How SPK’s Application Management Services Optimized Licensing Costs and Enhanced Tool Utilization

Challenge

Due to the size of this company, this client has purchased many licenses for multiple tools.  They have various teams, meaning licenses are extremely dispersed.  While many of these licenses are used daily, there are some that become unnecessary over time.  But, with large organizations, there is normally not a single person that is responsible for understanding usage.  This company needed a way to ensure its engineers had the right tools and the right amount of licenses for their engineers to succeed.  This required visibility into which tools were being used less over time. 

Solution

During yearly reviews, SPK uses our own tool, Licenseminer, to view when licenses are used.  Since we manage these licenses for the client, our experts can view data such as how many licenses the engineers are using.  In the case of this company, they were using a tool over the past 3 years.  While they were still utilizing it, the amount of licenses needed had drastically decreased.  Licenseminer allowed SPK to discover this pattern, determining there were more licenses than were being used on a consistent basis.  We then met with stakeholders to share this data.  We suggested that the company reduce the number of licenses they are paying for, and they agreed.  As requested by our client, we reached out to the vendor to change license counts and update our documentation to ensure our license information for this client remains traceable. 

Results

Paying for licenses that are not in use can cost organizations thousands of dollars. In the case of this medical equipment supplier, optimizing licenses for just one software saved them tons on licensing costs.  They went from paying $15,000 to $2,700.  Not only did this help them save on licensing costs, but it also helped them save on managed service costs as SPK now has fewer licenses to manage for them.  They can utilize this money to invest in different resources to help their engineers work faster and more efficiently. Ultimately, with the help of Licenseminer, SPK’s team adds value and increases productivity by optimizing license usage for our clients.  This also reduced the friction between teams when trying to understand if licenses were available, which increased productivity.