As a top IT professional or procurement executive, you command vast resources and oversee essential and mission-critical functions for your organization.
Your decisions drive the business and have company-wide impact. You shape policies and processes. You set the terms and conditions of contracts, and legions of vendors and suppliers bend to your will.
You wield formidable power over every area of your domain.
Every area except one.
The one playing field that’s tilted in the wrong direction
When you sit down with the software publishers and cloud resource providers on which your organization’s every function depend, the party on the other side of the table invariably holds all the cards.
As you know, at the negotiating table, the person with the best data typically wins. And when it comes to software and cloud resources, that person is too frequently not you.
These vendors come armed with detailed, precise reporting on the number of software users in your organization and the amount of cloud instances you consume. They apply current and comprehensive information that you’re unable to match with your finite resources and limited visibility across your IT infrastructure.
This data disadvantage—a disparity that will only increase as more vendors move toward consumption-based pricing—leaves you ill-equipped to effectively negotiate contracts, shape agreements or defend against audits.
Moreover, the contracts and licensing agreements of software publishers and cloud providers are increasingly complex and opaque, and some of these mega-vendors now offer both enterprise software and cloud resources combined in mega-contracts that are even more impenetrable.
Compounding the situation, changes to licensing agreements (e.g., Microsoft’s recent revisions to SQL Server Standard 2022), pricing (e.g., Oracle’s reconfiguration of its pricing model for Java) and reporting (e.g., IBM’s redrafting of the reporting requirements of its Passport Advantage agreement) are occurring with increasing frequency.
Each revision places new demands on your budget and your resources, setting you and your organization back three steps.
Evening out the data disadvantage
But what if you could achieve complete visibility over your entire IT estate?
You’d know exactly the number of users for each SaaS application, each software version, across your organization.
You’d be able to see precisely the amount of cloud resources your organization used—and when it was consumed.
This unprecedented visibility would deliver the current and accurate entitlement, usage and consumption data that would eliminate the data disparity and level the playing field.
You’d no longer find yourself at a disadvantage during contract negotiations. And you’d have the up-to-the-minute information you need to effectively defend against costly vendor audits.
But that’s just the start
Complete visibility across your IT estate—the visibility you’ve always wished for but have never been able to achieve—would put you back in total command.
You’d be able to:
- optimize costs and rightsize resources in the cloud
- eliminate sprawl, reallocate licenses as needed, and retire unused licenses and applications
- discover hardware and software across your estate, and know when your hardware and software is at end of service or end of life
- maximize the ROI of your ITSM and ITFM platforms with precision data in the CMDB
- reduce risk and control shadow IT
You could optimize your organization’s digital transformation:
- you’d know which business services are dependent on which applications, so you’d have the business context to properly migrate your workloads
- you could optimize your organization’s spend across public and private clouds
- you could identify savings opportunities, dialing your cloud usage up or down as needed
And your visibility would expand as SaaS and containers and other evolving technology become more essential components of your estate.
It’s time to reconfigure your relationship with technology suppliers
Sound like a dream come true?
It’s no dream.
Technology Value Optimization
Reallocate spend. Reduce the risk of audits and security breaches. And chart the most effective path to the cloud. Get the most from every IT dollar.
Complete visibility across the technology estate, along with the insights that inform IT and procurement decisions and the resources to optimize spend, are what Flexera delivers every day to many of the world’s largest organizations.
Our technology value optimization solutions help enterprises effectively manage, govern and optimize their hybrid IT estates.
