What changed in software licensing in November 2026? Microsoft and Salesforce are both preparing to put a meter on AI agent work, and Microsoft has now moved its date twice. The first three-year VMware agreements signed after the Broadcom acquisition are…
Smartsheet Doesn’t Sell You Seats. Your Employees Do, One Shared Sheet at a Time
Most of the licensing work I see this year goes to the big names: Microsoft renewals, Broadcom’s VMware bundles, Oracle Java and database exposure. Every IT and procurement team already watches those. What worries me is what those teams miss while…
SharePoint Out of Storage? How We Freed 55% in 48 Hours
For months, our Microsoft 365 tenant had been sending the same email: “SharePoint Online is out of storage space.” We were running about a third over the limit, and the alert told us storage was full without explaining why. The obvious…
Microsoft Licensing Changes, October 2026
What changed in Microsoft licensing in October 2026. Eleven CSP promotions expired on September 30 and a 5% cost-of-capital uplift began on October 1, both limited to the Cloud Solution Provider channel. Five Microsoft lifecycle clocks stop together on October 13….
Oracle Database Options Are Licensed by Use, Not Purchase.
Oracle Database Enterprise Edition will let you use almost every extra-cost option and management pack it sells without a license key, a prompt, or a warning. It will also keep a permanent record of what you did. I have spent a…
Oracle Fusion Licensing Risk Hides in Role Design.
I caught this yesterday, reviewing an Oracle Fusion role assignment report for a client ahead of their usage true-up. The numbers on the page did not match what the client had actually purchased, and the gap was large enough that I…
Microsoft Visio License Optimization: How 15 Minutes Found $15K.
I have spent most of this summer on six-figure problems. AI consumption meters, credit overage letters, renewal commitments that moved after they were signed. That work is genuinely urgent, and it deserves the attention it gets. Today, I spent fifteen minutes…
Azure VMware Solution Retirement Doesn’t Free You.
Your Azure VMware Solution renewal came up this month. It was priced as always: license included, one line, nothing to negotiate. Then a trade press headline about the Azure VMware Solution retirement appeared, and the quote no longer looked simple. Microsoft…
Microsoft Copilot “Co-Work” Consumption Billing Shock.
A feature that used to ship inside the Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription now carries a separate, consumption-based bill. Microsoft gave organizations days of notice, not months. Multiple unrelated organizations discovered this the same week, after usage had already started accumulating. One…
You’re Not Ready for Your Microsoft EA Negotiation.
A large organization was three months from their Microsoft EA negotiation when Microsoft called first. They wanted to come in early. They were there to help the team navigate the coming price increases. Volume discount levels were going away. A market…