Worried about the impact of Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience (NCE) on your Microsoft Licence procurement? Don’t worry, we’ve got everything you need to know about NCE in one quick overview.
What’s changing?
In August last year, the Microsoft price increase was announced, which meant all Microsoft 365 licence subscriptions would be rising by 15-20% on average. Following that, the Microsoft NCE was revealed to be the new licence model to simplify their licensing offerings and streamline processes. As part of the new model, long-term licence commitments under Microsoft NCE are more cost-effective than the current CSP model.
On 15 March, six SKUs will be affected by the planned price increase:
- Business Basic
- Business Premium
- Office 365 E1
- Office 365 E3
- Office 365 E5
- Microsoft 365 E3
After committing to a new licensing agreement, customers will not be able to move suppliers or cancel their contract mid-agreement. There will also be a 72 hour cooling off period to give businesses the chance to amend or cancel their subscription if they have a change of heart.
The changes to the Microsoft licensing model means businesses will need to take more time choosing their next Cloud Solution Provider.
The Microsoft NCE timeline
There’s still some time to adjust to Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience.
From 30 June 2022, users will not be able to make licence adjustments on the old platform.
Any incentives and rebates will be completely disabled on the old platform from December 2022.
And in February 2023, the CSP licensing platform will be discontinued. New and existing customers must move to the new NCE model.
But why wait? Now is the best time to move to the NCE and save on your licence subscriptions for another 12 months.
Our Gold Partner recommendation
As a Microsoft Gold Partner and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP), we recommend booking a licence consultancy review before the 15 March price increase. If you buy or renew your Microsoft 365 licence subscription before 1 March, you can push back the price increase for up to a year.
The original version of this post can be found on our main site, Influential Software.
Update (28 February): Microsoft has granted customers an additional 2 week transitional period to ease into the new pricing model. Therefore, all CSP new commerce transactions for the six commercial Modern Work SKUs listed above that are submitted into the system no later than March 14, 2022, 5 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), or 12 a.m. UTC on March 15, 2022, will be invoiced at the February 2022 pricing. Find more details here.
