This Livingstone Group client is a global engineering company, offering consultancy and technology solutions for a wide range of markets across the world. Headquartered in North America, it also has offices across EMEA and APAC, with tens of thousands of employees working across different departments.
Livingstone was first engaged by this client over a year ago to help optimize the delivery of an Effective License Position (ELP) for a major vendor for which Livingstone was able to deliver significant savings. As a result of this successful project, the client engaged Livingstone to help it optimize the renewal of its Oracle ULA (Unlimited License Agreement) support stream, whose renewal date was imminent.
Like many Oracle customers, this client felt that they didn’t have the right understanding or knowledge to effectively negotiate with the vendor to achieve its desired cost-savings and reduced the total support stream to match its reducing product requirements. Livingstone’s deep industry knowledge and Oracle negotiation experience greatly impressed the client’s C-level stakeholders, and with senior-level support and authority, Livingstone’s team of experts set to work.
Reducing Redundancy
As this client is a large, complex, global company, its Oracle ULA covered many different software and product requirements across numerous different departments and geographical locations. Historically the ULA had helped support and cover a huge amount of the organization’s requirements, but senior level stakeholders and budget holders realized that they were overspending, with a high level of redundancy costing them millions of dollars in support stream revenue at the end of each ULA contract.
The client knew it needed to have a better understanding of its Oracle estate to see where savings could be made and where its contract could be optimized. The challenge was that reducing Oracle’s ULA support stream is a notoriously complex and challenging process, often seen as an impossible task.
Optimizing the ULA Support Stream
Working alongside all relevant stakeholders – including IT, procurement and senior level teams – Livingstone set the platform for a negotiation strategy with Oracle to optimize the ULA support renewal.
The first step was to analyze the organization’s Oracle estate, reviewing its licensing, entitlements and usage across all departments. This created a huge amount of data for the Livingstone team, which they were then able to analyze to see where licenses were being used or were redundant.
With this information to hand, the team then set about restructuring the Oracle contract to ensure it was fully optimized, delivering on all the organization’s requirements whilst making significant cost-savings. By seeing where licenses were no longer necessary, the Livingstone team was able to draft an optimized contract, outlining where licenses could be reduced, if any needed to be increased for particular products, where concessions could be made during negotiations, and what an optimized, cost-savings renewal deal would look like.
Crucial to this optimization process was the involvement of a team of core senior stakeholders, which Livingstone worked alongside each step of the way. Initially, other stakeholders across the organization were struggling to align their strategies with Livingstone’s proposed changes, but with senior-level support, Livingstone was able to coordinate and bring everyone on board. For Livingstone, having high-level backing and authority is an essential part of ensuring negotiations run effectively and in gaining a streamlined approval process when restructuring contracts. The support of these stakeholders was key to the success of the project.
Huge cost-savings & future-proofing transformation
Livingstone helped the client achieve its primary goal of reducing its Oracle support stream and realizing cost-savings at its ULA renewal point. Overall, the client realized a million dollars in cost-savings and saw 12 times its ROI in Livingstone.
These savings also enabled the client to release significant funds that would allow it to move forward with various digital transformation projects, something it would not have been able to do had these cost-savings not been made. As these projects are put in place and the organization looks for more ways to optimize its software and cloud contracts, Livingstone will continue working alongside the client, helping it to achieve its objectives through optimizing its estates, negotiations and contracts for other major vendors.
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eGuide: Oracle Best Practice - A guide to driving the best value from your Oracle estate
You may like to subscribe to our Oracle Briefing Series presented by Razvan Tarnovschi, our Oracle Practice Lead. Razvan will explore optimization and compliance challenges with Oracle. This mini series comprises six 15-20 minute episodes focusing on key areas. The series offers valuable insights and recommendations to implement within your organization when planning and preparing for Oracle renewals and audits.