/  Craig Slack

Microsoft Licensing Updates – January 2025

CSP Pricing Changes  

Effective in April 2025, CSP licenses purchased on an annual commitment but with monthly billing terms will see a 5% increase in costs over what an annual term with upfront billing would incur.  This premium charge will begin to impact CSP customers as their annual term licenses renew. 

Microsoft Places 

Microsoft Places is now generally available.  This new functionality, which is accessed through Teams, is used to reserved workspaces in a hybrid work model and requires Teams Premium licensing to be added for users in order for them to utilize this booking system. 

Teams Updates 

Further enhancements to Teams are expected in early 2025, Microsoft has announced they have been conducting testing on some new features already.  These new features expected are the introduction of the new chat and channel experience which will include threaded chats, teams and other channels will be brought into the same view as chats, and @mentions filtered views.  The redesign of chats and channels is intended to simplify the end user experience of collaborating in Teams.  These features were introduced as a public preview in late 2024 and should be generally available in the first half of 2025. 

Windows 

A new category of PCs is being introduced, the Copilot+ PC.  These highly performant and secure Windows 11 devices have set new industry standards for speed, intelligence and security.  As Windows 10 is set to reach the end of it’s lifecycle in October of 2025, the timing of these new PCs is expected to drive more adoption of Windows 11.  Laptops are already available from Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo and Samsung, along with, of course Surface devices offering the Copilot+ experience. 

Azure FinOps and Cost Management 

The Microsoft Cost Management team had announced some key updates during Ignite to support customers FinOps journey, including: 

  • Exports to Microsoft Fabric will aid customers in getting cost and price datasets for storage, analysis and reporting. 
  • A new built-in view for Azure OpenAI in cost analysis will allow for much easier reviews of the costs of running Azure OpenAI. 
  • Copilot for Cost analysis features have been updated to allow customers to view costs from different parameters and views. Additional collaboration for users to share these views with others in their organization is also now available. 
  • Other cost savings programs/changes have also been announced for customers to reduce their overall consumption charges: 
  • Storage account default egress limits have been increased to 200gbps in most regions 
  • Fees for backing up SAP Hana instances have decreased 
  • Until March 31, 2025, the new latest AMD, Intel, and Arm-based Azure VMs for Linux are discounted by 56% 
  • Autoscaling in vCore based Cosmos DB for Mongo DB is in preview 

If you have any licensing questions we are here to help. Please contact us and we would be happy to assist.