This Livingstone Group client is a leading healthcare organization based in North America and serving several million members. This organization is a long-standing client of Livingstone Group, which works with the client providing industry leading Managed Services.
Livingstone helps the client optimize its software estates across all its software vendors, from mega-vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and IBM to cybersecurity software and smaller, independent publishers. Livingstone Group’s remit has grown significantly throughout the relationship, as the client continued to see the benefits of Livingstone’s ITAM approach, especially its central pillars of compliance, contract, consumption and control.
Gaining a multi-vendor overview
Livingstone provides specialist Managed Services across the organization’s 170 vendors, and our team of experts supporting the client spans data analytics, entitlement management, compliance, cloud, vendors contract and negotiation, project management and client engagement. The team provides the client with a comprehensive understanding of its current software estate, across all vendors, thereby leading to greater control over its costs, risk (including compliance and reputational), consumption and contracts.
This includes identifying potential optimization opportunities, mitigating risks through analyzing and optimizing each vendor estate, defending against vendor audits by helping the client to thoroughly prepare ahead of time and renew software contract agreements by working with the client to fully plan its Bill of Materials and negotiation strategy.
With so many vendors to monitor in the estate, the client’s risk exposure for costs and non-compliance could have been extremely high. Being able to understand, manage and gain control over all its assets is therefore a key aspect of keeping operations running smoothly across all departments and functions while ensuring the client’s compliance and consumption is managed effectively as well as related costs. Being aware of – and subsequently defending against – possible tier one and two vendor audits are a key priority for the client.
Continuous visibility and opportunity for optimization
Livingstone’s Managed Services team keeps the client informed and up-to-date on any risks that need to be managed and mitigated and any optimization opportunities than be leveraged.
Using our own in-house data collection and analysis platform, Hub, Livingstone created a unique service calendar for the client’s in-scope vendors, presenting a clear view of what can be expected to occur across the estate each year – from contract renewals to anticipated audits to software version updates.
Part of this process involves a tiering strategy for prioritizing vendors each year, depending on what can be expected to change within that period. While the client’s strategic vendors – Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle, and VMWare – require continuous attention, this tiering process helps Livingstone to identify any potential risks and provides a clear view of the risk that needs to be mitigated across the other vendors.
For example, Livingstone can see if the client has too many licenses for one product or if a particular vendor’s software is over, under, or even not used at all. Livingstone’s team will then advise the client how many licenses or instances it actually needs– saving it money and reducing compliance risk. It may suggest, for example, that the client move to a free web-based version of a tool rather than the full commercial version if it is only for incidental use. This “re-harvesting” of licenses and applications forms a key part of Livingstone’s consolidation approach to software optimization – consolidating assets into their most optimized format, making cost savings in maintenance renewals and reducing or even removing compliancy risks.
Livingstone also produces software usage reports to help this client stay on top of all its estates and fully understand its usage for each product and tool. This is especially helpful for the client when it comes to audits, helping to identify and mitigate risks ahead of an audit. Another key part of Livingstone’s Managed Services is regularly reviewing the results of its service with the client’s executive team. This enables the client and Livingstone to keep to a planned roadmap and ensure that requirements and goals are met. With the Managed Services from Livingstone, this client now has a complete and accurate picture of its current position, across all vendors, and we are able to continually keep the team up-to-date with current vendor activity, such as updates that require attention.
Multi-million-dollar savings and identifying future opportunities
Over the course of the Managed Services engagement to-date, Livingstone has helped the client make multi-million-dollar savings and realize multi-million-dollar risk reductions, defend multiple audits, optimize contractual renewals and capitalize on optimization opportunities.
Going forward, Livingstone will help the client in a cloud capacity by identifying opportunities to reduce spend and optimize cloud estates from AWS to Azure.