Microsoft plans to include these Power House apps in premium
Microsoft plans to include these Power House apps in premium #PowerPlatform plans, rather than introduce them as separate SKUs (licenses)
"Microsoft plans to include these Power House apps in premium #PowerPlatform plans, rather than introduce them as separate SKUs (licenses)."
As of today, the only readymade business applications that Microsoft has sold have been branded as #Dynamics365 products. With this step into delivering apps based on #PowerApps, the lines may get blurred. Even though the current information reported by Mary Jo Foley indicates that customers would not be directly charged for these "Power House" apps.
There is understandably a big push from #Microsoft to get organizations convinced on the value that Power Platform premium licenses offer. The strategy of bundling basic Power Apps and Power Automate capabilities into Office 365 / Microsoft 365 licenses has been a huge success so far - if you measure the platform adoption rate among citizen developers. With 15 million monthly active users of Power Apps and 7 million MAU for Power Automate, it is the most widely used #lowcode platform out there.
When you go beyond the power user and citizen dev scenarios, there's plenty of powerful tools built into the platform. Yet customers struggle with getting the required premium features unlocked, partially due to the friction in how MS licensing is typically managed in enterprise organizations. App makers and IT representatives may well understand how the business value to be derived from premium features would outweigh the license cost. Unfortunately it's often a slow process to get the licensing agreements in place.
On the governance side we've seen the Managed Environments set of features introduced in the same way as suggested by this "Power House" news. No new products to license, just get everyone a Power Apps/Automate Per User license to unlock the more advanced capabilities.
Many customers (and partners) will initially struggle with grasping this approach from MS. If Dynamics 365 licensing has been blamed as confusing, then this kind of indirect platform level licensing may also be a surprise. "What do you mean all users now need new licenses, just because I used Power Platform Pipelines to deploy apps from dev to test/prod?"
In the end, I think this is a logical move from Microsoft. They'd want to see their low-code tools included in the core licensing package of companies, in the same way as SharePoint and Teams are today. The benefits from premium licenses need to be promoted widely, to different audiences. Makers, admins - and now also possibly the business users looking for solutions that may be included in the coming "Power House" suite of 10+ applications.