How to beat Microsoft at their own game with your Office 365 data

Okay, so today we want to talk about how IT directors can actually beat Microsoft at their own game, utilizing their own data to save anywhere between 20 and 40% on Office365 cost. And so wanted to talk about an organization, oil and gas services company, where they thought they were actually licensing office365 correctly. And the reality is they were. They weren't non compliant. But when they were able to actually analyze their usage data and get visibility into what was going on, they found out that they were licensing about 3,700 users, but they only actually needed to be licensing 3,300. So what that did was it decreased their Office 365 spend from about $700,000 a year or just under it, to just a little over 400,000, giving them about $300,000 a year savings. And the CIO was so shocked because they thought they were doing things right. They thought that it just was what it was. They thought that they were subscribing to their user cases properly. They thought they were buying the right O365 subscriptions. But when they got visibility, they realized they were paying for a lot that they didn't. And a simple switch on their anniversary date saved them almost $400,000. A second customer, which is a pharmaceutical company, they basically thought that all of their users were using everything that they thought. They thought everybody was using all the features of actually an E3 license. And what they found was that they had almost 1000 users that weren't actually using any technology or any of the Office365 services at all. And they had about another 2,000 or so that we're subscribing to the wrong, wrong thing. And so again, when we worked with this, the procurement director for IT couldn't believe that he had a thousand users that weren't even using email. But when they went in and looked at it, they found out that they were employees that were in distribution centers and they didn't use a single service of Office365. And so again, they were able to do something differently and save themselves nearly $300,000 a year on their O365 subscriptions. And so the third case study that I want to use here is a state court system where basically they were licensing without very much visibility. They were just kind of taking their active directory and syncing that into Azure and buying subscriptions. But within four months of working with their data, they were able to actually reduce their subscription costs by almost 40%. And again, it was simply by looking at Users that they weren't used, that weren't using like licenses, where they had service accounts, assigned licenses and things like that. And when they were able to clean that up, they were able to reduce their cost by almost 40%. Again, another example of where just not having enough data, they thought everything was okay, but it was very simple for them to make these changes and take advantage of these savings. But they had to have the data. And so when you look at, you know, sort of a cross section of some user cases here, this does work for pretty much any size organization. You can see that most organizations are decreasing their subscriptions anywhere between 4 and 17% and they're getting savings from, you know, the lowest was 5%, but there was definitely an ROI there to as high as 40% and the average is somewhere around 25% when you start to look at your data and take that cost out. So who's this for? It's really for anybody that's a budget holder and who wants to be compliant with Microsoft licensing but are struggling with how confusing and complex their licensing programs are. Most of the times people will say things like, we feel like Microsoft has the deck stacked against us. They create all these bundles. They're confusing. They only offer discounts on purchasing, you know, the bigger tiered bundles. So, for example, an E3 versus an E5, you know, we don't need all that, or we don't know what we need, or we think all our users are using all the features. And so these are the sorts of things that we hear. But if you really want to be somebody that can decrease and take advantage of that 25% savings and go home at night not worried about how much Microsoft is impacting your budget or how you can get some budget back, this is a great solution for you. The other problem that a lot of organizations have is there's not enough resources or hours in the day to get at the data. So a lot of the times what we'll hear is, well, I was licensing it that way and I'm continuing to license it that way because the amount of effort in order to clean it up and keep it clean, we just don't have the resources. We have an Office365 administrator that it is a portion of their job and they just don't have the time to do that. But if you're one of these people that suspects that Microsoft has sold you more than you need, you're probably right. And I'm going to show you how you can get that money back. So the truth is it is possible to decrease your office365 spend by up to 40%. And if you have the right information. The challenge is, quite often we don't have the right information. The other thing is, Microsoft doesn't make getting this information easy. They make it difficult to understand not only the data that you need, but also how their licensing bundles work. Just for example, try and understand the difference between a Microsoft 365E5 and a Microsoft 365E3, and what you can and can't do with the security products that are included in both of those. It's complicated. And so if we take a look here, I'm just going to pull up our Office 365 portal and just say, okay, let's go in and take a look and see what sort of reports I get. So if I go into the portal, I can get reports and there's usage reports here. So let's see what I can see. So just give this a second to load. So I can see I have active users on Office365 or Exchange or OneDrive or SharePoint or Teams. We're not on Skype anymore, we're on teams. So you can see I have active users, but if I click it, I can't click into this to see which users. I can't see if all my users are using all the features, therefore need to follow O365. Again, I can see that I have 22 unique active users on O365 services with 17 on M365 apps. So it's very confusing because I'm not really getting much of a picture here. Let's just look at email activity. I can see that I have 10,000 activities in the month, and I can kind of see who's using these things and who's not. But I can't really compare that to the users of SharePoint and whether they're all using it together. So again, the information that Microsoft's giving you here, not really all that useful. So just to show you that this works, here's an example of some of the clients that we've helped. But here's my background. So I'm Mike Austin. I'm the founder and CEO of Metrics Data360. I have over 20 years of software licensing and audit experience. 10 years of those. I worked at Microsoft in various licensing roles, and when I was there, I realized that customers were always overpaying for licenses. They're constantly buying more than they needed, and most often they were doing that by chasing discounts in bundles that we were always creating and the new bundles that would come out. So, you know, you sort of think about it if you've done enterprise agreements or if you bought Microsoft licensing for a long time, you know, you had the CoreCal and then everybody got on the Core Cal and then they introduced the Ecal and if you didn't take the Ecal, the discount on the CoreCal was less and they just continued to push forward. And one of the things that I realized was that the problem was that people just didn't have the data that they needed. And so when I left Microsoft, I looked everywhere for a solution to start to look at. You know, how do I get a deployment data, how do I get a usage data? And really there just wasn't much out there. There are tools that sort of do pieces of it, they give you some information, but usually it's focused on sort of what you see in the Office 365 portal, the consumption, not so much how that relates to licensing. And so I finally got tired of not being able to get the information that I needed to help people save money on licensing. That when I left Microsoft, that was my objective and I started to build one of my own. And what I found was when we were doing engagements with customers that it worked better than we ever imagined when we were starting to take out 40% out of office 365 spend. It's quite amazing. And so, you know, my clients started asking after we would do these consulting engagements how they kept things up to date and whether it would work for them after the fact or how did they not slide back and then, you know, kind of get right back to where they were. And so I decided that now it's my mission to get this solution in the hands of everyone in the market so that everyone can save, save money on Office 365 licenses and quit overspending on it. So really, if you wanted to do this, you could do it yourself, but it would take a lot of effort. And sort of the way that you would have to do that is you'd have to go into the O365 portal and you'd have to download reports so that what they show you in the portal, as I showed before, doesn't really give you that much detail or that much information. It's hard to get anything out of these things that, you know, the standard reports are showing. And so you have to download reports, you have to know which ones to download. And they got to realize that They're a single view. So if I download a SharePoint report, it's a single view of SharePoint, and if I download Exchange, there's a single view of Exchange. There's no report in the portal that shows me how users are using those two products, how one single user is using those products. And there's definitely nothing in there that shows me how that corresponds to licensing at all. And so what you, you know, if you think about the report here, contrast that to this, where I can actually see that in this case we have three users that aren't using anything. We have five users that are only using Exchange online. And you can see that we can align our licenses to what these users are using. So here, Instead of buying E3s, we're just buying Exchange Plan ones. These users that are using the M365 apps, which are now Office, and a bunch of the other services we buy E3s for, or business Premium because we're a small business, obviously. But you can see how this simple view changes things. I'm no longer guessing what our 26 users are using. I now know what our 26 users are using. And I can align license according to usage versus just guessing or trying to figure it out by looking at eight or nine different reports. So the first thing you know, people ask is, where do I get the usage reports? So you can get those out of the O365 portal. You have to be an administrator. And they are fairly simple to find. There's eight of them that you can download. How much time does it take to do that? 10 to 15 minutes. They're just. But why can't you use them? And the reason is they don't tie anything together to give you a useful picture. It's a singular view, mostly based on how you're adopting the technology, not how you're using it, and how it's related to reporting or to licensing. And so a lot of the times we'll hear things like, Microsoft or my reseller is providing me these reports today. And yeah, it's true, some resellers provide you with reports that help you make informed decisions, but often they're not showing you the full picture because they are so dependent on Microsoft from a revenue perspective that there's only so much that they'll do. Okay, and so once I get those reports, what's next? Well, next you really have to. And here's the nine reports you need to get. You can go and download these reports and you can start to create these views that I'm showing here, but you actually have to be an Excel wizard. You'd have to know how to do vlookups and conicate and write macros and things like that in order to compare all these licenses together. And then that's not even assuming that you understand how licensing works or how that data corresponds to licensing. Just to get it into a single view, you're actually going to have to combine all nine of these reports to get things into a single review, to look at E1 versus E3 versus F licenses, combining that data. It does give you useful insights, but automating it is what's going to ensure that you actually use them. Because if each month you actually have to download and have someone spend all the hours to do this and do all the things and make sure the macros aren't broken, or that the vlookups aren't broken, or that Microsoft didn't change a title in a row or something like that, it's hours and hours of work. So in order to make them useful, you're going to have to automate it. Okay, and so how hard is it to stitch these together? You're gonna need somebody with a lot of advanced skills. There's nine reports, and it really takes a lot to get them to work together. Not to mention that Microsoft goes about and changes headers and file things. So every month you're actually gonna have to do work to make sure that nothing breaks. Even if you do figure out how to do that. How long does it take? It can take a few hours, depending on your Excel skills, anywhere from 20 to 40 hours in some cases, to get these reports put together in a manner that that makes sense. And how do I know what information is important to look at? Well, you got to look at the information where it's costing you money, you know? So does it matter how much storage you're using on Exchange or how much. How many people have large mailboxes on Exchange? A little bit, but not really. So you got to know what views to create and how those views correspond to licensing. So the next step is you need to use those reports to identify unneeded subscriptions. So again, in the Office365 portal, there's no way to do this. I can't actually see if I have unneeded subscriptions. And so what do I actually mean by unneeded subscriptions? And so what you're going to want to do is create a view to look at things like, for instance, users that haven't used an Office 365 service in greater than 90 days. Well, there's a great place to start to go and investigate. Why haven't they used Office365 in greater than 90 days? Can we reclaim those licenses? Are they no longer using them? You know, these Exchange Online plans, what are they assigned to? You can also go and see blocked users. And so blocked users are people that are no longer with the company, that have substance subscriptions still assigned to them. Sometimes there's valid reasons for that, other times there aren't. Another one, although not on this screen, is service accounts. So where have subscriptions being assigned to non humans. And so again, you won't see any of this out of the typical reports. You need to actually be able to build a view like this and then drill down to look at those individual users. So, you know, again, let's go look at these 1300 users that haven't used an F300 license in 90 days to see who they are, to see if there's something that we can do. Can we decrease those subscriptions? Should we be buying them something different? You need that sort of view. Okay, so one of the things you're going to require is a report that shows you unrequired subscriptions. Because if they're unrequired and we can reclaim them, then we can actually put those back or decrease our counts on our anniversary. And usually what we see is anywhere between 5 and 20%. So organizations have wasted licenses by 5 to 20% and those can be reclaimed. So what is a blocked user? A blocked user is somebody that is no longer an employee, but they still have an O365 subscription assigned to them. We'll get asked, do service accounts need subscriptions? The answer again is sometimes there are some technical reasons that require a subscription. Sorry. But most service accounts, they don't need to have a subscription. There's alternative or free methods that you don't need to assign service accounts to. And so by identifying these, you can go and look at them and figure out what do we need to do with that. How can you tell if a user has a multiple subscription of the same type assigned to them? So again, in the standard reports of the portal, you can't. When you start to combine these, you can, can. So what you're going to be looking for is users that have like say an E1 and an E3 or Project Plan 3 and a Project Essentials assigned to them. We see this all the time. Can you see activations of project and visios? Yes, you can. You can see Who's Activated Project and Visio. What you can't see, they pulled the data that allows you to see if they have used it within the last 60 to 90 days, although there are workarounds for that. And then, you know, we'll get asked a lot of the times, why are licensed assigned to service accounts? A lot of the times it's just because you're syncing Active directory to the O365 tenant. But sometimes there are service accounts where maybe an application is using Excel to do reporting, and it needs that Excel license that comes with an E3, for instance. So again, it's about investigating why they have them. But first step is identifying them so you can figure out why they have them. Okay. The next step is to review your usage for profiles of use, right? To make sure you have the right subscriptions for all of your users. Do you really need E5 for all your users? I have yet to see an organization that needs E5 for all their users, but I see lots of people licensing it, mostly because they chase discounts with Microsoft. And the problem is they were chasing discounts because they didn't have the data. And so it's not uncommon for for companies to believe they're using 60% or more of the functionality of the licenses they're buying, but to only find out that they're actually using 20% or less. And so when you have this sort of information, it puts you in the driver's seat of negotiations. So you want to be able to take a look at a report, something like this. So we can see here, these users are using multiple services and the Microsoft 365 desktop apps, or E3s. And so we know that they're assigned the right licenses. Now, ignore the miscellaneous. Those are going to be like a Power Bi or a Project or a Visio, right? They may have an Exchange Online plan assigned to them. And so that's something that needed to be cleaned up. But really what we're looking for is why do we have 3,000 users that aren't using anything that is costing this company over $300,000 a year? And so we want to be able to drill into those 3,000 users to take a look at why they're not using it, to see if there's a different way to do it. And so most of the time, I've only shown, you know, a simple three here, three profiles. We can see. This only makes up about 39 or 40% of the users. You will get the data that shows everything, but I just wanted to keep it simple. But most organizations are going to have 50 or 60 different profiles of usage which will align differently to licenses. So, so you need to know, once I see a profile, what is the most effective way to license them? Okay. And so having a user profile report helps you map the correct subscription type to those users. And again, this is another one where you can reduce your cost by 10 to 20% just by switching the subscription types in here. If we found out that these were all kiosk users, moving them from E3 all to F3s is going to be a substantial savings. But you can't do that without having the data. So why do I want to profile when Microsoft gave me a discount to buy all E5s, for instance? And the reason is that their discounts don't often justify the bigger bundles. When you can actually take a look at your usage and determine what you actually need, your discount quite often is not even coming close to decreasing your cost. If you think about the discount you got from Microsoft versus reducing cost by 40%, which one are you better off doing? Reducing 40% of your license costs before you even go after them for discount? And so how can I tell if there's commonality in my users? So again, when we look at that report, you'll see that, because you can then actually dive into it. So you can dive in and look at those users. If we actually pull in ad data as well, which we have the ability to do, we can start to look at some commonality. Are they in the same part of the world? Are they in the same sort of thing? So for instance, are they all filled text? And maybe that's why they're not using O365, because when we look at our fill text, we know their usage profile and things like that. So again, you're just getting the data to actually make informed decisions. Okay, so now that I have all this data, what can I do? I can go out and I can actually decrease my O365 subscriptions and save money. Okay, so you now have information to make informed decisions and not be worried about impacting your end users. So I found 3,000 users that aren't using any O365 service. I'm going to remove them from one license type and put them in a cheaper one. By doing that, that's how this company, the oil and gas services company that we talked about earlier, was able to reduce from 3,700 to 3,350 users. They were able to identify licenses that weren't being used in blocked and service accounts and other things and save almost $300,000 a year on their O365 spend. Okay, so having reports allow you to make informed decisions. You get to correct your data. You can make those decisions with peace of mind of knowing that you're not going to impact your end users and you can make them and know how they're going to reduce your costs. Okay, so you have a couple of ways to do this. Option one, you can do this the hard way, which is do it yourself. And that's to, you know, go out and download those nine reports, stitch them together and try and figure out how to identify savings opportunities. Most often because of the hours that it takes, people aren't doing that and they're just going on gut feelings or guesses versus actually using data to make the actual decisions. So what ends up happening? You're paying 20 to 40% more for your O365 licenses than you need to be. How often do you do this? Usually you do it once a year only at TrueUp. Now the unfortunate thing is you're reserving licenses and paying for those licenses throughout the year, even though you don't need to be. Because of the time it takes to do these reports, very few organizations are looking at them monthly to make sure that they don't have unneeded costs. The second way is to get help. And most organizations will work with a reseller or Microsoft to do that. They may provide some reports that help you make better decisions, but they're really not incented to help you reduce your costs or save money. They, they get paid to sell you more. And so they may show you some small savings, but they'll always try and do that to justify larger bundles via discount and future use. In other words, they want to sell you shelfware. Right? And so when do you usually do this again? It's only once a year and it still requires a significant amount of time from your team because your reseller and Microsoft is going to rely solely on data provided by you and the knowledge you environment from you and your team. Okay, the third way is to use metric data 360's optimization tool. When you do this, you simply upload your reports into our portal. Once they're uploaded, a few minutes later you can go on and then you can start to see those reports that we've been showing you, the unused license reports, the profiles, and you can start to make the reductions and changes to eliminate any risk. Sorry, eliminate any unneeded licenses and do that with minimal risk to your end users. And if you work with us.