Welding Office 365 To Cut Costs

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Metrix Data 360's webinar on welding your data sources to cut Office 365 cost. So today I just wanted to kind of set the stage and just sort of talk about some things that we hear from people all the time that they tell us that, you know, Microsoft has this game that they play and that they can't beat them. And, you know, I just want to let you know that's not your fault if you've tried to beat Microsoft in a negotiation or what you're purchasing. There's reasons for that that we're going to talk about. You know, if in the past you've tried to negotiate with them to get a better deal and they've just made it very difficult for you. You know, same sort of thing. And one of the things that I always like to let people know is that Microsoft wants you to think that you can't purchase what you need or that licensing isn't easy. You know, you need them in order to know what to buy and how to purchase all the bundles. But that's really not true. And you know, you probably even had the feeling that you kind of almost like if you're particularly a procurement professional, you may have almost had the feeling that, you know, Microsoft wants you to fail. You know, your job is to try and cut costs and save money. And Microsoft, you know, wants you to fail. And you're probably right if you feel that way. But what we're here today is to show you a way that you can actually go and collect data pain free and then use that data to purchase only what you need and to negotiate a use with Microsoft. And so my goal from this webinar today is I want to help people purchase only what they need from Microsoft and at a fair price. That is our number one objective, is showing people that you can buy what you need and get it at a fair price without feeling like you're getting taken advantage by Microsoft or they're big resellers that are telling you what you should be buying, not what you actually need. Okay, and so how do you actually do this? There's only one way for you to do it, and it's to get data. And we're going to talk about the type of data that you need today in order to do that. And there's, you know, you need to educate yourself on how licensing really works and we'll talk a little bit about that today. And you need to use a proven blueprint or a process that actually helps you reach you know, that goal of obtaining this. So let me tell you a little bit about who I am. My name is Mike Austin. I'm the CEO and founder of Metrics Data360. I worked at Microsoft in licensing for over 10 years. I have become an authority on Microsoft licensing. When I was there, I negotiated about $2 billion in contracts. I was responsible for not only negotiating contracts for Microsoft, but I also worked on a lot of product and product design. So how they build out licensing programs and worked with product groups on how they put licensing inside of those programs. All that to say I've got a really good understanding about how organize it or how Microsoft licensing works or licensing in general. And I'm really passionate about helping clients beat Goliath, as I call them, Microsoft at their own game. The reason for that, if you're new to sort of our ecosystem. You know, when I was a kid growing up, my mom was an IT manager at a small plant. I grew up in a small town and my mom was an IT manager in kind of the only plant in town. And they were threatening to move it down to Mexico to save costs. And she had a lot of sleepless nights trying to work with her vendors to negotiate better deals to save money, trying to save her job and others and they just wouldn't help. And you know, this is back, you know, pre cloud and you know, even probably pre licensing programs and things like that and they just, they just wouldn't help. And so, you know, I remember the day where she came home and went straight to her room and was crying and I knew that that was the day that she actually lost her job. And that had a huge impact on our family because there weren't very many, you know, good jobs in the town that I lived in. It had a real big impact on us financially. And I kind of, you know, remember thinking it's never going to happen to me. And so when I sort of got the job at Microsoft and was rising through the ranks and getting into building out these licensing programs and things like that, I thought I'd really made it. But in 2008 when the downturn came and Microsoft was asking me to sell 20, 30, 40% more into these clients that were struggling just to keep their employees employed and needed we're coming to us, ask us to partner and cut costs. I found myself not sleeping at night because what I realized was that my values weren't aligned with what they were asking me to do. I knew how to do it. I built the programs, I understood how to use licensing and how to confuse people to buy more. I knew I could do it, but it just didn't feel right. I left there and embarked on my own. But the one thing that I want to talk about is when I was there, I was literally winning awards and being sent to President's Club and all this sort of stuff, flying into Redmond to be on these. But there's one client that always stands out to me, and it was a customer of mine, his name was Marty. And he was the only deal of all the billions of dollars that I negotiated when I was at Microsoft that ever beat me. And, you know, I sort of wanted to understand. And I go back and I look at why was that deal so good? It was so good. This is how difficult it was for me, actually, when I was at Microsoft, it took me 18 months to sell it internally after we'd come to a business agreement with Marty. And the reason was that Marty had better data than I did. He knew exactly what his company needed. He knew what his profiles of users were. He understood when they could adopt certain technologies. And this goes back, you know, they were a note shop migrating to exchange. He knew what the timeline was for that. Anytime we would try and say, okay, it's not going to take you 24 months to get off of notes and move to Exchange. He had the reasons why it was going to take him 24 months. He had everything. Anything that we tried to throw at him, all the tactics that we used, he knew how to counter. And it was all because he had better data. And that was not typical. We always had better data on our clients than they did on themselves. How does this apply to you? Like I said, the goal is to teach you how to pay fair price for Microsoft licensing, make it so that it's not confusing, put you in control of the conversation. And just to let you know that the data you need to do this to be like Marty and be Microsoft, it's there, it's just hidden. Microsoft has a lot of data. You have a lot of data. It's just hidden in spots that you're not aware of. If you want to talk about the results, this is a project that we just ended. It's not a large organization, a couple thousand users, food services company, we saved them $275,000 or 21% on their EA renewal that came up using the process that we're going to talk about today. Now imagine, you know, if you were organization of 20,000 or 200,000, what two and a half million or 25 million would mean back into your budget, the things that you can do. We know that this client had some projects that they weren't going to get to this year. They didn't have the funding and we found them funding to accelerate a couple of projects. Other clients that we helped save money, use that money to go out and hire employees, you know, purchase new technologies, all sorts of things. And I put sort of this sort of area. I'm not going to go through everything that we did, but you know, everything that we do here where we show that we save the money on Windows servers and SQL servers and Office 365. I'm going to show you examples of these sorts of things that we do to get these types of savings. But this was all based on using data. This was not going after Microsoft and pushing and yelling and screaming at them to get deeper discount. This was using data to purchase what was needed and having the confidence to make those decisions. Again, what are we going to cover? I'm going to go through what I call the three core secrets. Secret number one is how to collect the data that you require to be prepared to be more prepared than Microsoft. Secret number two is to purchase only how to purchase only what you need. And secret number three is negotiate with ease and beat Microsoft at their own game. And so I'm going to get into each of those sort of secrets and we'll dive a little bit more into this data stuff that I'm talking to and what does that look like and what exactly am I referring to? Okay, so again, first secret is how do I collect the data that you require to be more prepared than Microsoft. And so a lot of the times when I talk to people about this is a lot of it. People will say, I don't understand the data that I need to beat Microsoft at their own game because how do I go and collect it? Have you ever tried to do inventory and figure out what SQL servers are out there? Have you ever looked at like an O365 or an M365 licensing bundle to try and figure out what you're actually using in there? You know, so they struggle with how do they get the data and how do they collect that data, how do they get their teams get to get on the same page to bring that together? And you know, I always want to bring back to remember Marty, right? Marty was a lone single IT director in a large global organization, was a decentralized organization that had 200 divisions that he was able to go out and collect enough information to beat us on and it was not simple for him. I remember talking to him at lunch after this deal was done and it was a lot of work for him. He didn't know what he needed. But what he did was he understood what we were going to sell him. Now licensing was probably even simpler back then, which is Office and bunch of cals and desktop OS and then some server licenses back there then. But he looked at all of those pieces and he knew, for instance that in an EA you were by this thing called a CoreCal and a Core Cal included Windows Exchange, SharePoint and System Center. And he looked at his need for each of those products because he knew that it was the bundle and he had to buy the bundle and he had the roadmap for when he would use those technologies or the reasons for why he wouldn't use pieces of those technologies. And there was no debate. It was very fact actual. Right. And so it is out there. And you know, the reason that this works and what we're going to get into is, you know, people actually call me the translator, you know, kind of the translator between Microsoft speak, internal IT speak, Procurement speak and Finance speak. And I am going to talk a little bit about using teams a little later. But it really is, you need to be able to translate all these things into simple things. But what ends up happening is you're just. When you, when you gather this data, your negotiation cycles are much smaller. I've had clients basically go through this process with us and then when they get to the negotiation, that was it. Right. Like it wasn't the big process that they used to go through with Microsoft. They have a complete understanding of what they need and why they're buying. And so we're going to go through what that actually means. We're going to understand why, how to get out a roadmap and what that looks like and how to align that to licenses. You know, they change the licenses that they're purchasing. So we know this works because they change the licenses that they're purchasing. We've had clients that we've suggested purchased Microsoft 365 E5s, which are their biggest bundles. We've had clients that we've told move from an E5 to an E3. We've had clients that we've told move from an E3 to just exchange online because we have the data. They can make those decisions on what they need and purchase with ease and peace of mind. Okay. And what ends up happening is there's a big reduction in the amount of follow up so when we first started out and we didn't have this process, we would spend a lot of our time educating clients on licensing and how it works and how all this. And there'd be all kinds of questions. A lot of the times we get on, after we go through the process and we show them, they're like, okay, what next? Like, they don't really have questions on, okay, how does this work? It's just, okay, how does this align to us? Are we sure we have the right information? Are we making decisions on the right stuff? It's a different conversation. And so one of the first things that you need to understand is your roadmap. And we use surveys to do that. We have 15 plus surveys on all the Microsoft technologies that we use. Everything from your relationship with Microsoft to your use of third party software to what you're doing. So you can see here, this is just a screenshot of four or five of them. But we're going in and looking at what are you doing with Power bi? What are you doing with security products? How are you using Power apps? What are you doing with teams? What are you doing in the public cloud? Every single thing what we want to do is gather information that relates to licenses, but also relates to where we're going. What this does is when we ask this, for instance, on the Power BI suite survey, we're going to ask, are you using Power bi? Does the IT department plan on using Power bi? What's the roadmap look like? Are you using third party technologies today? Yes. What are they and how much are you spending and when are you spending those so that we can look at, you know, and then we'll ask, do you plan on displacing, you know, cognos or whatever, potentially? And get the roadmap of where those are at so that we can go and say, okay, Microsoft, do you want to sell us your security products? But we're using five competing products. We've got three years of contracts left. We can't realize the value of your security products until those go. And this is what the roadmap looks like. Now we decide how much of that we want to give. Do we want to tell Microsoft that it's crowdstrike and it expires in two years? You're paying $400,000 a year or whatever it is. We decide that as part of the negotiation plan. But you can gather all that data. And the key thing is by putting these surveys together and knowing which questions to ask, you're going to make this process simple. For your subject matter experts to answer, it takes them less than 10 minutes per survey. So we have 15 in some organizations, that's one or people that fill those out. But in most large organizations that's going to go to four, five, six different teams and we grab that data and we pull it all into one place. Okay, and so what does this sort of look like when you start to do this? Here's another case study or example of a client in the old oil and gas that had a reduction of 39% on their O365 spend. They had poor visibility into what was going on. Their reseller reps weren't forthcoming with their with information. They were just told buy bundles of E3s and things like that. And they didn't have any leverage. And so when we went out, we actually looked at their data. So there's two pieces in this case study. One is we looked at their data of use and we looked at their surveys of what they said they were doing. And what we realized was they had about 400 users that didn't use Office 365 at all. And they were shocked, right? They thought everybody in the organization used email. But what we found was because of the survey process that we did and we were able to go back and ask a couple more questions to get some details on this. They had 400 service technicians that go out and service pipelines and things like that that don't use email. They get an application on the tablet that's told, go to here, do this work. They would log what they did into the application and then be told where to go next. They never actually used email. They didn't use SharePoint, they didn't use teams. Right there we were able to right size the number of subscriptions that they were using and do something different that saved them 39% on their Microsoft O365 spend. But that was all done with a combination of data. Okay. And so you might also be thinking like, I don't understand how to use data to beat Microsoft at their own game because licensing is so confusing or how will it make licensing so, you know, less confusing for me? So data will do the following things. It's going to clarify what you need to buy, it's going to simplify all the purchasing options and it's going to help you decide what bundles to purchase and when to purchase a la carte. So here on this screen here, you're going to see an example of the information that we collect when we're doing teams. So you can see we're asking to use competing products. No, there's no further action. Are you using on premise to do many? One to many. Right. And the answer is yes. So now what we want to do is review your on premise licenses to determine if team subscriptions are required. So what does that mean? It means that if you're doing on premise teams still, why would I be buying O365 subscriptions for Teams? Can't use them. They have on premise licensing requirements. Right. And so there's a little bit more nuance to it than this. But you can see here, we can tell that they have 900 requirements for dial in. They have 5,600 people on Skype and teams on premise, we know how many common area phones and things like that. So we're pulling all this data into one spot so we can look at this and go, okay, when we talk about how licensing works, how does this relate to what I need to buy when it comes to teams? Microsoft may want to sell me a bundle, but I want to just understand what I need for teams so that I can look and see what percent of the value I'm getting out of that bundle that's related to teams. Okay. So the next thing is like, they're going to make it confusing. Microsoft makes licensing confusing on purpose. One of the favorite things that I remember was when I was at Microsoft and Steve Ballmer was still the CEO, somebody actually asked him at an industry event, steve, when are you going to make licensing less confusing? And it was kind of one of those moments you could see that he did it and he was like, oh. He kind of chuckled and went, why would we do that? It drives revenue for us. Right? So it's confusing by design. Right? And they make it so that you don't understand what you need. And so again, I'm just showing you sort of the way the types of data that once you pull this stuff together and it's out there, what you can do with it, right? So over here on the right of this one, I know it's a little hard to see here, but here on the left is all the O365 products or subscriptions that this company has bought. On the right are things where they're paying for licenses that they shouldn't be. So they have licenses that are aren't assigned. They have licenses that are assigned to non humans. Think about how many licenses do you have assigned to meeting rooms and group email boxes and things like that. They have licenses assigned to users that haven't even been in the company. One company we went in and looked at, they had 8% of their O365 spend assigned to people that were no longer with the company. And they're like, oh, well, we have a policy that we need to keep that. Well, okay, that's great. There's other things that you can do that are cheaper than keeping E3s around. But when we went and analyzed it, it's like, these people haven't even been with the company for five. Do you still even need to keep that data? And they couldn't even answer that. So, again, it's just the sort of examples of, once you get this data, the richness of the sort of decisions that you can start to make. Because in this case, they can go from 27,000 licenses probably down to somewhere around 23,000. And we hear that all the time. I only have 23,000 employees, but I'm buying 27,365 subscriptions. Like, what the heck? What the heck is going on? Done. Right? And so, you know, another example is taking a look at Windows servers. I know we're talking about O365, but I wanted to give you the type of things that you can do once you collect data on the entire footprint. So the recommendations here, this is recommendations that were made to a client. The recommendations piece, you know, isn't kind of what I really want to point out. What I wanted to point out is if you look at the chart down below, they basically have three clusters where they're spending north of $600,000 in Windows Server licenses. So you can see that over here. Let me just put on my laser pointer here. You can see that over here. They're spending $600,000 on the cluster. Now you look at it and go, okay, it's got, you know, 6, 700 VMs in there. Look at the number of windows. There's 33 windows servers on those clusters that they're paying $600,000 of licenses for because of the way licensing works. And don't you think that there's probably a way that that can be architected differently to save money? So we don't make architectural recommendations because that's not what we do. But we can show them this cluster. These three clusters with basically less than two dozen Windows VMs are costing you $600,000 in licenses. What can we do to move those VM, those Windows VMs, or isolate them to a host or two in the cluster so that not everything is licensable and decrease that number? That is simple decisions that can be made utilizing data. Okay, Same with Azure, right? So when we're looking at Azure, so I know we're talking about O365, but I just want to show you how this works across all of Microsoft. Again, what the findings on the right are not relevant. They are relevant, but they're kind of specific to a client here. But what you can see here is this was 14 savings in a month, right? And some of that is, look at the number four there. Zombie, right? $26,000 a month, which is basically almost 7% of their Azure spend in zombie resources. Zombie resources are resources that are no longer in use that they're paying for. So this is. VMs were destroyed, but storage or IP addresses or things that you pay for are still being used. And so we're able to go out and identify those using data and say, like, look, you can easily kill these Zombies and reclaim $26,000 a month. I mean, who wouldn't like to be able to put almost over, well, almost 300,000, over $300,000 back into their budget just by identifying some stuff using data, right? So again, just the sort of things that you're able to do when you start to look at data and bring that together. So the second secret that I want to talk about is how do you use that data to purchase only what you need? Need. Okay. And so here, a lot of the times people think I'm not a licensed expert or a professional negotiator, particularly IT people. IT people will say I'm not an expert. You know, I'm not a licensing expert and I hate negotiating, right? And if I change this with IT to procurement, procurement, people a lot of times will tell us, I love to negotiate, but I don't get, I don't have the data from IT to make sure that I'm negotiating the right thing. I'm just negotiating what they tell me to buy. And I don't know if that's the right thing. So let me, let me just share quick story with you. I was on a flight one time flying home, and we literally were down almost to landing. Like we were coming in over all the warehouses at the airport. That's how close we were. And all of a sudden the pilot shot us straight back up like this. And I was actually sitting beside an off duty pilot that was flying home and he turned white. And we got back up in the air and a couple minutes later the pilot came on and said, hey, you know, sorry folks about that, but we came in a little close to another plane and we needed to pull up and I got home and that pilot was actually on TV and being interviewed. We were literally five seconds away from a mid air collision. The interesting thing that I found about that interview was when they asked the pilot, was he nervous, was he concerned? He basically said, no, not at all. I had all the data I needed. The systems were giving me the data I needed. I knew what decision I needed to make. I just pulled the trigger and made the decision. There was no angst, there was none of that. He just made a very simple decision. Flight up, got 200, 300 people home safely that night and avoided what could have been a tragedy. So again, that data is the key thing that people need in order to not feel that angst a lot of the times. How do I know that this stuff works again? Because clients tell us all the time we know more than we ever have. We feel like we actually know more than Microsoft for a period of time. And that's all done because of the data analysis that's been performed for them. In fact, you know, one of the biggest compliments that we get is that Microsoft quite often requests what we have, right? They want examples of the data that we have to use their business cases internally to go and get special concessions or to help the client deploy new technologies or so that they can align their selling activities to the clients. Because you think about it, we've done surveys, we understand their roadmap, where they're going. We can go and say like, here's what's going on in the next 18 to 24 months. Most IT organizations don't, don't have that because it's scattered across things and we pull it all into a nice little picture for them. Okay. And so again, here's a case study of how this works. We had a electronics manufacturer, about 2500 users, this was a few months ago. They were having issues with COVID and the supply chain and cash flow and they needed to find cost savings no matter what. They suspected they were over licensed, but they didn't know where. This was one of the ones where I think, if I remember correctly, they were over 3,000 licenses going. We got 2,500 staff. Why are we buying over 3,000 O3,65 subscriptions? And so what we were able to do was analyze the use to show them which parts of the E5 they weren't using. We move them back to the E3, they were able to show Microsoft they weren't using it. And we also were able to reduce the number of licenses they had because they had a bunch of licenses sitting in those blocked statuses and things like that. And the other key thing is we identified that they had $700,000 in vendor duplication that they didn't really realize. So what that means is they had 700,000. Again, go back to that survey. Is this how we figured that out? They had $700,000 in vendor duplication. So they had other vendors that they were spending $700,000 a year on that they had functionality for Microsoft to replace. And so they could look at that and say, do we want to continue to use that? Maybe because it's best of breed and we want to do that or which of these can we start to cancel as our renewals come up and replace with Microsoft and save 700k? So again, we're not talking about always like beating Microsoft up. In this case, we went to Microsoft and said we want to partner with you on removing a good chunk of this $700,000. Right. So you might also be thinking like, look, I'm not a business analyst. Maybe if you're procurement, I'm not technical. Maybe if you are technical, I don't have access to systems to get the data. I definitely don't have the time to do all the work. I mean, I go home, I bring in more work home. Last time I took a vacation, I worked the whole time. And you might just be asking like, will I really get better results than if I just sort of try and scream at Microsoft and get the best discount I can. So to spe, right? But the truth is, if you gather the right data, you don't need to be a license expert or you don't even need to negotiate because the work's going to be done for you. And so what do I mean by that? And so this here is a chart that's put together by Aaron Gind at Microsoft. It's m365maps.com this is the Microsoft 365 E3 bundle. Now, I'm not going to go into licensing in a ton of detail today. We've done other webinars on that and I think we're going to be putting up an offer that if you really want to train yourself, a three day or three hour workshop on just diving into how M365 and O365 licensing works that you can take advantage of. But what I want to point out here is if you look, the one thing that is key to Note is that Microsoft 365 and Office 365 are not products. So a lot of people confuse the fact that they think that they're buying this product called M365 or O365. And Microsoft and their resellers a lot of the time actually condition you to that. But the reality is there is no such product as M365. It's a marketing brand. So it's like, it's no different than like, there's no product called Nike. Right? There's Nike, you know, Air Jordans. Right. But there's no Nike. I can't just go and buy Nike. Right. I have to buy Air Jordan or whatever else. Right? And so inside of this chart, what you'll see is each of these service offerings inside of an O365 are the products, right? So Microsoft Teams is a product product. Microsoft Exchange Online Plan 2 is a product, right? So some of these are services which are not things that you can actually buy. They're just services that you get. So for instance, alert policies or audit logging, you know, that's not something you go out and buy. That's a service that's included when you buy the subscription to some of these products. Okay, so the key thing to note is looking at these bundles and how Microsoft puts these together and understanding what you need. And so if we go back to the survey that I showed on teams, we could tell here on the teams piece that they had 10,000 employees. Six thousand of them were still on premise. In that case, they had about 3,000 something in the cloud. So they didn't need 10,000 teams like Microsoft was showing them, selling them. They only needed 3,000. Right. And so what really happens is if you look again, this is some of the stuff that we've built to put together our systems and things like that. And so this is a service that we have called slim 360. This screenshot that you see here, but over here on the left are the subscriptions that have been bought. And over on the far right are those services. So if you look at these boxes, these are these things. Now, they have strange names and things like that, but those are each of those services that are in those boxes. And so if I was to look at the M365E3 in this client, I could tell that they own, own 3950. They've assigned 3940, but they're only using 3350, so they're using 600 less than they need. Now the key thing here is Microsoft looks at consumption as I own 3950 and I've assigned 3940. So Microsoft would basically say ticky box, they're 99.75% round that up to 100% deployed. But the reality is they're only using 3350. And so if we go back and look at at that data and look at their blocked users and you know, non human accounts and all that sort of stuff, that's where those 600 are going to come in. Right. So we can actually go in and look at where are those. Let's free up those 600. But the other thing is if you look at the M365, it's made up of 30 or sorry, 42 different plans. Okay. So those boxes, there's 42 of them that show up in an M3 or in an M365E. Okay, they're only using 36 of them. But when you look at the total that they're actually using, they're only using 24.1% of all of that bundle. Right. So I don't want to get into all the nuances and the details today because again, like I said, we have a three hour course that we teach that teaches you how to do that. But by getting to this data, can you see how powerful that is to go to Microsoft and say, look, you want us to buy an E3, we're actually using 24 point of it. Now, in fairness to Microsoft, you know, a To do app, which is this bottom one, this BPOs to do, that's the to do app isn't as valuable as the Office subscription itself. So that's your Microsoft Office Pro there. Right. And so it's not as valuable. So you want to weight this stuff and say like, you know, to do is maybe worth 50 cents a month of the costs where office is 30, 13%. But you can do some weighted stuff on there to show Microsoft what the actual value is, is of the products that you're paying for that you're actually using. And so that leads us to secret number three, that you can negotiate with ease and beat Microsoft at their own game. I talked about this, is that a lot of the times it people, they just don't like to negotiate. They'll tell us all the time, I get sick to my stomach, I can't sleep at night, I get sweaty, I get nervous going into the meetings. And then the procurement teams are typically like, hey, I'd love to have those negotiations, but I just don't feel that I have the data that I need or the information I need to make sure that we're making the right decisions, we're able to push back on what Microsoft counters when I asked them for something. So I think I talked about this. You have to have a team. Ironically enough, when I was at Microsoft, I had one president's club. And on one of the days, they had a bunch of different activities you could pick from. And there was six or seven of them that you could pick from. And, you know, my wife and I was looking at it going, there's nothing really here that interests us all that much. But we thought, okay, let's go deep sea fishing, because at least then we're out in the water. And we made that decision. But instantly I got this, like, sick feeling in my stomach and I'm like, what the heck am I doing? Because I get really seasick, right? And so we got out on the boat and true to form, within probably about half an hour, I was literally seasick lying down in the cabin, sick sleeping. And it was at the end of the season, so it wasn't great fishing. And so the other couples were all up on the top part of the boat, you know, kind of having a couple of beverages and things like that, when I heard the skip yell fish on. And it's the. It's a monster. It's the biggest one I've ever seen. And I kind of jumped up and, you know, he said, jump in the chair. And I jumped in the chair and I saw it jump and it was huge. And, you know, it went down and kind of went out, I think almost like the length of three football fields or something, if I remember correctly. But the skip had kind of said to us, like, said to me, like, look, it's going to take probably all four men that are on the boat somewhere around four to five hours to pull this thing in. And I had done it in 30 minutes myself, and I couldn't have done that without a support team. And what I mean by that is the skip was there and he was telling me, like, when to kind of lean forward, to loosen the slack and when to kind of reel in. And the captain was watching the water and he would back the boat up to loosen the drag on the line line or pull forward, to tighten it, to kind of tire that out. My wife was pouring water on my head and the other guys were there cheering on and sort of, hey, Mike, die real. So it was a whole team thing. And so the thing is, when you want to beat Microsoft, you need a team Right. If you get that pit in the stomach that you don't know what you're doing, you need a team. You need somebody that has seen what their tactics are. You need the person that looking at the data, that was the skip for us. He was watching the water, watching the fish, watching the line, seeing somebody looking at that data, giving you that data, figuring out who that is. You need the, you know, if you're it, you need the procurement guys to, you know, take over the negotiations so you don't get the pit and the filling of your stomach that, you know, I'm going to be sick. If you're the procurement team, you need the IT team to go out and do those surveys and get you all the data that you need in order to pull this together and make it easier, Easy, right? Because at the end of the day, you can slay the blue marlin monster, in this case Microsoft, by doing that and surrounding yourself with the right team in order to do that. And when you do that, what ends up happening is clients always say to us, that was easy. Literally, Mike, where was the that was easy button? Because their time to negotiate decreased substantially. Right? Like the amount of prep work that they do is not nearly as much as when they were trying to do things manually and pull all these spreadsheets together and figure things out. But the difference is, and I'm going to show you how this works here in a second, is they put all the pressure on Microsoft. They took the pressure off of themselves and put the pressure on Microsoft. And that's not the way that Microsoft likes to negotiate. And so here's an example. This was a 200,000 staff company as a government and they had some budget deficits. And we're basically looking at 18 agencies that they were configuring, managing differently, and they had no real visibility into what each of them were doing. And so we went through our blueprint with them and did the surveys and looked at their O365 usage and basically went out and found $125 million in savings, 85 million in vendor duplication, and basically 110 million in cost savings from being over licensed. I got like 50x ROI on what they paid us. But this was, you know, again, you don't have to be 200,000. The same could be for a 2,000 seat organization or 200. The percentage that they saved was significant. And no matter what the size of your organization, those savings into your budget are, you know, are saved or significant. Right. So you might also think like, you know, I Don't know how to negotiate, I don't know how to assemble all this data. I don't know how to even find the time to do this work. And then how do I even figure out what licenses I actually need, right? And so the truth is you have all the data you need to have a conversation. And you know, especially if you're supported by a team, it won't feel like a negotiation at all. So if you collect the data, you got a great strong team, it won't feel like a negotiation. All just becomes a conversation and facts, right? And so typically the process sort of looks like this is most organizations, SAM stands for Software Asset Management or what they do is they sort of try and look at what they have out there. They might have some tools in place, depending on the size of the organization. They run the licensing tools and then they end, this is how much we need. But they haven't gone into any great detail. They just sort of run it to kind of get the surface information, you know. But to do it right, it takes six to 12 months. If you're doing a negotiation with Microsoft, there's things that you can do in 30 days to save money, like Azure, like you said, you find savings in Azure, you can get savings tomorrow. There's things you can do in O365 that can save money depending on when you're at that, within a few days, up to whenever your anniversary date is. But you have to do like a detailed license analysis. You have to take that data, map it to that O365 map of services that I showed to figure out what you need, use that to run a data driven discussion and get maximum value and ROI on your investment. And so what that typically looks like is basically three phases, right? And so what happens is we spend a lot of time, about 15% of our time and 50%, so 3, 2/3 of the time in these two phases around setup. So understanding what your goals, your objectives are, figuring out, you know, the budget, what, what you need. And then we get into information gathering to figure out what you're using, do the surveys, you know, look at all the products, develop a deal strategy, start to figure out optimization, what licenses do we actually need? And we only spend about 35% of the time on negotiating at the table, right? The thing is Microsoft does this in reverse, right? Microsoft wants to just come in and close the deal. So they come in and say, here's what you were buying and here's a quote for you to just buy that and here's A quote for you to buy whatever we want to sell you. So for instance, if I'm just a Microsoft365.3 customer, I get up for renewal, Microsoft comes in, goes, here's your quote for E3. Here's a quote for E5. By the way, we've discounted E5 to make it look more attractive. You should just buy that because you get all this stuff that is going to sit on the shelf and you're not even going to use. But it's a great. So go out and do it right versus this approach where it's all data driven. You go to Microsoft and go, actually, I know exactly what I need because I know my roadmap, I know exactly what I'm using, I know exactly what licenses I need, not bundles that you want to sell me. And so I know what that is worth to me. And basically what I'm. What I. What you're going to do is what this is worth to me versus what Microsoft wants to sell sell you is what I call the value gap. So they want to sell you all E5s. You don't need E5s. They want to sell you E5s for a million bucks a year. You only need $600,000 worth of products because you've gone out and looked at what you need and figured out that you can buy a la carte, things like that. That creates a value gap of $400,000 and Microsoft needs to close that. Okay. And so part of what this does is it allows you to view Microsoft in a different light. So here is an example of how Microsoft actually views their products. Right? So again, this is data. How's Microsoft view their products? Right. Do they care about any on premise products anymore? Nope. Project Online, Project On Premise, Visio On Premise, Office on premise, SharePoint servers, Exchange servers, they don't care about that stuff. They don't even really care about Windows and SQL servers. In fact, nobody gets quota retirement if you buy more Windows and SQL servers. I had a client that needed $10 million in SQL servers and Microsoft was like, we don't care. The reps are like, I don't get paid on it. Right? What they do care about is if you're putting that in Azure. So, you know, low value tactical stuff on the left, high value strategic stuff on the right and up up, right? And so if I understand that they care about Dynamics 365 or PowerApps or Power BI or Intune or Team Voice or Azure, you know, to really high degrees, and I understand what they're doing with O365 and how they see that I can map my product purchase. Right. So if I'm looking at a product purchase and I map it like this, I don't want to focus on trying to get, you know, concessions on Windows and SQL Server. That is less than like a, you know, quarter of the deal or 10% of the deal. I really want to be focusing on these things that Microsoft are strategic and getting them excited about this stuff and moving towards this stuff and negotiating. Okay, But I won't know that I have this if I haven't done that survey and gone out and figured out any of the value gap stuff and things like that. Okay, and so how does this affect, you know, renewals or negotiations with Microsoft? You know, they're going to do, they're decreasing the discounts that are on products not in quadrants three and four. So three and four, the right hand side here, actually even three, they're starting to really show that they're not, they're not all that interested in providing pricing concessions on that. They have a sales tactic to drive you up into that upper right hand quadrant. A lot of the times you don't need those products. You look at the security suites. A lot of the times when you look at and go out and do surveys and understand what's going on, people don't need everything that's in the security suite. They're using CrowdStrike or other products that are best of breed and they're not ready to use Microsoft. They might be thinking about maybe dabbling in it and whatnot, but they don't need everything that's in there. Right. And so a lot of the times it's like, well, if you want teams dlp, you got to buy the entire security suite. But then there's like six products that I don't need. So I need to understand the value of that, how I create that value gap and how I go and have that discussion with Microsoft to build justification. Now they're justified because they want to sell you that bundle of products. It's in the fourth quadrant, right. So how do I use that in my strategy or negotiation with them to push when I push and pull what I'm to trying, trying to do. Okay, so let me ask you, hopefully you're enjoying this webinar so far finding it's, you know, got some good information but if, you know, what we've covered is, you know, how do I collect data that you require to be more prepared than Microsoft. So we talked about surveys Understanding usage stats and things like that. We talked about how to purchase only what you need. So how do I take that? Those surveys, those usage stats, align them to, to that color chart with the boxes of all the services. Figure out what I actually need in our tooling with Slim360, you can look and see, okay, what percentage of a bundle am I actually using? And then using that data to negotiate with ease at Microsoft to beat them at their own game. That's sort of what we covered. So if you want to take this to the next level, one of the things that I'm introducing, I talked about it a little bit, is that we have an O365 savings symposium. It's a web training training. We normally charge clients, you know, a couple of thousand dollars to attend that session with us. But it really is going to go and dive into deeply on purchasing O365 or M365. By the way, in there we talk about what the difference between O365 and M365 is. I get asked that a lot, but we talk about that. And so we spent three hours really diving into how you align each of those boxes to that and then also taking out the confusion of am I buying or am I buying a licensing program? Microsoft loves to sell you licensing programs, not products. We'll leave it at that. Right. So it gives you the information you need to really dive in and understand what you're using and what you need. And so basically what you get if you attended is what's the difference between O365 and M365, how to understand what is a license versus a licensing program, Understanding what is included in the bundle bundles and then what data in more depth than we're able to kind of go through in a one hour webinar of what data you require to make negotiations easy. And just to give you some examples, we talked a little bit about it. We had a 21% reduction in a restaurant chain. We did a 42% reduction in a transportation logistics firm, saved a large healthcare organization 10 million. We talked about the 40% there, 39% to be exact, on that oil and gas computer company. Right. So there's definitely proof. We've got a number of case studies on how this works. And it works for both IT professionals who want to make negotiations easy. It works for procurement teams who need to get the data to negotiate the best deal. When it comes and say, hey, go negotiate this, this renewal, okay, it might be thinking, you know, I can't get started. Because, you know, why even bother? Microsoft controls this process from start to finish. They control the data. We see how licensing works and how their programs are like their licensing, like their EAs and things work. The good news is you can control the process. We do this for clients all the time. And you can get a deal where you pay a fair amount for what you need, but you need to understand the data and things like that. And part of, not just what data do I need to get, but how does that data align to licensing. So like I said, we normally charge 2000 bucks for people to come and spend half a day with, with us to go through this, but we're, we're giving the online version of it. We'll also throw in, if you purchase this, we'll throw in access to our surveys. So if you want to go out and survey your organization, understand, we'll throw that in. And we're giving you the template that we use to model those licenses to those boxes that we talk about. And so if you want to understand, you know, what licenses need, understand what O365 services you're using, figure out where you're wasting money and how to do that, because we show you what reports to pull out of the tenant to start doing some of this yourself in that course as well. Okay, so if you. And you know, we're driving 27% savings on average to clients doing this. And so, you know, with this, you don't have to do multiple spreadsheets. You don't have to waste hours trying to figure out what data you need. You don't need to get on, you know, you don't need to attend unneeded meetings to collect data all lined out for you and then, you know, trying to guess on what and how. Right. So the reason I developed what we do is because I searched the market for the tool. So when I, when I went out and said I'm going to go and help people do this, I searched in the market for the tool to get the type of data that Marty used against me when I was at Microsoft. And I couldn't find anything. You know, there's tools out there that do software asset management, but they don't look at it from license and cost optimization. They look at it more from a process optimization perspective. Perspective. And so I had to create a way to gather this data for myself. And so, you know, basically what that means. You don't have to waste your time trying to figure it out. You don't have to guess at what you need. And you don't have to listen to Microsoft to figure out what you need. I have these interesting conversations all the time with people where they're like Mike, you said this but Microsoft said that. And then we'll go and pull information out of the product terms or something, go back, say well tell Microsoft their product terms say this. And then Microsoft oh yeah, you're right. The reason for that is nobody at Microsoft is. There's very few people at Microsoft that are actually licensing people. Even people with licensing in their title are product and program salespeople, not licensing people. And so we take it down to that bare, bare, bare minimum. So if you look at like what we're, what's in this program, like I said, a couple thousand dollars we would charge for half day with us 1997. If you want to just use our survey as our model sell as well, we'll throw in a 30 minute call with one of our analysts to review your data with you if you want. You know, so it's worth about $4,300 and so you know, save 1%. It's probably well more than 4,300. Probably just in the hours that you would save negotiating with Microsoft if you did this. It's worth that. But what I want to do is I want to make it cheap and I want to make it valuable. So what we're offering today is if there's anybody that wants to get more trained on, on Office 365 licensing and the data that you need 49.97 you can get your teams to get trained up on it as well. It's definitely an easy three hour course that they can watch over a period of time and just start to learn more about how all this works. And we're just offering it for 49.97 if there's anybody that's interested in that. Anyways, that is what I wanted to present today. I don't know if anybody had any questions. If there are, please feel free to either drop them in the chat or put your hand up. I'm happy to call you on. But if not, we can give a couple seconds here to see if there are any questions. But if not, I thank you for attending this afternoon or evening depending on where you are in the world and appreciate it and have a great day everybody. I think they dropped the link. If you are interested in taking the training or sending that off to some of your teams to get a little bit more training on, on how 365 licensing works and the type of data that you can collect. It's in the chat. Okay, thanks, everybody. Have a great day.