Microsoft's core license counts stay flat while bills explode because add-ons like Teams Premium, dependent services stacked on Dynamics, and Dataverse storage at $0.20-$0.40 per GB aren't bundled in E3/E5. Fear-based selling and hidden usage data make it hard for CIOs to control spend during renewals.
Chapters
So where does Microsoft hide the add-on costs, right? And so a lot of the times, you know, conversations that I start with customers will start really with like, why are we spending so much on Microsoft? I'll have CIOs come to me all the time. They're like, we don't understand. It just continues to grow. 3 years ago we were $2 million. Now we're $5 million. We don't even really understand where that spend is coming from. And so where, where does it come from? Right. And so much of it is hidden in add-on costs. Look at what they did with Teams, for instance. You know, now they have the Teams Premium. So if you want the AI features or the note-taking features in Teams, you need to have another license, which is a Teams Premium license, which is not included in your E3 or your E5. They've done similar things with SharePoint around the compliance piece and things like that. But I also think that now they are doing what I'll call dependency stacking. Right? So if you look at things like Dynamics, for instance, so if I'm a Dynamics customer, the reporting platform that you're going to build out your reporting is Power BI, which has a dependency on Fabric, which has a dependency on Dataverse, which has dependency on Dataverse storage. And so now they are stacking or bundling dependency, not licenses. And so you really have to understand that, that dependency stack because that's where the real cost is coming from. It's all hidden. So many organizations, as they've adopted some of these technologies like Power Apps, didn't realize how expensive Dataverse storage is. They start building Power Apps, they run out of standard storage that's included for free and start having to pay for it and realize that Microsoft is charging 20, 30, 40 cents a gigabyte where internal cost and benchmarks on storage are like 7 or 8 cents. Right. So it's, it's all hidden. Right. And they really use fear to scare you. Right. Fear of, you know, missing out. Fear of compliance. Oh, if you don't do this, it's too complicated. Like if you make profiles, you have different users with different licenses, you're at risk of compliance. So they're very good at fear-based selling. And the other thing is there's a real lack of visibility into the usage of the product.
