“I wish we had internal data to challenge Microsoft’s numbers instead of relying on their narrative.”
That thought echoed in my mind as I stared at the EA renewal proposal sitting on my desk. More accurately, lurking like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It wasn’t just the numbers that bothered me. It was the fact that I couldn’t confidently tell my executive team whether they were accurate… or inflated.
I’m Ethan Keller, CIO of VirelliTech, a global industrial automation firm with just over 12,000 employees. We’re a company known for engineering precision and operational efficiency—but when it comes to software licensing, especially Microsoft, our house has been… less than in order.
The Internal Reckoning
A few weeks ago, I pulled together my IT ops director, our procurement lead, and a couple of folks from finance to ask one simple question:
“Do we actually know how many Microsoft licenses we’re using — and how many we actually need?”
Silence. Then the usual dance:
Procurement shrugged: “We go by what Microsoft tells us.”
Finance asked: “Isn’t that in the SAM tool?”
IT said: “Which SAM tool are we talking about? We’ve got ServiceNow, but it’s not fully implemented.”
And everyone turned toward my SAM lead… who left the company six months ago and hadn’t been replaced.
That’s when the reality hit me.
We had fragments of data — procurement records here, spreadsheets there, telemetry that may or may not be tied to active users — but nothing coherent. And yet, Microsoft was asking us to sign off on a 3-year agreement with a 22% cost increase and only vague assurances about “value realization.”
Microsoft’s Narrative Is Always Ready
Microsoft doesn’t wait for you to get your house in order. Their EA renewal account team came prepared. PowerPoints, charts, “business value assessments,” and usage stats that—let’s be honest—made us look underlicensed, underutilized, and underinformed.
But here’s the kicker: I knew some of their claims didn’t line up with reality.
For instance, they said Teams usage was “skyrocketing” across the company, but I’ve had two senior managers tell me their divisions still use Slack and WebEx. They claimed our Defender deployment was near-complete. It wasn’t. We were piloting it in just one region. So I sat there, stuck between a vendor who had all the leverage—and an internal team that couldn’t give me a clean, confident alternative narrative.
Enter MetrixData 360
That’s when our CFO — who had worked with MetrixData 360 at her previous company — pulled me aside and said: “You don’t have to do this alone. Get someone in the room who can tell our story — backed by our data.” We brought in the MetrixData 360 team that same week.
They didn’t start with Microsoft. They started with us. They dug into our Active Directory data, matched it with usage telemetry, crawled our CMDB, reviewed our contracts, and helped us map out an actual license inventory. Within a month, we had a complete, validated picture of what we had, what we were using, and what we truly needed.
They identified over 1,300 E5 licenses that could be downgraded. We were double-counting SQL Server entitlements. And our supposed “under-deployment” of Defender? It was already deployed across three regions—just not reporting correctly in Microsoft’s dashboards.
The Power Shift
For the first time, we walked into the negotiation not with questions—but with answers. Our answers.
And when Microsoft’s team tried to steer the conversation with their usual assumptions, we didn’t push back emotionally. We pushed back with evidence.
I felt like a CIO again—not a customer trying to catch up to a vendor’s story.
The Lesson
We talk a lot about digital transformation and owning your tech stack — but no one tells you that if you don’t own your data, someone else will. In this case, Microsoft was more than happy to tell our story for us — until MetrixData 360 helped us tell it better.
I still think about that moment in my office:
“I wish we had internal data to challenge Microsoft’s numbers.”
Now, we do. And I’ll never go into another renewal without it. You shouldn’t either.
