A regulated utility had let Power Platform and Power BI Premium spread organically across departments, accumulating overlapping capacity, idle premium licenses, and per user assignments that no longer matched the work. The optimization redesigned the estate around real usage. This is how a sprawling low code footprint was brought back under control.
A regulated utility with Power BI Premium capacity, Power Apps, and Power Automate deployed across operations, field services, finance, and customer functions, much of it adopted department by department without central governance. The estate carried overlapping premium capacity, per user licenses assigned and forgotten, and premium tiers applied where per app or capacity models would have cost a fraction. The practice was engaged to redesign the licensing around actual usage.
Power Platform had arrived in the utility the way it arrives in most large organizations: not as a procurement decision but as a series of departmental successes. A team built a useful app, another automated a manual process, finance stood up Power BI Premium capacity for its reporting, and field services followed. Each step was individually sensible and locally funded. None of it was governed centrally, and over a few years the sum became an estate nobody had designed and nobody fully understood.
The result was the predictable pattern of ungoverned platform growth. Multiple Power BI Premium capacities ran in parallel where one consolidated capacity would have served, each provisioned by a different department to its own peak rather than to shared need. Per user premium licenses had been assigned during pilots and never reclaimed when the pilots ended or the people moved on. Premium licensing models were applied uniformly where a per app model would have covered the same usage at a fraction of the cost. The estate was paying for the way it had grown, not the way it was used.
The waste was structural, not careless. A platform that grows department by department ends up licensed department by department, and that is almost never the cheapest way to license it.
The practice inventoried the entire Power Platform and Power BI estate and mapped real usage against the licensing carrying it. That meant identifying which Power BI Premium capacities were genuinely utilized and which ran far below their provisioned size, which per user licenses were active and which had gone idle, and which premium assignments covered usage that a per app or capacity model would serve more cheaply. The inventory turned an estate nobody understood into a quantified map of cost against actual use.
From that map the practice redesigned the licensing model rather than simply trimming the edges. Overlapping Power BI Premium capacities were consolidated into a right sized shared capacity governed centrally, eliminating the parallel provisioning that departmental ownership had produced. Idle per user licenses were reclaimed and the remaining population was matched to the model that fit its usage, with per app licensing applied where it covered the work at lower cost than blanket premium assignment. The redesign also established the governance the estate had never had, so the savings would not simply regrow as new departments adopted the platform.
The decisive move was treating it as a model redesign, not a cleanup. Reclaiming idle licenses saves money once. Redesigning the licensing model around real usage saves it every year and stops the sprawl from returning.
The optimization consolidated the parallel Power BI Premium capacities into a single governed capacity, reclaimed roughly 3,100 idle per user licenses, and rematched the remaining estate to usage appropriate models, removing an estimated $6.8M in annual cost. The redesign aligned what the utility paid to how the platform was actually used, rather than to the accumulated history of how it had grown department by department.
The durable outcome was governance. The utility emerged with a centrally managed capacity model, a license assignment process that matched tier to usage, and the visibility to keep the estate aligned as adoption continued. Power Platform remained available to the departments that had made it successful, but the licensing behind it was now designed rather than accumulated. The savings recurred annually, and the governance framework kept the sprawl from rebuilding itself.
The engagement reflects the firm's broader record across Microsoft contracts: more than $420M in cumulative client savings, over 340 engagements delivered, and an average 79 percent reduction in audit financial exposure, built on 20+ years of combined practice depth across the Microsoft estate. The figures above are verifiable on a reference call arranged through the practice.
The practice supports enterprises on redesigning Power Platform and Power BI Premium licensing around real usage, consolidating capacity, reclaiming idle licenses, and installing the governance to keep the savings. Two analyst calls, no pitch, and an honest read on the estate.