This Livingstone Group client is a major European multimedia company, a well-known and highly respected global player providing a variety of leading services to consumers and businesses.
Livingstone was first engaged by the client over five years ago to optimize its IBM software estate. As a result of Livingstone’s work on this one product alone the client was able to realize approximately £1 million in cost savings. Following the success of this initial project, the client appointed Livingstone to manage and optimize its licenses for its top ten software vendors, including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and BMC. Livingstone is managing these deployments on an ongoing basis, as a three-year managed service. Key Facts & Figures
- 400% return on investment on Livingstone Managed Service
- Multi-million-pound savings on client’s top ten vendor licensing
- Thousands of software entitlement documents processed & managed
- 30-strong dedicated account team members
- License renewal calendar established to streamline & optimize license renewal process
- Risk management capabilities bolstered with risk-steering committee & well-informed key stakeholders
- Improved vendor management and renewals.
Our Journey Continues
In 2019, the client had a strategy to bring its software management in-house, using a leading ITAM software tool. However, this tool struggled to produce meaningful reports on the company’s vast amount of license-related data, which was drawn from thousands of different products deployed on more than 140,000 separate devices; the dataset was simply too large for the tool to process and it couldn’t cope. Another issue with the tool – a problem that we see many organizations face – is that it was never effectively integrated or configured, meaning the platform was not fully delivering on its intended outcomes.
This was at a particularly critical time for the operator, as it was negotiating a new contract with a major vendor. To strike the best possible commercial terms for this deal, it required an accurate understanding of deployments, usage and entitlement. It became evident to the client that it could not count on the tool to provide the critical information needed to ensure it was able to negotiate effectively with the vendor.
High-volume data processing spurs greater efficiency; stakeholder management streamlined
The client turned to Livingstone for support. The biggest challenge was the requirement to process a significant amount of data relating to its software installations and usage, and establishing how these tallied with its contract entitlements, together with the raft of ‘non-instance’ – or undiscoverable data – which requires manual collection and analysis. As the client is such a large organization, with many different aspects to its business, Livingstone had to find effective and efficient ways of handling huge volumes of complex asset, commercial and contract data.
With Livingstone’s team of license experts onboard, and using Livingstone’s proprietary technology platform LUCE to process the massive amounts of data, it was possible to process millions of rows of complex licensing data, all within a matter of 24 hours, delivering far richer data than the client had seen from its in-house ITAM tool during the previous two years.
With this intelligence at the team’s fingertips, Livingstone was also able to provide extremely valuable insights to the client’s key stakeholders, providing relevant information directly to the company’s c-level executive team to keep them well-informed about the organization’s software portfolio and any associated risks.
As a result of LUCE outperforming the previous ITAM tool, and of Livingstone’s license experts adding such comprehensive support and value, the client has since elected to outsource its entire SAM function to the Livingstone Group. Together, the LUCE platform and Livingstone’s expert consultants are continually streamlining and optimizing the organization’s software estate, delivering significant savings as part of the process.
Client achieves multi-million-pound savings & boosts risk management capabilities
Over the last year, the Livingstone Group has been an authorized Managed Service Provider to the client, primarily focused on software renewals and risk mitigation. Livingstone has provided the company with a renewals calendar, so that every time a software contract is set to expire, the client’s procurement team has plenty of advance warning, and can prepare for what are usually complex and lengthy renegotiations. This is backed up by license specialists and clean licensing data related to each vendor.
This proactive approach also goes a long way to avoiding any major licensing-related challenges, particularly audits from top vendors. Furthermore, Livingstone also set up and now manages a risk-steering committee within the organization. The group, which meets once a month, includes the client’s Head of Procurement, Finance Director, and other key stakeholders who review risks associated with the company’s software estate to ensure no gaps are missed and that oversights can be resolved.
To further ensure ongoing compliance and minimise any unnecessary spend, Livingstone has set up a managed software service desk to ensure that all software requests from the client’s users are triaged and processed by Livingstone. The Livingstone team checks for any spare licensing before pushing requests through to procurement as a last resort.
As part of the software management process, Livingstone has been able to process many thousands of entitlement documents, over a thousand individual software requests, and has analyzed hundreds of millions of lines of software-related data. As a result, the client has seen multi-million-pound cost-savings and a 400% return on its investment into Livingstone managed services.
Livingstone has helped this leading European multimedia company organization make multi-million-pound savings on a number of key vendor renewals and via the ongoing renewals management process. It has deterred two major vendor audits. There are currently 30 people providing ITAM services to the operator – which include delivery managers, procurement specialists and consultants – reassuring the client that they have the very best team behind them.