Norwegian Refugee Council

How SoftwareOne exempted NRC from Microsoft fee increases

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is an independent not-for-profit organization helping people forced to flee. It is present in 40 countries in most regions around the world and in 2023 it assisted almost 10 million people worldwide.

A few hundred of its roughly 15,000 humanitarians working with NRC are based at its Oslo head office, but the vast majority work in countries such as Yemen, Kenya, Colombia, and Bangladesh. NRC provides aid in the form of education, water, sanitation, food, livelihoods, protection from violence, shelter, and legal aid.

NRC wants to spend as much of its budget as possible on aid, and as little as possible on administrative and organizational functions such as Microsoft licenses, necessary though these are.

Anthony Nichols is the Head of Global IT Operations and Support at NRC. In 2021 Nichols and his small team were confronted with the bad news that Microsoft would raise its prices for O365 and M365 licenses from September the following year – and by 11 percent, a hefty increase.

“It’s fair to say that we didn't have full control over our Microsoft provisioning,” says Nichols. “We wanted a very different situation going forward and needed to get much more rigorous about our Software Asset Management.

“We needed help with this. Microsoft licensing is notoriously challenging but at NRC we face the additional challenge of working multiple projects in 40 countries. To try to slice our license costs across countries or projects, and what we cover as a head office cost, is complicated and messy.

“So we started looking for a partner that could give us a better overview of our current state, what’s deployed and what is idle.”

After considering a handful of partners, NRC landed on SoftwareOne as its new Microsoft license partner.

Before the project officially kicked off, SoftwareOne assisted on a pro bono basis with an O365 and Software Investment Analysis (SIA). This involved scrutinizing NRC’s use of O365 licenses and software to identify potential savings and optimizations. SoftwareOne mapped which licenses were in use, which were inactive, and where there could be opportunities to reduce costs by adjusting the licenses to actual needs.

SoftwareOne’s findings enabled NRC to remove nearly 3,000 inactive users of E1 licenses.

“That fixed our over-licensing,” says Nichols. “Since then, we’ve also been adding automations which have helped with offboarding and identifying former employees and removing these licenses at our end. Our efforts ran in parallel but SoftwareOne’s expertise also informed our [automation] project, making us focus on the need to get a good handle on our licensing estate, because things can quickly get out of control.”

An important part of the overall licensing project was that users of E1 licenses had to be upgraded to E3, “because E1 was insufficient for the kind of work that happens”. 

The optimizations made possible by SoftwareOne’s review led to a cost avoidance of 1.5 million NOK.

“We used to get quite a large grant from Microsoft for E1 licenses,” says Nichols, “so this transition to E3 was a huge budget challenge. You go from zero cost to a big bill, but SoftwareOne helped us soften the blow.”

Another source of savings was an astute mix of flexible provisioning and a traditional Enterprise Agreement. As NRC transitioned to paid status, SoftwareOne placed 7,100 O365 E3 licenses on a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) contract which allows customers to adjust the number of licenses as needed. This short-term strategy saved NRC between approximately 225K NOK from August 2022 to August 2023.

The Enterprise Agreement was an equally successful piece of license engineering. By setting up an EA with a minimum commitment of 250 licenses just to lock in pre-September 2022 prices, NRC avoided the 11 percent price increase for the duration of the contract, saving approximately 1.8 million NOK after moving from the CSP arrangement to the EA in 2023.

“Of course, when we renew we’ll have to pay the full price,” says Nichols, “but SoftwareOne has given us this invaluable breathing space of three years’ coverage at the preferred price.

“SoftwareOne has been a huge help in many ways. When we started working with Preben Hool, our SoftwareOne consultant, we’d just been handed off between teams within Microsoft, and we’d had three or four account managers in the previous two or three years. So having a consistent person to talk to who understands the licensing was great.  Microsoft also changed its licensing models during this time, so we’ve had our challenges. However, we have come out on top with an optimized Microsoft licensing position and considerable savings and cost avoidance.

“We would not have been able to achieve anything like this outcome without the expertise and support of SoftwareOne,” Nichols concludes.