How a Microsoft licence review saved one business over £30,000 a year

The situation

The organisation already had an established internal IT team and a substantial Microsoft 365 environment supporting 205 users.

Its licensing had developed over time into two distinct groups. Eighty users had Microsoft 365 E5, while another 125 had Office 365 E1 combined with separate Microsoft Intune Plan 1 and Microsoft Entra ID P1 licences.

Each product provided genuine functionality, but the overall licensing position reflected decisions made at different points in the organisation’s history. It had not recently been tested against what users and the business needed today.

As the annual Microsoft commitment approached its end, the organisation had a choice: renew the existing products for another year or use the opportunity to review the complete position. Simply renewing would have been the easiest option. It would also have committed the business to another year of unnecessary cost.

The target

The objective was not simply to find a cheaper Microsoft licence.

Any recommendation needed to preserve the productivity, identity, security and device-management capabilities the organisation relied upon. Moving to a lower-cost product without validating those requirements could create operational limitations or weaken controls elsewhere in the tenant.

West View IT’s role was deliberately collaborative. The organisation did not need its internal IT team replaced. It needed an experienced Microsoft partner that could work alongside that team, provide an external perspective and help turn the review into a properly evidenced licensing decision.

The target was clear: establish the most appropriate licensing model for all 205 users, remove unnecessary expenditure and retain every capability the organisation had identified as necessary.

The activity

West View IT completed a full review of the Microsoft 365 tenant and worked directly with the internal IT team to understand how the environment was being used.

The review considered:

• existing licence assignments and user groups;
• productivity and collaboration requirements;
• identity and access-management controls;
• endpoint and mobile-device management;
• security and information-protection requirements;
• dependencies on functionality specific to the existing products; and
• the organisation’s expected user numbers and future licensing needs.

Rather than comparing products solely from a feature list, the review connected each requirement to the people, devices and working practices it supported.

This confirmed that the organisation did not require the full capabilities of Microsoft 365 E5. It also confirmed that the functionality being assembled through Office 365 E1, Intune Plan 1 and Entra ID P1 could be provided more simply through Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

With 205 users, the organisation also sat comfortably beneath Microsoft’s 300-user limit for Business Premium. West View IT therefore recommended moving all users to Business Premium when the existing annual commitment ended.

The result

The existing licensing model carried a current annual RRP benchmark of £78,486.

This consisted of £49,536 for 80 Microsoft 365 E5 licences and £28,950 for the Office 365 E1, Microsoft Intune Plan 1 and Microsoft Entra ID P1 licences assigned across the remaining 125 users.

Licensing all 205 users with Microsoft 365 Business Premium reduced the equivalent annual RRP to £41,574.

That produced:

• an annual saving of £36,912;
• a licensing cost reduction of approximately 47%;
• one primary Microsoft subscription instead of four separate products; and
• a simpler licensing position for the internal IT team to administer.

Most importantly, the saving was achieved after the organisation’s requirements had been validated. It did not depend on removing functionality the business had identified as necessary.