Requirements for your Microsoft license partner
The vast majority of Swedish companies today buy some type of Microsoft licence - for Office 365 and Microsoft 365. Because you buy cloud services, it is now easy to change contracts and licence partners, yet too few take advantage of the opportunity to choose the partner who can add the most value to the licence. Why is that and what requirements should you really be able to set for your licensing partner today?
What else do you get besides the license?
In larger companies, there is often a habit of licensing agreements for on-premise products for three years at a time. This practice has been overturned with cloud licensing because the whole point of cloud solutions is the flexibility to scale up and down as you wish. It therefore makes little sense to have long contract periods. By "tradition", many still continue to buy their licences under the older model - without the licence partner having to offer anything more than the licence itself to their customer. For smaller companies, on the other hand, it is often a case of simply trusting the existing licence partner and settling for less. This is often due to a relatively low level of awareness of what is available and what the requirements should be.
Today, you buy the license for your Microsoft product as a pure transaction - you pay and the provider delivers the license. But the partner who provides licenses in this way does not optimize them based on your needs. Instead, they often offer some kind of one-size-fits-all solution and there is no real thought behind why they offer one license or another.
For you as a customer, this means that you often pay for functionality that you have no use for, or that you buy licences that do not cover the functionality needs of your business.
How can and should a licensing partner deliver added value?
The general rule should be that you buy the licence from the supplier who can add the most value to it. Therefore, it is important that your partner:
- Have sufficient understanding of your business to optimise your licences.
- Have solid knowledge of the platform to which they sell licenses.
- Continuously provides information on new functionality to enable you to keep up with developments in a way that benefits your business and allows you to make full use of the licences.
- Offers convenient ways to order licences, with short response times. For example, waiting weeks for licences is not acceptable - there must be well-established processes.
- Offers monitoring of unused licenses with clear reporting.
Don't think technology - think functionality and business benefits
The role of IT has changed. It is no longer just a client organisation, but an important part of business-critical development. Licensing now merges with functionality and business needs in a completely different way than before, which means that the discussion about licensing is not based on a purely technical perspective. This creates a whole new requirement for your licensing partner to understand your individual needs and knowledge of the platform and its functionality.
At WeSafe, we know the importance of both understanding our customers' needs and being able to translate them into functionality on the platforms we specialise in. Want to know more about how you can optimize your licenses and be continuously updated on new features? Contact us!