Power Platform | Licensing Tetris Part 2

A couple of days ago, I came up with what I would now call part one of licensing tetris. I received a couple of questions around this „simplification“ and there´s also a couple of misunderstandings that I´d like to address with today´s article.

So the intention of mapping the licensing of Power Platform to something like the Tetris game was certainly not about the quality of the Power Platform license guide or the license information shared via other channels. It neither was to criticise peoples understanding of licensing itself or why they complain about it.

The reason of selecting a simple famous game like Tetris and map this to Power Platform licensing was to introduce a methodology – taking things to a simpler level to make them consumable and understandable for everyone to find a solution for the real issue ongoing. A method often times found inside Design-Thinking workshops to help collect, align, cluster and prioritize.

To give you an example of what I am talking about – with all the single requests incoming regarding Power Platform components or modules, like each department could raise multiple requests on different modules to be used for different purposes – you could easily end up in something like above. You´ve deployed on a case-by-case decision, fulfilled requirements (maybe) and…

ended up in a kind of „Game Over“ status as further growing and license assignment process becomes complicated or internal invoicing ends up in a challenge. Of course this is not what you should look or aim for and rapid decisions being needed shouldn´t cause you to end up like this. So it takes a plan or strategy.

Same as with Tetris in an ideal game flow, you would be able to compose the various requirements and requests incoming, get to a level of orchestrating as a platform and allow for easy maintenance, simplified internal invoicing and of course true governance and security. And why is this?

Because same as within Tetris game we try to get to a bonus round at each level, allowing us for continuous controlled growth and digital transformation. Enabling Business, Developers and IT Pros to achieve more with Power Platform components, modules and add-ons. Create business value chains across Power Platform with the help of connectors and Microsoft Azure.

As an example from my day-to-day live: Sometimes I get a question of why licensing can´t be as easy as M365 from the Office aspect. One license fits all. Or why can´t it be as simple as Azure licensing – a consumption based approach?

I guess the best way to decribe the as-is situation is – there´s a difficulty in terms of allowing customers to have choices vs. allowing to go for a single option only. A single option would need to be the compromise between all kind of options possible, but still allow for being attractive to allow for maket acceptance level and a certain level of growth. We´ve been through this – at least, I´ve been with Dynamics CRM licensing from the past – we learned something from it (I hope everyone did).

To resume with our goal playing Tetris, hunt for bonus levels, reach a new high-score, I think taking the complexity out of something and turning it into a strategy and plan to follow-up and execute on is what we should look at carefully. Not everyone will find a magic application use-case that is worth making the buy-in to a full stack offer. But orchestrating things, bringing them in broader scope and setting up a game plan for a certain time will allow us to digital transform and become successful in an easy way.

Until then, happy gaming