Strategic SAM Engagements

Managing a renewal or negotiating a contract around a major service deployment or migration is, at best, a long and complex process. At worst, it is fraught with commercial risks.

Without the necessary diligence, preparation and expertise, it is easy to sign up to unfavorable, inflexible terms, including wholly avoidable licensing and maintenance costs for services you might not even require. This is especially the case when negotiating with the ‘big five’ publishers, which have highly skilled and well-incentivized negotiation teams.

Whether you are faced with an Enterprise Agreement Negotiation with Microsoft, a S/4 HANA migration with SAP, a ULA exit with Oracle, an ELA negotiation with IBM, a renegotiation with Salesforce.com, or any other mission-critical negotiation, the Livingstone team can guide you through the process – giving you complete clarity of the outcomes you should realistically expect from the process and, just as importantly, ensuring you achieve them.

Visit our Contract Renewals page for more information on how we can help your organization.

Audits from both software and cloud providers introduce enormous risk factors to organizations, as they often trigger unbudgeted, unexpected spend in the form of fines and back payments.

The Livingstone Group team has vast experience of managing these complex events on behalf of clients, often saving them tens of millions in the process.

Our services comprise of inventory, entitlement and contract reconciliation, to help you understand and reduce your liability.

With expert knowledge on how each publisher approaches audits, we can steer you through the negotiation process and help you achieve the best possible outcome for your business.

For more on how our audit team can help visit our Audit Defence Support page

We can establish your Effective Licensing Position by leveraging the Livingstone Hub to draw product data from across your organization and supplementing it with manual declarations and entitlement information to give you complete visibility of your software and cloud portfolio.

This allows you to right-size your operations by identifying areas where you are under- or over-licensed, or where you could rationalize assets.

For more information, visit our Compliance Reporting service page

Cloud cost management is quickly becoming the single largest commercial risk for IT, procurement and budget holders. Few organizations have robust processes, tools or methodologies for the planning, tracking and control of their cloud consumption costs. The impact of not being in control can be significant, with cloud overage costs tracking many times above the original budgeted amount and stakeholders not having the ability to mitigate this risk easily.

Optimizing a cloud ecosystem that includes IaaS, PaaS & SaaS requires a clear understanding of each cloud service, how it is charged and the factors that affect cost and value during it’s use. We are here to help.

To optimize and maintain control effectively requires solid data and refined methodologies, these are critical to fully profile the lifecycle costs and understand what interventions are required to maintain a level of optimization. Livingstone provides this capability within our Cloud Managed Services. Our Cloud Optimization services allows clients to take control of costs across their cloud ecosystem, so they can plan effectively, optimize when required and only pay for what they consume. This ensures they retain financial control of their ecosystem, resulting in lower and more predictable costs. Read more >>