How a metropolitan council used Subble to reclaim over A$1m a year of E5 licences
A metropolitan council licenses everyone on Microsoft 365 E5, at about A$1,000 a licence a year. They suspected they were paying for more licences than people were using, and didn’t have the resources to prove it, so they brought in Subble, which flagged 1,032 licences, just over A$1m a year.
A$0m+A$0m+ - a year of E5 licences flagged, 1,032 of them at about A$1,000 each
000000 - of those licences were still assigned to someone who had stopped using them
~0 years~0 years - the longest a single licence had sat idle before Subble flagged it
Why the licences piled up
The council takes security seriously, so everyone is on Microsoft 365 E5, the tier with the full security stack switched on. It also means any licence you forget costs about A$1,000 a year. The admin centre is built for assigning licences, not optimising them. Disable a departed employee’s account and the licence stays assigned. You keep paying, and nothing tells you. And the usage reports are split up per service, while one E5 spans a dozen of them, so no report tells you whether a licence is being used at all, let alone what it costs. None of this was for lack of process. The council had offboarding procedures, and the team audited licences at each renewal with scripts over the audit logs. But a check that runs once a year misses eleven months of change. The same licences are piling up in every E5 tenant this size.
What Subble flagged
Subble flagged 1,032 licences. Most were assigned to people who had stopped using them.
Inactive
assigned to someone who had stopped using it
800 licences
Ex-employee
people who had left, still holding an E5
204 licences
Never logged in
licensed accounts nobody had ever logged in to
22 licences
Redundant
a duplicate licence on someone who already had one
6 licences
A licence flagged for more than one issue is counted once.
The idle licences went back years
Working backwards from the day each licence was reclaimed, most had been idle far longer than any report could show.
352
of the reclaimed licences had never been used at all
435
licences had been idle for more than a year by the time they were flagged
14 months
was the median time a reclaimed licence had already sat idle when it was flagged
A$1.5m
was already spent on the reclaimed licences while they sat idle
How the cleanup ran
Nobody had to email all staff asking who still needed their licence. The team booked a standing meeting, pulled up the flagged licences, and worked through the list.
- 1
Connect the tenant
They connected their Microsoft tenant in September. From the first sync, every E5 held by an inactive user, an ex-employee, or an account nobody had signed in to was flagged for removal.
- 2
Check the list in a weekly review
Instead of clearing the list in one hit, the council ran a weekly review with us and checked each flagged licence against what they knew. Has this person really left? Is this account really dead?
- 3
Remove the licences in bulk
Each checked batch was removed in one pass, hundreds of licences at a time, until the backlog was clear.
The result
By the end of the year the waste was gone. About A$300k a year came straight off the agreement, and the other A$700k worth is now in use: on new starters, on growth the council would otherwise have bought licences for, and a few with people who had started using them again. The agreement now carries a handful of spare licences instead of a thousand idle ones.
~A$300k / year
off the E5 renewal, with about 300 fewer licences than at the peak
600 licences
came off the subscription across the year
200+ starters
licensed from the reclaimed pool, with no new licences bought
What’s next
The backlog is gone. Now, when a licence stops being used, or someone leaves with theirs still assigned, Subble flags it straight away. At the next Microsoft renewal the council can say what every licence is for and negotiate with confidence. Microsoft is only one of many platforms that Subble connects to. The council is now using Subble to realise savings in dozens of other applications.
“We don’t know what we don’t know. That reporting opened our eyes: oh my goodness, that’s how much we can save. We don’t have enough resources to do this exercise internally.”
Ready to take control?
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