Power Platform | Licensing Tetris

You remember this awesome „time killer“ of the late 80’s – played almost every day to break high-scores? Sometimes, when it comes up to licensing conversations around the Power Platform, I feel badly reminded and then starting to look into ways to simplify. For those that don´t feel familiar with the Tetris game, let me help you better understand.

You may know about the main four Power Platform modules – Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. Down below the logos you´ll find tetriminos used inside the Tetris game that should it make easier for you. But wait, before we´re taking a closer look, there´s more, right?

If you would ever come across Power Platform licensing, a document you might stepped over is the Power Platform License Guide. It talks about the main four modules, but also about options and add-ons. So with that mapping of tetriminos above you now should have a good understanding of the basics of Tetris. You also might already studied the license guide and therefore your brain is ready to start a game… Ready, set, go…

When starting your Power Platform journey, you normally got business or developers who considered low-code being a good fit for their problem. IT Pro´s being approached with the demand then, starting to dive into licensing, governance, security and how to operate. After them catching up with the information on price-pages or license guides, they do understand it becomes a challenge for them, the moment it becomes bigger and clock starts ticking (in terms of solving things quickly to not loose on innovation).

While it is pretty straight forward to invest into each of the modules only (setting the ground layer), it becomes a tricky part more users are being onboarded and more modules are being used. This is due to the fact of several options being available to modules, add-ons being available for extending the use-case and all of those combinations are all of a sudden ending up in a complicated thing. But is it really that complicated?

Isn´t it more about a strategy (like you would play Tetris and set a new high-score)? Playing Tetris, you would think of: How to move a tetrino to fit in the current needs, but also setting a perfect layer for the next round?
Well, let´s map this to a real-life of an IT Pro studying the Power Platform license guide.

What helped many customers of mine I´ve been running Design-Thinking workshops with was to split modules, options and add-ons into such tetriminos. For example understanding that AI Builder is an add-on that extends both Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents as well as Power Apps is a good starting point.

Another example is Power Automate being an option inside Power Apps licensing. Or in other words, if a flow is running in context of your Power Apps application, there´s no need to purchase an individual Power Automate license for it. I could continue providing more examples, but I guess you get the idea.

Sometimes, mapping a problem statement to something way simpler, that in an ideal world we´re also reminded of from the past – it helps us outlining the real issue and shaping a plan – or a strategy to work on. For example: Do I need a separate Power Automate license, if I am going to get Power Virtual Agents licenses?

I am stopping here, as today´s article shouldn´t become another license guide or general license discussion. For those who expected me covering this – well, if you´re interested into deep dives, you know how to reach out.

In interim, happy gaming. Until next time