Ultima CEO on Microsoft's price hikes, customers shifting to long-term spending and taking IA-Cloud global

MSP boss Scott Dodds gives his take on Microsoft’s price increases, and what they mean for customers

Microsoft's upcoming price increases will mean customers will have to invest more into managing their licences as costs begin to rack up for larger customers, according to Ultima CEO Scott Dodds.

Microsoft last month announced that it would increase the pricing on commercial Office 365 and Windows 365 products by as much as 25 per cent.

The changes come into force on 1 March next year and will apply to commercial products as well as business packages such as Office 365 EI, Office 365 E3 and Office 365 E5.

It marks the most substantial pricing from Microsoft in more than a decade.

Speaking to CRN, Scott Dodds said the increases were "inevitable" and said the changes will mean larger customers will have to pay much more attention to how they're using and managing their Microsoft licences.

"For me, it's about value. When you're talking about a dollar here and there it doesn't sound like very much, but when you've got tens of thousands of people then it's a big deal," said Dodds.

"I think there will be more questions asking who's got what, and whether you need it."

"Then you've got to look at the ways you optimise those licences and how you manage them. Are you using the cloud to its full extent? Are you switching things on and off as and when you need them? That's the whole power of the cloud; it's a utilisation model rather than just a licencing model."

The Microsoft pricing changes come as customers begin to invest in long-term IT projects, Dodds said.

He told CRN that there's a "massive amount of pent-up demand" in the market, and said that a handful of large projects - that were previously delayed - have started up again over the last few months.

"There are signs that companies are now making that step to invest in the longer term… We're not out of Covid issues yet but generally speaking companies are starting to move in the right direction," he said.

"There's a lot more cloud engagement. We're doing big datacentre migrations - a lot of which involve classic datacentre stuff, but all of them involve cloud hooks. All of them involve how we're moving to cloud. Even if it's consolidating or refreshing a particular part of the datacentre, it's still a question of how are we going to move more of that to the cloud over the next couple of years? That's on everyone's agenda now."

Ultima's development arm - Ultima Labs - launched its own automated cloud platform in November last year called IA-Cloud Platform, which it claimed could reduce Azure management costs by an average of 66 per cent.

IA-Cloud will soon become available to MSPs globally through a partnership with distribution giant Tech Data, Dodds said.

Meanwhile, another cloud-based offering from Ultima - IA-Connect, will also become available through Tech Data in the near future, Dodds said.

The CEO added that IA-Connect now automates processes for joiners, movers and leavers (JML) within a business, which Dodds said solves a "massive problem" for any company.

"The compliance issue of shutting down the leavers who still have access to your systems, or for your joiners, giving them the right access to the right things.

"Not just joiners and leavers but also movers, which is just as a big of an issue in any organisation. You could have some people in finance move to a technical role and they've taken all the access with them and nobody has remembered. This concept of JML is a huge topic."