch up on anything you may have missed.

Microsoft FY22 Q2 results

Microsoft had another bumper quarter in FY22 Q2 (Oct - Dec 2021) with overall revenue of $51.7 billion and strong growth across all the focus product areas including:

Office 365 Commercial up 19%
Dynamics 365 up 45%
Power Apps up 161%
Azure up 46%

During the earnings call, it was interesting to see many of the newer products being called out by Satya Nadella as successful - these included:

Azure Arc
Cosmos DB
Microsoft Sentinel
Industry Clouds

This suggests that even as growth slows in existing areas such as Office 365 & Azure - which it must surely do - there are plenty of new revenue streams to keep driving Microsoft's growth in the future. I'd say the sooner you start looking at some of these products and understanding how they will fit into your environment/role, the better as they will continue to gain traction as we move into 2025 and beyond.

More earnings info and links to the Microsoft pages here.

Microsoft Viva Insights Consumption licensing

Microsoft Viva, the new family of Employee Experience products, brings not only new SKUs but also new licensing considerations.
Users are able to create bespoke queries against the swathes of data collected by Viva Insights - using Capacity Credits. Each Viva Insights license includes 1 credit and they're pooled across the tenant. If more are needed, it's $5,000 for 5,000 per month.
There are 3 different pricing tiers which cover almost 80 metrics and there is a 4 step calculation to define the final amount of credits:

Measured Population x Metric x Price Tier x Length of Time

This is a great example of how Microsoft licensing continues to evolve 😁
I cover the different metrics, tier, and calculations in more depth here.

Microsoft Product Terms - January 2022

Very quiet this month with just 2 key updates in January 2022:

Microsoft confirm that Open Licensing is done, over, finito
Microsoft Phone System is now "Microsoft Teams Phone Standard

Save money on Microsoft Sentinel

Customers with eligible Microsoft 365 licenses are able to save money on Microsoft Sentinel charges via a free grant of 5MB data ingestion per user per day (from certain data sources). Microsoft estimate this will save a 3,500 user company around $1,500 per month so it's worth taking advantage of if you're able to.
Eligible licenses include: Microsoft 365 E5/A5, Microsoft 365 F5 Security add-on, and Microsoft 365 E5/A5 Security.

More info and the full eligible SKU list here.

Azure Stack HCI Windows Server licensing

Hybrid is the future and Microsoft have announced a new mechanism for Azure Stack HCI customers to license guest Windows Server VMs.
"Windows Server subscription for Azure Stack HCI" will cost $23.60 per physical core in your Azure Stack HCI cluster but is currently free to try in preview.
More info and links here.