How to Control O365 Licensing Spend in Large Organizations

Welcome to Slim 360. So this tool has been designed from the perspective of license and cost optimization. So a lot of tools on the market where they say they do O365 are more focused on the operational aspects like storage and the amount of storage usage. We do have those sorts of things embedded in here, but it's really been built around cost optimization. So I'm just going to start with kind of like a summary. And this is data just on our own tenant. So it's a little. Not a lot of details in this one, but it gives the picture. The first thing that we do is we're going to go out and look for what we refer to as waste in O365. And we see anywhere from about 7% on the low end to as high as 30 or 40% waste in O365 licensing. And that comes in a few areas. One of the first ones is users have multiple subscriptions. Obviously we don't have any of those, but we go out and look for users that have two subscriptions of the same family. So think of like somebody that has an E5 and an E3. They only need one of those. A Project Plan 3 and a Project Essentials Visio Plan 1 and a Visio Plan 3. So we're going out to look for people that have multiple subscriptions. You'd be surprised. We had one client that was only about 5,000 users, had about 500 people that had multiple subscriptions. I mean that just cleaning that up alone saved them. I think it was close to $40,000. So that's one of the first areas we go and look. The next area that we go and look, I'm going to start from the right to left in this colored graph down here is on service accounts. So we actually have some algorithms built into it to look for what we believe to be service accounts or non humans that have been assigned licenses. Again, anywhere between 5 and 7%. We've seen this as high as like $200,000 a month being spent on licenses that aren't people. So that's, that's one area that we focus on secondary accounts is a accounts. A lot of organizations have those. And so you got both your, like Mike Austin and the. A Mike Austin, a dash Mike Austin that have accounts. And so we are looking for secondary accounts. You really don't need to license your secondary one. But again they get assigned these in the onboarding or the scripting processes or whatnot. And so again we're going out to look for those and then blocked users. Blocked users are people that left the company and still have subscriptions assigned to them. So each one of these categories, the secondary, not so much like usually less than 1%, but blocked users and service accounts. We've seen anywhere from 1 to 7% extra licenses in there. So again, we're gonna go out and clean those up. We can drill into them when we see them and show who those users are. We also look at activity date, right? So here you can see we've got a couple of users with no activity. We've got one user that had no activity in greater than 90 days. So we want to go in and look at who they are to see why they have subscriptions and why they. Why they have those. Why are we paying for them? So can we free them up, put them back into the pool to avoid reservations, or shed them or true them down on our anniversary date if we're in ea, or next month if we're in a CSP program? So we look at the activity date here and the usage of those products. Again, no activity is the no activity one could be a bit of a misnomer because there is a bit of a lag when you onboard somebody and you by the time the tool or the Portal RO365 story starts to actually log things. So that's one of the things that we do look for there. Again, when we're doing this as a service, we look month over month to make sure that they're not in there month over month and start cleaning them up. You can see here the license is owned and what's assigned. So again, if they have access licenses on anniversary dates, very clear to figure out how many you can decrease by. And the goal when we start these cleanup projects, especially in EA customers and is to get them so that there's more available than assigned. And then on those anniversary dates, start shedding them. Right? So an example is we had one customer that had 500 Visio licenses when we went in. I'll show you how we look at those here in a second. But when we went in, we realized they only needed 100 of them. And so on the anniversary date, they got rid of 400 times 12 times 12 or whatever it was. So it was, you know, fairly significant savings that they were able to drive utilizing their data. So the. That's the sort of first part of it. The second part of this that I want to dive into is we actually utilize this to provide summaries of profiles. When we talk about summary of profiles, we want to look at what these users are actually using. So if you look here, the majority of our users are using Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and they have the M365 apps or Office Pro. So it's going to make sense for them. We're small so we have Business Premium, but, but we would expect these to be E3.5 users now down here and we see this profile quite frequently. No usage at all. We've got three. We know who those are. There's a couple of contractors and one person that's on a little bit of an extended leave. But again we can dive into these and see this, this profile here. Most organizations is 10 to 15% of their users and their license is assigned with it. So again, we actually import their cost into the system so we can tell them exactly what this is costing them, but it gives them the ability and the data to make decisions on what licenses they actually need. So here for instance are three users that are just on Exchange. Now if we saw an E3 or an E1 on these, you know, is there an opportunity to move them just to exchange online? So again giving them the data to actually look at what they need. Okay, so when we get into talking about cost savings. So this is where we sort of get into some of the details of where you can actually drive cost out of the agreements. And so I'm just going to go back to the overview page here. So you can see here I can quickly tell them what the reservation costs are. That's something that most people don't know. We don't know how many reservations we've made. We can quickly pull that cost out. And we can see here that there's a potential cost savings and that the average cost per user. So again, some data that they can use. We also have a tagging system so that it pulls in Azure tags and we have the ability to do back end tagging. So add additional tagging so that if they want to see it by instead of by country, but they want to see it by line of business, we can just switch that and show them all their data by line of business. So any of these views that I'm about to show you, we can slice them up in the way that they need to see them. So I'm going to go into the recommendations here. So we talked about some of these, right? So here's an example of users that are not active in the last 19 days or sorry, in the last 30 days. We can change this to 6090 day views, but I'm going to Go into the details and I can see who these users are. This data has been anonymized, but I can see who the users are. I can see what licenses they have assigned to them. I can see they've had no activity in the last 30 days and I can see that that's costing me nearly $400 a month and that the action is to deallocate that license or remove the user. And then I can mark that as action. Now we only have read access to the O365 tenant. So it doesn't automatically, if you go in and mark as action, it's not going to push that into the tenant. Nothing's going to happen. You can export this, these recommendations, so you can go do that. We also have an option where you can grant the application one time access to write to it. So you can write to it, send the file over of the changes that need to be made, then go accept them and then make all those changes. Okay, so I'm not going to go through all the recommendations. I believe there's about 30 some odd that we do and we do this with Azure as well. So it's not just O365, we do this with Azure as well. I'm going to go to another section here and I'm going to look at SKU usage so I can show you what we can actually do with the actual part numbers. This here are all the subscriptions that are owned on the left over here and on the right are all the actual underlying Office 365 services. Now you know, you have to understand what these are to know the details. But that's where the actual subscription, the services that are turned on are being utilized as part of these SKUs. And so you can see here, you know the license investments, $4,600 a month, the license is actually being consumed are $2,300 a month and that there's somewhere around 2300 of unused value and unused licenses. So we're not using a lot of the products. I'll show you how we calculate that in a second. And we have licenses that aren't even being used. So we have extra licenses that are costing US$300 a month. So if I actually click on one of these part numbers. So this is the Office 365E5 without audio conferencing. Here's all the components that are used in it. Here's the number of users assigned, here's the number of users used. So if you look at it from a license Assignment perspective, because we have 100 licenses and 74 are assigned, Microsoft would have said that that's 74% license utilization, whereas the actual utilization license is 29%. Because of all the features in this SKU, here's what's actually being used. So only 44 of our users are using SharePoint. Nobody's using or, you know, flows only being used by two people. Nobody's using the sway, right? So again, we can look at this and we use this for a couple of things. We can look at it and say, how much of this are you actually using? To go back to Microsoft and say, hey, come on, this E5 is not worth $40 a month because I'm only consuming 29% of it. And I can actually show you that. And then the other piece of it is we can look at this and understand which pieces of these make up the E5 over this E3 to look at users to figure out if they actually need to be licensed with E5s or E3s. And again, that's just another screen. But we have that underlying data. The other thing that we do is we've taken the proportional value of each of these products. So if you think about it, you, you know, offices worth $12, exchanges worth three, you add those up and take those as a percentage. So as a percentage of an E5, we calculate here, that's where this unassigned value is coming from. Because we're not using $447 of the 1200 that is costing us in a month. Okay. So again, we can do that on all the products. So if we look at, see the EMS Suite E3 here, you can see that we're using 77% of it because we're not using Intune. So using Multi Factor Active Directory Premium, we're doing rms, but we're not using Intune. Really, we only got three devices that are being managed by Intune. So again, the value that that's costing us is $246 a month out of the 371. Again, we got a couple licenses that aren't used at 18, and that intune is costing US$228 a month that we're not using. So I can also go in. Let me just. It's a little hard to see here. Project Premium, you can see here that with Project Premium, nobody's used it in the last 30 days. And so I don't actually have the license cost assigned in the portal on this. So I, and I do that on purpose to show you that we actually put in their license cost as their true cost. So if I go in and put those in, which I usually do in a longer demo, you would actually see the value of this. But again, they own 40, only seven are assigned, so they only assign 17.5% of them. And of those seven users, they're only using 23% of the functionality of Project. Now the one thing that we really want to look at is there's only one. Whoops, shouldn't have clicked that. There's only one user in there that actually activated the project, the Project Pro license itself. Sorry about that clicking there, but you can see here only one person's actually activated and using the Project Pro, so the actual client itself. So the rest of them potentially are just. They only need the online access and so could be downgraded subscription types. So anyways, I just wanted to give you a quick overview of some of the stuff we can do. Obviously there's a whole lot more in here. We can get into how much storage they're using, how many emails are being sent, their security scores, whether multi factor authentication is turned on on their users and things like that. But I want to show you some of the high level cost optimization pieces that we have today, so hopefully that's helpful. Look forward to having a much deeper discussion with you.