Mike Austin explains how enterprises waste millions on Microsoft 365 licenses assigned to inactive users. Three hidden problems: users inactive in the portal but logging in elsewhere, high-tier licenses on kiosks that should downgrade to F3, and bulk Power Apps purchases like one company's 2,000 licenses with only 78 active users over two years.
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and getting licensed. Now, people will say to me, but Mike, we can see in the M365 portal if they're not active, and then we do that. And I'm like, okay, that's great. But when I analyze your environment and I find inactive users that haven't been active for 3 years and still have licenses on it, why is that? 'Cause that's what ends up happening, right? And people aren't looking at this, and these intersections are where those opportunities come. Or the outliers are where the opportunity comes, right? So like, for instance, if they're not showing usage in the M365 portal, but they're logging in through Entra ID and Active Directory, that's that scenario of the retailer, right? If they're showing usage in the portal, but it's light usage, and we have hardware data to supplement that shows that they're on a kiosk and we have E5s on them, those are targets for F3s. And this is only going to become more and more important as you move into Copilot and E7s, if you're going to go that route. Because this just continues to compound. Right? I can give you examples, like so many examples of things that we've seen, right? Like, we've had a customer that signed a deal 2,000 Power Apps. They're like, "Oh, we're building all these apps. Microsoft says that we need to have the premium connectors, so we're buying 2,000 because that's what we think we have." Now, they didn't do this view. Now, that view for Power Apps maybe is a little bit different. Instead of the M365 portal, maybe it's the Power Apps Center of Excellence that we need to go to. But the concept is the same. When we went in and analyzed it, You're not going to believe this. They had 78 active users on Power Apps that for 2 years they were paying for $2,000. I pause not to be overly dramatic, but I see this every day. You know, even companies are like, hey, we're totally locked down on this stuff. And then we come in and we're like, yeah, except for here, right? Because they don't, they don't know to
