The Cloud Crew has helped The Building Company save R6-million on its annual Microsoft 365 renewal after using its Azure-powered licence audit and optimisation application to assess actual usage across the organisation.
The saving represents about 38% of The Building Company’s annual Microsoft licensing spend on a like-for-like basis. It was achieved by moving away from an expensive one-size-fits-all licensing model and aligning users more closely with the Microsoft 365 services they actually needed.
Before the review, The Building Company was facing rising licensing costs and limited visibility into whether users were actively using the services included in their Microsoft 365 licensing SKUs. The complexity of Microsoft’s licensing models, combined with longer-term contract commitments, made right-sizing users or removing unused licences more difficult.
For many organisations, this is where Microsoft 365 licensing becomes a business problem, not only an IT administration issue. Licences are often assigned based on broad user groups or assumptions about what employees might need, rather than on clear evidence of what each user actually consumes.
“The issue is not only the licence cost. It is visibility,” says Michael Currie, Director at The Cloud Crew. “When organisations do not know what each user is actually consuming, renewal decisions are often based on assumptions. Our approach is to analyse real usage, build a clearer user profile, and recommend the licence mix that best fits the individual user’s role.”
The Cloud Crew’s application analyses licence assignments and usage signals across Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Office applications. It does not analyse user content. Instead, it looks at indicators such as when services were last accessed, Office licence usage, Teams usage, and SharePoint and OneDrive access to identify where licences may be misaligned, underutilised, or unnecessarily broad.
“The Cloud Crew’s Microsoft 365 Consumption Tool gave us granular insight into usage across every user in our tenant, including when services such as OneDrive, Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and Office Apps were last accessed,” says Chris Bowers, head: IT and digital at The Building Company. “It helped validate or disprove licensing assumptions using actual data and removed days of manual reconciliation and profiling work.”
The assessment confirmed that a single licensing model was not suitable across The Building Company’s environment. It showed where users had been assigned licences with services they were not using, and where similar functionality had already been deployed through third-party products.
The team then used the tool’s dashboard, overview report, and CSV data to identify user and job-profile requirements. The application generated an “as-is” and a recommended licence summary, providing The Building Company with the information needed to conduct its own financial modelling. The Cloud Crew’s licensing specialists also validated the recommendations, discussed user requirements with The Building Company, and provided guidance on refinements, including where Microsoft Frontline Worker licensing could be appropriate.
The R6-million saving was driven by right-sizing Microsoft 365 licence SKUs, reassessing the broad assignment of Enterprise E3 and EMS licensing, and aligning eligible users to more appropriate licensing models while retaining the core services required for their roles.
The engagement has also changed how The Building Company manages licensing beyond the renewal. The organisation now profiles users upfront and automates licence allocation by worker type through its internal tooling and automation. It has also implemented a process to remove inactive services or licences from the tenant, freeing those licences for other users.
The Building Company now conducts a licensing recommendation exercise with The Cloud Crew twice a year to identify further refinements ahead of future renewal discussions. It has also adopted an annual commitment model rather than a three-year commitment, giving the business more flexibility to add or remove licences as requirements change.
“Not every user needs, or will even use, the services they are provisioned with. Organisations should review actual usage data, question assumptions, and relook at user profiling before renewal. Licensing has traditionally been a major pain point for organisations and IT departments, and reliable tooling with a trusted licensing partner is essential,” says Bowers.