Ctrl+Alt+Subscribe: A Microsoft Licensing Story

Welcome Chad Muckenfuss, VP of Cloud. Chad’s going to be walking us through the latest Microsoft licensing changes, what they mean for your customers, and how to turn that discussion into a gateway for those bigger engagements with cloud. Joining him, we also have Ashley Triplett, Director of Cloud and Procurement, and Alexis Hesseltine, I said this wrong earlier, I’m gonna say it right, it’s Alexis Hesseltine, National Channel Manager for Managed Solutions. So everyone, thank you guys so much for joining us today, and it’s lovely to have you all on. Go ahead and take it away.

Well, you, Cassandra. I appreciate that. And I am excited to have Ashley and Alexis joining us today from Managed Solution.

I have had some great success with them over the past couple of years personally coming out from the SE and SA team that I was on prior to my current role here. We’ve had some great wins with them. And the topic of Microsoft Microsoft three sixty five, their licensing, all of that seems to be kind of top of mind. So I wanted to take the time today to spend a little bit of time going into some different aspects.

There’s been a bunch of changes that Microsoft has put out there regarding licensing. And what I wanted to do was really just go through some key questions and have, Ashley and Alexis talk us through some of the changes, what’s going on, and, obviously, also learn some of the ways that we can begin to leverage Microsoft licensing to open some doors with customers. So without further ado, again, Ashley, Alexis, thank you for joining. We can go ahead and, and begin the conversation.

I wanna really kinda kick things off Okay. With, some questions, around licensing specifically. So, again, you’ve you’ve outlined here what we what we’re gonna talk about today in the opening slide. But can you explain some of the changes to the Microsoft EA licensing and and some pricing after you introduce yourselves?

So go ahead. We’ll do the introduction first.

Yeah. And I’m happy to kick things off from the managed solution front. Chad, Cassandra, thank you all so much for having us on today. It’s a pleasure to to be on and and discuss CSP licensing and all all that’s coming down the pipeline from Microsoft.

I am your channel manager here at Managed Solution. I’ve been here about three and a half years.

Personally based in Texas, we are headquartered in San Diego. So happy to send everybody a recap after today’s conversation and address any questions y’all may have.

But joining me today is really our resident Microsoft licensing expert, our director of cloud procurement, Ashley Triplett, who is going to be addressing most of our questions today around Microsoft licensing. Ashley, would you like to introduce yourself?

Yeah, absolutely.

It’s nice to meet you all. I’m really glad y’all could join us today, and thank you Chad for for hosting us. We appreciate this. My name is Ashley Triple, and I run the procurement and the cloud department here at Managed Solution.

We work with hundreds of Microsoft customers every day on licensing, renewals, making sure optimizations are getting the most value out of the Microsoft investment for our customers. So happy to get into a little bit of that today with you guys, I’ll kick it back to Chad for now.

Yeah. So thank you both for the introduction. And again, like I said, I’ve I’ve worked alongside of you. We’ve had some really nice wins together and continue to see a lot of activity in and around the Microsoft licensing area.

And not only Microsoft licensing, but also the outstanding support that you guys bring to the micros your Microsoft customers. So they’re not just buying licensing from you, but they’re also buying the support and the ongoing understanding that your team and expertise that your team brings to the table as being a Microsoft CSP. And with that, let’s let’s dig into some of the changes here. So as I mentioned, the EA licensing, can you explain that and some of the major changes that happened the end of last year for that?

Yeah. Absolutely. And we do have a slide dedicated to the EAs. So the EA landscape shifted dramatically heading into twenty twenty six.

Here’s a slide that kind of gives you an executive summary of those changes. Effective November first last year in twenty twenty five, Microsoft eliminated tier volume based pricing for levels b through d. So all the online services under EA, MPSA, OSPA, every customer, whether it’s five hundred seats to fifty thousand seats, they now pay the same level as A pricing.

Basically, that’s going to cause a lot of different changes for those EA customers coming up. For larger organizations previously priced at level C or D pricing, this translates to an increase of eight to fifteen percent more at their renewal. So they’re, of course, still locked into any three year term that they already signed for, But when they come up on that renewal pricing is where this is really gonna impact them.

So and the EA licensing specifically is enterprise.

It’s an enterprise account licensing. That’s what the EA stands for. So it was typically in and around larger organizations that had, like you like you outlined there, the five hundred to fifty thousand licensing. Most of the interaction that I’ve had with you all in working these has been in the two thousand to six thousand range, sometimes a little bit more. But, a majority of that, again, is is a major change for these organizations. The only one not or the two that are not affected for this was nonprofits and FedGov. Correct?

Correct. Yes. So this is a major change for the corporate customers primarily.

Yeah. Okay. Great.

Going a little bit further and I guess what I wanna outline is how managed solution really kind of shines as not only, again, just a pure licensing procurement, but but more of a that cloud service provider. And I know we’re seeing some things pop up in the chat here asking about support. And the Microsoft CSP model, why is that important to have when when people are also looking at buying Microsoft licensing?

Yeah. Absolutely. So CSP stands for cloud solution provider.

Microsoft needs cloud solution providers specifically for the additional support for the customers. Instead of buying directly from Microsoft, customers can purchase Microsoft products through a certified partner who manages the relationship, the billing, and the support.

So the partner led support through a CSP has a dedicated partner managing the licensing renewals, resolving issues, providing strategic guidance. You’re not just navigating licensing with Microsoft alone.

There’s also flexibility that with unlike an EA, the traditional enterprise agreement that we were just speaking on, CSP licensing can be adjusted monthly or annually depending on the terms the customer wants to go with. So that’s all very much more incentivizing to go with, especially with the EAs now no longer having a discount.

Yeah. That’s great. And so Microsoft has done away with the with the metal versions of of silver, gold, platinum, and all that type of thing. Can you while we’re on the CSP subject, one of the questions came up. What level is managed solutions? Gold, question mark.

Can you explain the difference in what they’ve transitioned to in the CSP model?

Yeah, absolutely.

I was just waiting to see if Alexa wanted to take that one. She usually does, but the cloud solution provider is what we do. Go ahead, Alexis. I’ll let you take that one.

No, you’re fine, Ashley. I just dropped it in the chat as well. So as Chad mentioned, Microsoft has really sunsetted the terminology gold, silver, bronze partners. Managed solution was formerly considered a gold partner. And I apologize if you hear background noise. I have two sick little ones today, so I’m doing my best. And that’s why I’m on mute, most of today’s conversation.

We are considered a tier one CSP. And beyond that, I think Chad mentioned this earlier, Managed Solution as a whole, we’ve got an entire Microsoft department, deep bench of engineers that work really extensively across the Microsoft stack. So that coupled with our tier one CSP status actually sets us in the top one percent of Microsoft partners globally.

So with the tier one CSP status, that means we have a direct relationship with Microsoft. That’s the biggest differentiator between a tier one classification versus a tier two classification. Most CSPs are considered what’s called tier two, which means there is some kind of intermediary, like an Ingram Micro or an SHI or a CEW that sits between Pax8. Often we see that sits between that CSP and Microsoft when it comes to the procurement of those licenses. Managed solution is direct with Microsoft, which allows us to get some excellent discounting that we can then pass on to the customer.

Yeah. That’s fantastic. And, you know, it’s interesting from from that CSP level, you can wrap your managed services in and around that as well. So, can you just briefly talk about what you offer in addition, obviously, to the licensing, the the support? Is it tier one, tier two, tier three, etcetera? And and how you interact with the end user customers.

Yeah. Happy to take that as well. So we do offer in house complimentary support to all of our CSP clients. So that includes a fifteen minute response SLA, which is rather unheard of in this space. So very quick turnaround time. We assist with all management inquiries associated with licensing.

So ads, removes, changes, general inquiries around consulting for licensing. We also go through an optimization exercise that’s free of charge to all new clients and all existing clients upon renewal, which simply means we are optimizing and rightsizing their licensing based on their current number of employees, what those end users are needing feature wise across the Microsoft stack to make sure that they’re not overpaying or over licensed within their organization.

So you have the in house support with that complimentary fifteen minute SLA. And in addition to that, we also leverage what’s called Microsoft Premier Support that’s available at no added cost. So that Premier Support is essentially escalated support with Microsoft directly in the event that the customer ever has an issue with Microsoft. So not necessarily a management inquiry, but more so an issue, downtime, things like that. And we can leverage that Premier Support to ensure that tickets for the customer are seen about same day or next day by a Microsoft engineer.

Great. And, we just transitioned to the next slide, which is the next part of the conversation here. So Microsoft just announced Microsoft three sixty five e seven. That’s the new brand new licensing package that’s out there. Can you talk us through what that includes now and how it’s a little different from the prior e three and e five, which stands e is enterprise for everything there. So go ahead and talk us through that.

Yeah. I’m happy to take that. So Microsoft actually just officially announced this e seven license yesterday.

Its launch date is planned to be marked May first, as you can see in the slide. What is E7 exactly? So E7 is now called the Frontier Suite. It’s the first enterprise license tier since E5 that was launched in twenty fifteen.

It bundles the E5 license, which is all security, compliance, identity, and productivity, along with Copilot licensing, the Copilot three sixty five to be exact, agent three sixty five, which is also a brand new license. I’ll get to that in just a moment, but it includes the Entrez Suite, so that’s advanced identity features beyond just e five itself, and then advanced Defender, Intune, and Purview security capabilities. You also see WorkIQ, which is also another brand new phrase or brand that Microsoft is throwing out there, and that’s actually gonna be available sooner than this license comes out.

So Microsoft is rolling out a new, what they’re calling wave three of Copilot, and WorkIQ is something that that is really based on.

So it’s really expanding the intelligence layer across Microsoft three sixty five stack that will be within the applications itself. So you would need a Microsoft three sixty five CoPilot license to take advantage of the WorkIQ today.

Great. As far as the the the AI agent, can we go into a little bit of what the what they’re rolling out from a Microsoft standpoint as far as AI services and bundling that altogether?

Yeah. Absolutely. So what exactly is the Agent three sixty five? It’s a new central control panel for AI agents.

It’s a it’s basically for the IT team and security teams to register, provision, monitor, and secure those AI agents that are gonna be within your organization. So your users can get these can create the AI agents, and this gives it a central place to actually manage all of those agents from one place. So it’s a management tool.

Okay. Great.

Let’s transition to the next slide, and and what we’ll do is let’s let’s talk about some of the changes specific licensing before we get into some of the other product sets that I wanted to to chat with you all about today. So please talk us through what’s happening in July of this year. There’s some impending changes coming from Microsoft once again.

Yes, there are some really big changes coming. So first off, it’s price increases. So almost all of your primary license suites that Microsoft offers today are getting a price increase.

It’s not just a price increase though, there is some added incentive and features that are being added in there to justify this increase. And as most of you know, there’s been a lot of increases going on as far as features go over the last year or two anyway. But Microsoft is also adding a lot more Copilot features in the suites themselves without you having to purchase that Copilot add on license. It also includes Defender. So a lot of you might be familiar with Defender for Office three sixty five Plan one.

That license has always been have to be purchased a la carte for any of the e one, e three frontline SKUs. So Microsoft is now gonna include that in the e three SKUs, both the o three sixty five e three and the Microsoft three sixty five e three licenses. So that’s a huge bonus ad. That’s about two dollars to three dollars per a la carte SKU for that Defender. That’s gonna be included now in the e three starting in July.

Intune remote help and advanced analytics, that’s part of what that Intune additional features are. That’s now going to be included in E3 and E5. You won’t have to purchase that separately or a la carte any further.

And then e five is getting a few more, robust security features for Intune and the Copilot agents that we just recently discussed.

Great. And before we transition into, the Copilot conversation and some of the AI things that are that are changing here with Microsoft, I just wanted to highlight a win that I had with one of our partners and you all. You both worked on it alongside of me, and, it was it was something where a customer, again, was in an enterprise agreement. They were not happy with how that was going.

They were not happy because they the the way that that organization worked specifically was that they purchased other organizations, folded them in under their umbrella, and then sold parts of their organization off as well. And it was very difficult to maneuver that type of adding and removing, licensing under that EA agreement. We brought the whole thing to you, through one of our great partners in the Midwest. And what we ended up doing was putting it together in a very nice package that before they did away with the EA agreements, we did a CSP agreement for licensing, which allowed the flexibility that they needed.

And that was a six figure a month deal, if I remember correctly. Right? I I think that was a a really nice win for everybody across the board. And now it’s opened the door to significantly more, again, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but significantly more opportunities with you and that end customer to continue to grow that relationship.

Right?

Absolutely. And they are a fabulous customer. And thank you so much for that referral, Chad. We appreciate that come the partnership there.

Yeah. It’s just been it’s been great because you make it very easy for this whole transition to happen. And, again, doing those assessments of the licensing and and being able to talk it through at a level that the customer’s IT team needs. The expertise that you bring to the table for that has been tremendous because it puts the customer at ease, that you know what you’re talking about, and then building a custom solution each and every time for the for those customers has been has just been tremendous. So it makes it very, very easy for for us to have those conversations from a customer level all the way up through engineering and beyond. So so we appreciate that. As we transition into Copilot, can you it’s it’s an easy entry point, I think, for a lot of customers to begin that AI adoption that that I talk about and that Telarus is talking about.

Can you can you offer some maybe some examples of where Copilot is winning and and some of the things maybe that you’ve implemented recently?

Yeah. Absolutely. So Copilot adoption has reached fifteen million seats as of January twenty twenty six, with paid usage growing over a hundred and sixty percent year over year. There’s some clear wins there. Right? So meetings and collaboration, that’s the single fastest return of investment on Copilot. Copilot and Teams feature summaries of your meetings, generates action items after the meetings that make it easy for those follow ups.

Customers and users who miss meetings catch up four times faster. So if you miss a meeting but you were invited and that meeting got recorded, you can easily get a recap from Copilot that briefs you on that meeting. It even gives you breaking points in the meeting where certain topics were discussed. So if you really just need to hone in on one of those topics, you can skip right to that section. It’s incredibly helpful.

That’s great.

As far as, you know, some win stories, have you had I know one of your key things is really kinda coming alongside the the customer, the end user, and helping design how to leverage Copilot and training them how to leverage Copilot. Do you have any, any recent win stories that you that pop into your head?

Yeah. So there’s actually, when it comes to knowledge workers, we have a customer that has relayed that there’s thirty percent, thirty two percent in their day to day email. They spend that much time in their email every day. Copilot has driven measured reductions of forty percent in email composition time.

Document briefs that took two three hours now take thirty minutes to sixty minutes for early adopters to copilot. So those are significant time savers for your team.

Okay.

One of the questions that just popped up, is this offered in Canada? Are you able to to offer licensing outside of the US?

That’s a really great question. So we at Managed Solution can only provide licensing to US based tenants.

However, we can always help you find a partner that can provide licensing in other countries. So we’re happy to assist with that.

Okay. Great.

As we kind of transition out of Copilot and into more of how can we win overall with Microsoft? It’s it’s kind of the the big player in the space. What are some key areas that we can start to develop for our partners here? Some key questions to start the conversation with their customers regardless of size.

Yeah. Absolutely. So definitely the conversation starting with, when is the renewal exactly that you’re in today? That’s always a very beneficial question. It could postpone the conversation until it’s more important, more of a priority for the customer.

If they’re locked into a term right now, there’s not a whole lot you can do depending on the situation. There have been situations with exceptions where we can get a customer out of the current term, but that’s not always the case. It’s more infrequent than frequent for that. So that’s number one, always trying to know when that renewal’s gonna happen.

And then asking them if they’ve audited their licenses. And there is there any licenses where there might be, some unused features or unused components of those licenses. Maybe not everyone in the company needs the same licensing. Are they licensing by role or are they just giving everyone the same license?

Because that’s something we can definitely have a conversation on and help them streamline and optimize those licenses per seat or per role.

Additionally, you can talk on the security in the cloud side. So are they paying for these features that are included in the suites they have today, but maybe they’re not taking advantage of them, or maybe they’re purchasing those features under a third party. So definitely more return of interest or return of investment of those features if you use what’s actually being provided within the suite itself instead of buying that through multiple third party apps.

Yeah. That’s a key thing is very few, in my experience, very few Microsoft users leverage what’s included in their bundle to to its fullest extent. I’ll especially with regard to the cybersecurity aspect of things, which is fairly robust and what’s included and seems to be getting better, which is even which is even better.

AI readiness and and the AI discussion, what are your thoughts on that as far as how to start the conversation in and around that?

Yeah, it’s a really great conversation.

A lot of companies are really scared of the security components around it.

So the best way to approach that is to really get your security and your governance and your environment set up properly before you implement Copilot. And Managed Solution has a really great team of engineers that can help with that security posture and make sure your governance is really strong. So that’s a really great first component that you wanna make sure is in line. That way you put some guardrails up for CoPilot to work within.

Great.

As we move to the next slide, making that Microsoft conversation easy. It there’s a lot of nuance to Microsoft. It can be difficult to understand all the different licensing levels, all that type of thing. With with managed solution, yourself, your team, everybody that’s gonna interact with our partners and their customers, can you talk us through how you make it easy?

Yeah, absolutely. So we definitely want to bring the licensing expertise to our customers.

We feel like it’s our number one value add. Being able to really talk through the licensing with the customer and explain what’s included in those licenses, the best route for each of the additional features. So if a customer comes in, they have maybe a business basic license and they want additional security and things like that, we can talk to them about business premium. If they’re, you know, at business premium and they’re trying to expand that, should is it time to move to Microsoft three sixty five e three? Are they capping out at the three hundred cap for premium? Those are really great conversations we like to have, and we’re happy to have some creative solutions to get them where they need to get, without having to spend significantly more money. So that’s always a really big value add is having the expertise and the licensing, and being able to come with those come up with those creative solutions.

We’re also a full stack provider, so we can not only give you the licensing assessment, but we do have the team to help you roll out and implement those services.

Being able to do both of those things in collaboration with one another brings a significant value to the customers.

So implementation, having the knowledge behind it, and then we’re not just an order taker. So as Alexis kind of talked to you earlier, our support model is to bring that value continuously through the relationship to the customer. Anytime we’ve already onboarded the customer, we still treat them like they’re a brand new customer we’re still trying to win a relationship with. We’re still trying to prove all of the licensing knowledge. We’re trying to bring the value every single day by continuing to give them the most up to date information on Microsoft and help them every single time that they need a new service implemented in their environment.

That’s fantastic. You guys, again, you you kinda bring the whole offering. And the way that I like the approach is let’s start with the easy part. Here’s the licensing, and then here’s everything that we begin to wrap around that licensing and then just continue to grow that relationship as I noted on on one of the wins that we’ve had together that we worked on.

Can you talk us through, as we move to the next slide, just your story overall? How did you start? Where what do you what do you look like as an organization? All that type of thing.

Yeah. Alexis, do you wanna grab that one?

Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. And just a quick note, Chad, talking about Managed Vision being a full stack provider.

I just wanted to throw out here that obviously today we’re talking primarily about CSP licensing. What we’ve seen in years past is licensing though it can be very transactional, it often offers a quick win with our discounting and complimentary support that we offer customers. And from there, the licensing itself often opens the door to additional opportunity within the account. There’s typically a lot of value add, as Chad mentioned, in terms of clients not really utilizing the full stack of solutions and features that they’re paying for as part of their licensing.

So oftentimes this road leads into additional opportunity. And per our agreement with Telarus, I just wanted to call out that we pay you all as TAs on any additional opportunity that arises from an account that you refer to us. So even if you refer a CSP licensing only opportunity, and let’s say it grows into a SharePoint project or an Entra ID implementation, you are paid on that as well. So I just wanted to call that out.

And then as far as managed solution, we’re founded back in o two and we’re headquartered in San Diego. We’re actually still operated by the original founder. His name is Sean Farrell. I see in the comments, some of you have met him before.

He is still certainly involved with operations today and currently sits as our CEO. So it’s not uncommon for him to pop in on conversations like this should his schedule permit.

The managed solution, primarily two main arms to our business. We are an MSP by default. That’s actually what we were founded as twenty plus years ago. So we offer everything from outsourced help desk services, level one, level two to level three, as well as what I would call your full blown managed IT services, network monitoring, firewalls patching, EDR security, and all the fun things there in between.

And the second arm of our business is of course why we’re chatting today, which is really our Microsoft practice. I think we talked a little bit earlier about in addition to the fact that we have a tier one CSP offering, We also have a deep bench of fully US based engineers that work really extensively across the Microsoft stack, primarily specialize in what Microsoft calls their security suite, Entre ID, Intune, Defender, for example, as well as Microsoft’s Modern Workplace. That’s everything under the o three sixty five umbrella. Teams, Viva, SharePoint, Copilot, you name it.

We do a lot of migration work moving to o three sixty five as well as moving to Azure.

Azure is also a specialty of ours, specifically infrastructure side of Azure. And I don’t know that we’ve discussed it today, but through our CSP practice, speaking of Azure, we do resell all Azure subscriptions as well, which are commissionable.

So Azure subscriptions are typically offered on our end about six percent off of retail cost. So some immediate savings to customers there as well.

Fantastic.

Well, as as we are coming to a close here, there’s some things that I wanted to highlight. You are industry recognized in your expertise. Can you just talk us through a few of the things that you have here that set you apart?

Sure. Ashley, you want me to take this?

Sure. Go for it.

Yeah. So I I mentioned earlier, we are three times specialized with Microsoft. The specializations are essentially obtained through various certifications that our engineering bench has to obtain through Microsoft.

We also sit in the top one hundred and thirty of Microsoft consultancies in the world. So certainly separates us from the majority of other Microsoft providers with our CSP status and those engineers.

We also have an entirely US based help desk. So as an entire organization, we do not outsource or offshore any of our resources. For that reason, we tend to play very well in high compliance verticals in terms of our client base. We do a lot in medical, healthcare, law, biotech, finance.

We do a lot of manufacturing here recently as well. And you can see some of our awards there on the screen.

Great.

Well, I wanna thank you both, tremendously for talking us through what a lot of times is a difficult conversation to have, and to understand what’s happening with Microsoft. Appreciate just the the very clear succinct overview.

I wanna hit on some questions that have popped up here. And, Cassandra, I know you’ve been watching the chat as well. Some of them have been answered. But one of the ones that I wanted to touch on, do you do you do any of the GCC, high or GCC licensing?

Yeah. Great question.

Yes. So we do sell the GCC. Unfortunately, we’re not able to sell GCC high, but we’re more than happy to work with the GCC customer. And if they can’t find another provider, we can definitely make recommendations there for the GCC High.

Okay. GCC High is very specialized. There’s only a handful of providers nationwide that can resell GCC High licensing.

Yeah. That’s been that that is true. And but even having access to the standard GCC is is key for getting into those government and government contractor companies out there, which is which has been great. Well, a couple of things that popped up in the q and a and, Cassandra, did you have some before I I run down those two?

Yeah, absolutely. Because we are running out of time and I definitely want to make sure that we get a chance. One of the things I saw pop up was about training. So for our TAs here, what resources can the advisors use to stay current on Microsoft changes without having to become licensing specialists themselves?

Yeah, absolutely. So we do provide webinars on new features and new products that Microsoft offers. So we do have a pre sales architect team that puts out those webinars, keeps everyone updated. And those are also Q and A based, so if you join one of our live webinars, we can definitely talk through those questions and things like that.

Great. Fantastic. Well, I, again, wanna thank you both Ashley and Alexis for joining us today, talking us through this, what can be a difficult conversation sometimes and showing us how you’re winning, alongside of our partners and their customers. So thank you again.