In this example, enabling Microsoft Security Copilot, even if you are licensed with E5, on a relatively small Microsoft tenant, resulted in thousands of dollars of unexpected charges in under a month – while producing little actionable output.

At VOSS, this aligns with what we see across AI adoption in enterprise collaboration and security environments. AI promises productivity, insights, and automation – but value is never automatic. Without the right telemetry, workflows, and governance, enterprises risk paying consumption-based charges for capacity and capability that isn’t delivering meaningful business impact or value.

From this experience, three critical lessons emerge:

AI compute resources like Security Compute Units (SCUs) are billed continuously. Without careful provisioning and monitoring, costs can escalate rapidly, even in small deployments.

Technical readiness isn’t just licensing; it includes active telemetry, mature security tools, and processes that allow AI outputs to be actionable.

Workflows and use cases need to be defined before enablement. AI is a productivity multiplier, not a magic solution. Its real value comes when it’s embedded into clear, operational workflows that teams can leverage.

For enterprises adopting AI in UC, security, or network operations, the lesson is clear: don’t enable AI because it’s available – enable it when your environment, processes, and governance are ready to support it.

At VOSS, we help our customers navigate this balance, ensuring AI and automation deliver measurable outcomes, improve efficiency, and protect against unintended costs. By approaching AI adoption with readiness and governance at the forefront, enterprises can transform AI from a costly experiment into a powerful business asset.

Please get in touch to discuss your requirements or concerns in more detail.

Automation as the foundation of the modern digital workplace

A major theme at Ignite was the shift to an automation-first mindset. Enterprises are moving beyond isolated workflows and manual provisioning toward what we often describe as an automation fabric: A shared automation layer that spans applications, systems, and teams.

This is exactly where VOSS fits.

We bring automation fabric principles directly into UC and collaboration, security and identity, license management, contact center, meeting rooms, messaging, and AI-assisted operations—without requiring organizations to build an automation estate from scratch.

VOSS as a turnkey automation fabric

Modern enterprises – and the frontier firms leading the way – are looking to operationalize AI agents, automate insights from large datasets, and quantify ROI from automation. Achieving this requires a platform that unifies automation under one strategy.

VOSS provides that unified layer.

We deliver lifecycle automation, consistent policy enforcement, delegated admin aligned to business structures, and cross-platform orchestration across Microsoft workloads and beyond. Our AI-driven insights prioritize actions and cut operational noise, while end-to-end monitoring covers voice, SBCs, meetings, and service quality. Deep business analytics illuminate licensing, capacity, usage, and cost decisions. Most importantly, VOSS helps you do these things in a structure and hierarchy that is defined by you. The hierarchy and permissions in the VOSS platform are dictated by the Customer. After all, who would know better than you?

This combination accelerates the adoption of Microsoft’s cloud-first model and extends it into areas where native tooling cannot provide the depth or cross-platform visibility required.

I’m proud to say that VOSS is the leading vendor that brings automation, monitoring, analytics, and AI together into a single platform, delivering a comprehensive automation layer purpose-built for modern enterprises and frontier firms alike.

Data, intelligence, and the new decision-making landscape

Ignite reinforced the growing importance of fabric, connected data, and analytics-driven governance. Customers want meaningful visibility—not raw metrics. They want to pinpoint productivity loss, reduce costs, and evolve their digital workplace for an AI-centered future.

With VOSS analytics, organizations gain insight into:

• Usage and adoption patterns
• Meeting and calling quality
• SBC behavior, anomalies, and capacity
• License consumption and cost optimization
• Resource rationalization opportunities
• How operational performance impacts business outcomes

These insights help organizations rationalize services, optimize licensing strategies, and unlock ROI in their automation and AI investments.

The future: Intelligent, automated, and insight-led

Our week at Ignite confirmed that the industry is entering a new phase – one where AI, automation, and operational intelligence are no longer optional, but foundational.

For enterprises building their automation fabric, VOSS offers a ready-made platform that integrates seamlessly into the wider Microsoft ecosystem. For service providers, we deliver the automation infrastructure needed to scale efficiently and profitably. And for organizations exploring AI agents and next-generation digital workplace models, VOSS provides the operational backbone required to support them.

Ignite set the stage. VOSS is ready to accelerate what comes next.

In my previous post, I explored how smarter Microsoft licensing enables digital agility. I looked at visibility, allocation, and governance as tools for organizations to scale and optimize services confidently. But assigning a license is only the first step. Just because a license has been allocated doesn’t mean it’s active, adopted, or delivering value. For many enterprises, the real challenge lies in bridging the gap between license assignment and actual usage – a gap that can lead to underutilized features, wasted spend, and missed opportunities for productivity.

This is where license adoption insights come in. By tracking activation, surfacing dormant capabilities, and aligning entitlements to business needs, you can move beyond compliance to maximize business impact.

Typical challenges enterprises face include:

• Purchased vs. unassigned licenses – Licenses bought but never allocated.
• Assigned but not used – Users have access but don’t activate or leverage features.
• Underutilized capabilities – Powerful tools, like Teams Phone in E5, remain dormant.
• Duplicate or overlapping entitlements – Confusion between overlapping licenses such as E5 vs. MCOEV.
• Disabled or inactive accounts – Licenses sitting idle in inactive accounts.

Without granular insights, these gaps remain invisible, and organizations risk overprovisioning, wasted spend, and inconsistent adoption across regions or departments.

VOSS helps IT and business stakeholders bridge this gap by providing real-time adoption and usage analytics across Microsoft and other UC environments. Key capabilities include:

Granular visibility

Track license activation and feature usage at the department, brand, or regional level.

Immediate snapshots

Identify white spaces where licenses are assigned but inactive

Trend analysis

Monitor usage over time to balance capacity, forecast needs, and align future licensing plans.

Actionable alerts

Flag underutilized licenses, duplication, and misaligned entitlements.

Driving adoption

Surface underused features and provide guidance to users and teams to unlock productivity.

With these insights, you can align your license investments with actual business value, ensuring every license drives adoption, efficiency, and ROI.

By bridging the gap between license assignment and activation, the benefits are huge. You will be able to maximize ROI by ensuring every license allocated delivers tangible value, improve productivity by enabling teams to leverage the tools they need when they need them, support data-driven planning as IT leaders gain the insights to forecast, plan, and reallocate resources confidently, and achieve strategic alignment by tying license entitlements directly to business priorities rather than simply maintaining compliance.

To close the digital consumption gap, I recommend that you:

• Audit your current license usage – Understand which licenses are assigned, active, or dormant.
• Invest in analytics – Use platforms like VOSS to gain visibility and track adoption trends.
• Act on insights – Reallocate, rationalize, or educate teams to drive feature adoption and value realization.

If you would like to discuss this with me, please do get in touch!

Now, let’s turn the spotlight on results, because solving problems is only half the story. The real value lies in the outcomes: What your business gains when you simplify Microsoft 365 management with VOSS.

From improved productivity to major cost savings, here’s how VOSS is delivering meaningful, measurable impact to organizations around the world.

VOSS eliminates time-consuming manual tasks through automation and intelligent orchestration. By streamlining activities like user provisioning, license management, policy enforcement, and MACDs, IT teams are free to focus on higher-value initiatives, boosting overall productivity across the department.

In our discussions with customers and prospects, they will often talk about how they currently leverage automation. These discussions usually outline a process that is ripe for optimization and a refresh. For example, thinking that an ‘automated process’ includes an email being automatically sent to a person for response or action, when it could be so much more. In 2025, with the platform from VOSS Solutions, we believe that in most cases you have enough information to generate the email; you have enough information to open a ticket, take action, and close the ticket. All without a single employee having to interrupt their regular responsibilities.

Whether it’s identifying unused or underused licenses, or eliminating inefficiencies caused by tool sprawl, VOSS helps organizations cut unnecessary costs. Our automation and business analytics capabilities enable proactive license management, usage tracking, and rightsizing – all of which contribute to significant savings.

Managing Microsoft 365 across thousands of users, departments, and regions is no small task. VOSS simplifies large-scale deployments and ongoing administration by integrating into existing ITSM tools and business processes. This means fewer bottlenecks, faster onboarding, and a more agile response to service demands.

Global admin overuse is one of the biggest threats to Microsoft 365 security. VOSS enables granular role-based access control, giving local administrators the tools they need, without compromising the security of your broader environment. You get the best of both worlds: secure delegation and scalable control.

With VOSS, it's easy to move from guesswork to clarity. Real-time dashboards and reports put critical data at your fingertips – from usage metrics to adoption rates and quality of service. These insights drive smarter planning, stronger governance, and better alignment with business priorities. 

One of our customers – a large County government – faced rising Microsoft 365 licensing costs with little visibility into actual usage. By deploying VOSS, they were able to:

• Identify and recover underused and orphaned licenses
• Automate license assignments based on user roles
• Delegate the management of licenses to specific groups or users
• Create ongoing policies to ensure license hygiene
• Make significant time and cost savings

This isn’t a one-off. It’s the kind of business outcome VOSS delivers, time and again.

Let’s talk about what VOSS can do for you. 

If you would like to discuss your M365 platform and how VOSS might help, please get in touch. To read more about VOSS for Microsoft 365, please click here.

At VOSS, we believe mastering Microsoft 365 requires more. It needs a centralized, intelligent approach to automation, visibility, and proactive control. In this blog, I’ll dive into how VOSS solves the problems that keep IT leaders up at night – and helps businesses take control of their Microsoft environment.

Managing Microsoft 365 across multiple regions, teams, and user types quickly becomes overwhelming without a single source of truth. VOSS provides a centralized management portal that offers real-time, end-to-end visibility across all tenants. This means IT teams can confidently track changes, monitor activity, and enforce policy – without jumping between tools or relying on disjointed or incomplete reports.   

In nearly every case, a "Microsoft" environment includes a lot of elements which are not Microsoft.  Perhaps you are a global organization going through a multi-year, multi-phase migration and will have legacy users on other platforms throughout the transition. Not a problem with VOSS' native multi-tenant, multi-vendor approach. Perhaps you want to look at hardware elements beyond the platform, and stretch out into conference rooms or SBCs?  Again, no problem with the VOSS platform. 

Over-reliance on global admin privileges is not only risky – it’s unnecessary. VOSS empowers IT teams to implement granular role-based access control (RBAC) and local admin delegation that respects your organization’s structure. This segmentation supports governance best practices while giving regional or departmental teams just the right level of access they need – nothing more, nothing less.

Manual processes and repeated service requests (MACDs) often slow your team down and invite human error. VOSS replaces complexity with intelligent workflows that automate routine tasks like user provisioning, license assignments, policy changes, and more. By removing repetitive admin work, your team can focus on strategic initiatives that deliver real value.

Manual processes and repeated service requests (MACDs) often slow your team down and invite human error. VOSS replaces complexity with intelligent workflows that automate routine tasks like user provisioning, license assignments, policy changes, and more. By removing repetitive admin work, your team can focus on strategic initiatives that deliver real value.

Performance and experience aren’t just technical concerns – they shape employee productivity. VOSS enables organizations to track, analyze, and optimize the user experience across Microsoft 365 apps and services. From Teams call quality to mailbox performance, VOSS provides the data you need to keep users happy and productive.

It’s not just about collecting data – it’s about turning it into decisions. VOSS business analytics empower IT and business leaders with dashboards and KPIs that make sense of usage trends, adoption rates, license consumption, and more. These insights drive smarter planning, stronger ROI, and strategic alignment with business goals.

A customer I recently worked with was struggling with license sprawl and overprovisioning across its Microsoft 365 tenants. Using VOSS, the organization was able to:

• Delegate and manage licenses on THEIR terms
• Identify underutilized and duplicate licenses to reduce license waste
• Automate license assignments based on user role and geography
• Generate real-time reports to support license optimization

This is just one example of how VOSS turns visibility and automation into real-world results.

Microsoft 365 is brilliant. We make it even better. With VOSS, your IT team will gain the tools they need to streamline operations, reduce risk, and drive better business outcomes – all from a single platform. Feel free to reach out to me to discuss how we can help optimize your M365 platform.

Christopher explores why traditional tools fall short in delivering the control and agility modern enterprises need, and how the constant pressure of MACDs and technical complexity puts unnecessary strain on IT teams.

Finally, he introduces how VOSS helps break the cycle – with automation, intelligent workflows, and proactive monitoring to simplify Microsoft 365 management and drive operational efficiency.

Hi. I’m Christopher Martini, Vice President with VOSS Solutions.

In a recent blog post, my colleague, Tim Jalland, queued up a conversation about powering enterprise scale Microsoft environments by leveraging the VOSS toolset.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of vlogs where I address some of the challenges that we see with our enterprise scale Microsoft customers, the solutions that we’ve delivered to those customers, and then some of the outcomes that we’ve seen when the customers have leveraged the VOSS toolset. But starting this week, I just wanted to frame the conversation around some of the common challenges that we see with large enterprise class Microsoft deployments.

The first problem comes around the area of tenant segmentation.

If you’re on a large single tenant or what we would classify as a super tenant, the challenge is by having everything in the same bucket, kind of ripple across the support environment.

It starts with trying to build out a hierarchy that makes sense and aligns with what you have internally.

You’ve got departments. You have an entire segmentation piece that you’ve thought out. Getting the out of the box tools from Microsoft to see that consistently across portals, across products is time consuming, challenging, and it doesn’t always stay in a steady state, right? Changes that you might make to the way that you want to filter information need to be redone every time you log into that tenant.

That leads to inefficient data management. You tend to create silos or operational efficiencies that are mostly driven by “we don’t want to give access to the entire tenant, to every single person in the environment. We want to give people access to do the thing that they need to do to get their job done efficiently”.

At the same time, you could run into a lack of cohesive monitoring, right? If internally you have PowerShell people or Power App people that can understand all of that complexity that’s going on in the background, great if you have those people. A lot of organizations either have to outsource that work or they look for ways that they can overcome those challenges and not have to piece together a solution. This becomes more complex if we start to look at things outside of the Microsoft environment. So maybe you’re looking at a complex telephony solution and the TAC is a fantastic resource for you for administering that environment.

But there are six other pieces of that telephony infrastructure that are not Microsoft centric. So now you’d find yourself logging in and out of systems, trying to connect portals in the background super challenging. That technical complexity alone drives a lot of the discussion from VOSS’s standpoint.

You also have the evolution of a regular stream of service requests that are coming from your internal customers. The key MACDs and the processes that you have in place today might not be the key things that you’re looking to support tomorrow or into the future.

If you’re building all of those things on the fly, you’ve put yourself on kind of a perpetual development cycle.

And then the other piece is, that leads to siloed information. So as an example, your effort to limit the number of people that are seeing alerts for things like Defender might be helpful in lowering the signal to noise ratio for those employees, but it’s not really the holistic view that you want to have, for your security posture as an enterprise.

At VOSS, we’ve looked at all of these challenges and we’ve matured our products over time to address these challenges specifically. So tenant segmentation as an example, we have an entire solution that leverages role based access control. And we can take each of those individual items and turn them on and off for each user. So you don’t need to share credentials across an entire tenant with people that don’t really need them.

They need purpose driven credentials that limit the scope of what they’re able to do and as a result, limits the scope of what they’re able to break and that you might eventually have to clean up. The same holds true for our analytics, assurance, and reporting tools. Again, Microsoft oftentimes is a very large part of an incredibly complex enterprise IT and service delivery movement. In order to get the most out of that movement, you need to be managing Microsoft not in a silo and not on its own, but looking at the data that you’re getting from Microsoft alongside things like network and infrastructure data.

Maybe you’re trying to look at, building management system data. You need a flexible and robust platform that delivers that role based access control, but does it in a way that makes sense for your environment, even if Microsoft is an overwhelming majority of the environment, but not the entire environment.

Next week, I’m going to talk through our toolset and specifically how we can help you address some of those challenges, that I just outlined. I’m Christopher Martini. I appreciate you taking the time and I look forward to seeing you again next week.

I was honored to be invited to present at this summit – a platform for tier one Telcos and Microsoft’s Tool Enabler Partners to connect, exchange insights, and discuss how they can work together to drive Microsoft opportunities in the Telco space. My presentation focused on the critical role automation and management solutions play in empowering Telcos.

During my session, I highlighted the importance of driving efficiency through solutions like VOSS Migrate, VOSS Automate, and VOSS Insights. These tools not only streamline customer onboarding but also enhance ongoing management, enabling service providers to reduce operational costs and improve profit margins. It was incredibly rewarding to share VOSS’s vision and solutions with an engaged audience of industry leaders.

Microsoft has recognized that partners like VOSS, who can streamline and reduce the costs associated with delivering services based on the Microsoft stack, can help global Telco partners to scale and improve margins at the same time.

This Summit served as a springboard for many partners, as meetings were quickly scheduled for every open calendar slot that attendees had. VOSS had meetings the following day, and follow up meetings while still in Chicago, that led to some sizeable pipeline growth before Ignite had ended. It is always great when you can attend an event that delivers important content, but it’s pretty special when partners can get together and so quickly be working on opportunities. Kudos to Microsoft and especially to Patrick Bouvet and Hayley Buckner for spearheading the event.

As I reflect on the week, I’m energized by the insights gained, the connections made, and the opportunity to share VOSS’s story. Here’s to building on this momentum and continuing to deliver solutions that make a real impact to both the service provider industry and large enterprises.

To learn more about VOSS and how we can support your UC automation management journey, please get in touch.