Challenge
Managing licensing compliance can be an overwhelming and tedious process, but one that is entirely necessary. No company wants to willingly overpay for unnecessary enterprise licenses. And since paying too little often results in hefty fines (sometimes millions of dollars), they certainly don’t want to do that either.
As Microsoft continues to focus on license reconciliation, companies using Dynamics are looking for ways to ensure compliance. One of the nation’s leading professional cleaning services had an upcoming Microsoft Dynamics software licensing renewal, and they needed to ensure that their licensing costs aligned with true usage. They were already using our Fusion Alliance team for Microsoft Dynamics support, so they asked us for help, a decision that certainly paid off.
Fusion is a Microsoft certified partner and Gold Partner in many disciplines, including Application Development, Cloud Platform, Cloud Productivity, Data Analytics, and Datacenter. In 2019, Fusion was named one of the Top 50 Microsoft Solution Providers in a network of certified partners across the globe, by CIO Review Magazine.
Solution
As a Microsoft Dynamics partner, one of the services our Fusion team provides is helping clients true-up the money they are spending on licensing. Having recently taken over as partner of record for this cleaning services company, the licensing assessment we performed was covered under their Fusion Dynamics support contract.
To perform the assessment, we conducted a round of interviews with Dynamics users in the organization. We spoke to everyone from the employee who pumps fuel into the work trucks and logs it in Dynamics, to line-of-business managers, such as warehouse and IT managers, all the way up to the CFO. We then ran usage forensics and compared that to licensing needs.
The assessment revealed that the company’s licensing was not accurate. They needed fewer enterprise and functional client access licenses (CALs) than their current licensing fees reflected, so their expenditure for licensing would drop.
We facilitated the paperwork and all communications with Microsoft to make the necessary licensing changes, a task that can be very time-consuming in itself, and the results were felt soon thereafter.
