Azure Service Retirements & Break Changes
21/11/2024
Microsoft Updates: Key changes and impacts for your organisation
27/11/2024
In this issue:
- Price Increase for Power BI & Teams Phone
- Price Increase for CSP Annual Commit monthly billing
- Introducing monthly billing option for Microsoft 365 Copilot on CSP
- Windows 10 ESU
- Windows Server 2025 now available
- Microsoft Azure Updates – November ’24
- Azure Stack HCI is now Azure Local
- Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs (P-SKUs) retirement on Jan 1st 2025
- Azure OpenAI data zones and price reductions
Price Increase for Power BI & Teams Phone
Microsoft announce they will be updating the pricing for Microsoft Teams Phone Standard, Power BI Pro, and Power BI Premium Per User starting on April 1st 2025. The update in pricing results in a 40% uplift when compared to the current list price.
These price updates will be implemented as follows for new and existing customers upon renewal (after 01/04/2025):
-Teams Phone Standard licenses will be $10 per user per month
-Power BI Pro licenses will be $14 per user per month
-Power BI Premium Per User licenses will be $24 per user per month
Price Increase for CSP Annual Commit monthly billing
Microsoft confirmed a new 5% uplift on all annual commit monthly invoicing subscriptions, which will be effective from 1st April 2025.
This means that organisations renewing on or after 1st April 2025 will have an uplift of 5% on monthly invoicing. Any customers that have their annual renewal before April 2025 will remain unaffected until the next renew cycle in 2026.
Introducing monthly billing option for Microsoft 365 Copilot on CSP
Microsoft are introducing a new monthly invoicing option for Microsoft 365 Copilot from 1st December 2024 due to customer feedback.
This new monthly invoicing option will incur the 5% uplift when compared to annual upfront invoicing.
Windows 10 ESU
Windows 10 reaches end of support on October 14th 2025 at which point 3 years of ESUs will be available for commercial and education customers.
Annual ESU cost per device will be roughly £50, prices will double in Year 2, and again in Year 3 respectively (£50, £100, £200).
Windows Server 2025 now available
Both Windows Server & System Center 2025 Available from 1st November.
Windows Server 2025 introduces significant updates, including enhanced security with improved Active Directory and SMB hardening, hybrid cloud capabilities like hotpatching and Azure Arc integration, and performance boosts with Hyper-V enhancements and NVMe storage improvements. Additionally, it offers new Active Directory Domain Services features, such as a 32k database page size and AD object repair capabilities.
Standard and Datacenter editions remain the same, differing by a couple of technical features but mainly by their virtualisation licensing rights, CALs are still needed for users or devices.
There’s now a PAYG licensing option through Azure Arc, and prices are increased by 10%.
Microsoft Azure Updates – November ’24
Azure Stack HCI is now Azure Local
Via Microsoft Ignite, the Microsoft portfolio is going through some changes to try and simplify understanding on certain products. One of those is Azure Stack HCI, the hyperconverged on-premises infrastructure solution but with management via Azure. Going forwards Azure Stack HCI will now be known as Azure Local, with Azure Stack HCI clusters being renamed to Azure Local instances. Pricing, licencing, APIs and PowerShell commands are not affected by this rebranding change and AVD, AKS and existing hardware is still supported.
Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs (P-SKUs) retirement on Jan 1st 2025
For customers with PowerBI Premium Per Capacity licencing, you need to be aware that after January 1, 2025, customers should work to transition to a suitable Fabric capacity and pricing plan at the time of your next renewal, which provides more flexibility in SKU size, pay-as-you-go billing options, access to Azure-only features, and is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). If you need assistance with this or want to find out more, please contact your account manager to set up a call with our licencing team.
Azure OpenAI data zones and price reductions
At the beginning of November, Microsoft introduced data zones for the Azure OpenAI service. This new capability offers customers capability where they want to embrace OpenAI LLM model creation but need to maintain strict data sovereignty needs for compliance reasons. Prior to this, it was incredibly complex to make sure data processing and data storing was tied to a specific region. Data zones provide geographic boundaries such as US and the EU.
Starting November 1st, provisioned global deployments will also see a price drop under PTU SKUs from $2.00 per hour to $1.00 providing a more cost effective long term model for enterprise and medium size businesses.
Contact us today for expert guidance and to discuss how these updates might affect your business. We’re here to help you navigate the changes and plan for success.
