Livingstone | Services | Single Vendor SAM Managed Services

Technology from the five major software and cloud providers – IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com – will likely play a pivotal role in the success of your organization. As your reliance on these vendors continues to grow, it is vital to manage your usage, contracts and entitlement on a day-to-day basis, otherwise your costs and exposure to risks will grow too.

Livingstone Group has deep expertise in managing all aspects of your software and cloud deployments from these five publishers. More than that, our team has worked inside these vendor organizations, ensuring customer compliance, negotiating ELAs and more.

Our comprehensive Single Vendor Managed Services include:

Our experts can sit at your side of the table, ensuring that every aspect of your relationship with your strategic vendors is closely managed and delivers against your business goals.

Our Single Vendor Managed SAM Services do much more than help you manage your licenses and establish your ELP; they leverage the Livingstone Hub to provide you with on-demand data on your usage vs entitlement, so you can continuously optimize your estate and your spend.

Your procurement teams also benefit from our strategic sourcing advice, enabling your organization to secure favorable terms when you are renewing or renegotiating your contracts during times of growth, M&A activity and more.

Our expert team is also on hand to steer you through your migration to the cloud with these main publishers, whether that be to IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. We can help you optimize your service and licensing requirements, steer you through contract negotiations and then manage your cloud estate on an ongoing basis, helping you to control costs and consumption in the long-term.

Compliance

Effective Licence Position

Our compliance risk reports are built from contract entitlement and product usage data that is sourced from across our client's organizations, they are delivered to clients via our secure HUB platform. This intelligence allows clients to understand the usage and compliance across the software and cloud estate for specific major vendors . Our analysis focuses on the licensing metrics and contract terms under which the software has been purchased to ensure that we understand what compliance issues may exist and any financial risk that could be present.

Risk mitigation

With vendor audits and major renewals taking place all the time, simply knowing where potential software and cloud non-compliance risks lie is only half the story. You need on-going access to specialist knowledge and expertise to be able to understand and mitigate these risks, avoiding any resulting financial impact. Our team of Compliance specialists can help you understand the scope and scale of any potential compliancy issue, their experience allows them to define a prioritized action plan that will effectively mitigate any compliance risks through technical rationalization and commercial optimization. Their knowledge of your strategic vendors licensing programmes, contracts and commercial terms will prove invaluable in ensuring you get and remain fully complaint and avoid unnecessary costs along the way.

Audit Defense

Software audits can be unexpected, unwelcome, disruptive and costly. They can also be more common than you might expect. Our international team of compliance and audit defense experts have helped hundreds of organizations around the world deal with audit demands from all of the Tier One vendors including Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Our Audit Defense service provides a complete programme to help organizations plan, prepare and respond to audit requests from named vendors. We ensure that the optimum outcome can be achieved with minimal internal resource and outcome risk. By utilizing our extensive experience, a best practice management approach can be established to reduce the overall impact of an audit and ensure the overall cost and liability is minimized.

Contract Optimization

Renewal planning

Major contract renewals present one of the best opportunities for organizations to control their software and cloud costs. Having rigorous processes to validate renewal requirements and the visibility current consumption are now an absolute must. However, one of the big challenges remains the ability to implement and manage an effective renewals management system and supporting process that keep requirements and costs under control. Livingstone provides a complete lifecycle solution for Renewals Management, providing the technology, process and expertise that help clients get their renewals under control and drive significant cost benefits. The administration of renewals processes can be onerous, our service allows clients to track and manage their renewals, providing vendor expertise and administration where required.

Optimization of your Bill of Materials

Achieving the best commercial and contractual terms from major vendor negotiations requires detailed and rigorous planning. This preparation helps develop a lean, optimized and detailed Bill of Materials (BoM) that bridges the gap between what software and cloud services you have now and what your future demand will be for the next 3-5 years. We then use this granular view of actual needs alongside a sympathetic approach to contract agility to develop a strategic negotiation plan.

Negotiation support

Our experts will support you throughout your vendor negotiations. Our global team of industry experts have negotiated some of the largest and most complex mega vendor contracts globally, for a wide variety of clients including domestic and international enterprises, as well as a variety of Public Sector organizations. They have many years' experience of working with and for mega vendors, working to proven methodology to deliver specified client outcomes. Every client is unique, and we tailor our service to deliver the outcomes you need, either as an individual tactical service or as a packaged end-to-end strategic service.

Consumption Reduction

SaaS, PaaS and IaaS consumption optimization

Our XaaS Consumption service provides clients with a consolidated management view of their subscription-based services. We provide the required intelligence through aggregated reports and dashboards, this allows organizations to effectively manage these environments and maximize savings throughout their deployment lifecycle. Simple and easy to set up, this service is becoming invaluable to our clients.

Optimization of hybrid on-premise and XaaS deployments

Ongoing cost management

The exponential growth in adoption of cloud-based services is now being felt by many organizations, the ease at which these services are accessed and paid for can have major implications, particularly on an organisation's IT costs and data security. This trend has been particularly acute in larger organizations, where the need to validate cloud billing, ensure budget accountability and internal cost allocation is becoming increasingly important. Our cost management service provides clients with visibility of their costs and billing, the analytics capability of our Hub platform allows clients to manage their costs effectively across their organization.

Access to on-demand data on your deployments, usage and entitlement, including the management of vendor-specific tools

Ongoing Control

Request management

Our Request Management service can be tailored to client's unique needs, delivering defined processes or tasks. This can include the administration and management of license & cloud related requests from users, the organization, lines of business or IT itself. Our team can reconcile these requests against existing cloud subscriptions & software licensing, ensuring optimal use of existing investments before procurement of new services and licensing. We employ industry experts that have vast experience and knowledge on a wide range of cloud and software vendors, including specific technical architectures, contract management and procurement expertise. Our services can be built around predefined processes and policies for example joiners & leavers, license pool operation, cloud resource requests & media/key library administration. Our Service Desk can also provide other services including...

Full integration into your business and procurement process to ensure your purchasing decisions are always optimal

The growing importance of having effective IT governance cannot be underestimated. If your ITAM processes and policies are lacking or non-existent, the chances are you will be incurring significant costs that could be avoided, its likely you won’t be compliant, and you will struggle to drive an optimal commercial position with software and cloud contracts. Good policy and process should deliver benefits across the organization, governance that drives commercial, operational, and technical best practice and financial outcomes. Integrating policy and process through ITAM workflow enhances overall IT governance management systems and can ensure that commercial outcomes are realized throughout the lifecycle of your investments.

Forecast management

Producing accurate and meaningful forecasts from the vast amount of data now available can see like an impossible task. Without the ability to accurately forecast many organizations base their investment planning on inaccurate or incomplete data and assumption, often contract and commercial terms agreed with vendors are not fit for purpose and IT decision making can be flawed. Our Forecast Management service uses the powerful predictive analytics engine of our Hub platform. Hub can analyze historic and current usage trends to model future requirements, which informs future investment planning and decision making. This clarity can empower your contract negotiations with strategic vendors, leveraging your buying power to make significant costs savings.