Vendor management
Master your IT vendor Landscape: Optimize spend, relationships and compliance
Managing a multitude of software vendors, each with complex contracts and evolving license models, is a significant challenge. Without a strategic approach, organizations risk overspending, facing compliance issues and missing opportunities for better terms. Flexera empowers you to take control of your software vendor management, transforming it from a reactive burden into a strategic advantage.
Recommended Products
Get a complete picture of your vendor relationships
Vendor selection
VENDOR SELECTION
Evaluate your vendors
It’s important to choose the right software vendors based on a needs assessment. Identify your organization’s specific software needs, including functionality, scalability and compatibility with existing systems and future requirements. To do this, you need to have a clear overview of your software vendors, software provisioned and software spend when considering acquiring new applications. Flexera can help you keep your software sprawl down with a comprehensive overview of all of your vendors and applications.
Software renewal
SOFTWARE RENEWAL
Reconsider your vendors at renewal
As software contracts come due, it’s a great time to reevaluate which software vendors you’d like to continue a relationship with, and if they are fit for your business. After all, if you don’t understand how much software you’re utilizing, how can you know which (and how many) applications and licenses to renew?
Vendor value
Vendor Value
Understand your software usage with Flexera
Comparing licenses purchased against what is allocated only scratches the surface of savings. Simplify software renewals with automated calculations that identify the correct number of licenses the organization needs. Flexera’s ITAM solutions dive deep into the most commonly used software vendors, providing a 98% recognition and normalization rate and the insights you need to make data-driven decisions across your on-premises, SaaS, and cloud environments
Navigating the labyrinth
The challenges of modern software vendor management
Today's IT environments rely on a diverse ecosystem of software vendors. This diversity, while offering choice, introduces complexities in tracking spend, ensuring compliance, managing contracts and maintaining productive relationships. Understand the common pain points that can undermine your vendor management efforts.
- Decentralized vendor data: Information siloed across departments, leading to a fragmented view of vendor spend and risk
- Complex and opaque contracts: Difficulty in understanding and tracking entitlements, product use rights and renewal terms across numerous vendors
- Inefficient renewal processes: Lack of foresight leading to rushed decisions and unfavorable renewal terms
- Vendor lock-in and limited leverage: Difficulty in switching vendors or negotiating better terms due to dependency
- Compliance risks and audit surprises: Increased likelihood of non-compliance when managing numerous, varied licensing agreements
- Suboptimal vendor performance: Lack of clear metrics to assess vendor value and ensure they meet SLAs
- Consolidated vendor portfolio view: Gain a single source of truth for all vendor contracts, spend, usage and compliance data
- Proactive contract and renewal management: Track key dates, terms, and entitlements to prepare for negotiations and avoid auto-renewals at unfavorable prices
- Data-driven vendor negotiations: Leverage accurate usage and entitlement data to strengthen your position and secure better terms
- Vendor performance tracking: Establish metrics to assess vendor value and ensure they meet contractual obligations
- Risk mitigation and compliance assurance: Proactively identify and address compliance gaps specific to vendor agreements
- Spend optimization across vendors: Identify redundancies and opportunities for consolidation to reduce overall software costs
Achieve clarity and control
Strategic software vendor management with Flexera
Flexera provides a centralized platform and the data-driven insights necessary to manage your entire software vendor portfolio effectively. We help you move from reactive firefighting to proactive, strategic engagement, ensuring you maximize value from every vendor relationship while minimizing risk and cost.
Building a strong foundation:
Pillars of effective vendor management
A successful vendor management strategy rests on several key pillars. Flexera solutions support each of these, helping you build and maintain healthy, cost-effective vendor relationships.
- Vendor selection and onboarding: Establishing clear criteria and processes for evaluating and integrating new software vendors
- Contract management: Centralizing contracts, tracking key terms, obligations and renewal dates
- Performance management: Monitoring vendor performance against SLAs and business expectations
- Risk management: Identifying and mitigating risks associated with vendor compliance, security and financial stability
- Relationship management: Fostering collaborative and transparent communication with key vendors
- Spend optimization: Continuously analyzing vendor spend to identify savings and ensure value
- Improved ROI on software investments: Ensure you are getting maximum value from each vendor agreement
- Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): Optimize licensing, reduce shelfware and avoid unnecessary fees
- Enhanced negotiating power: Enter discussions equipped with comprehensive data on usage and compliance
- Stronger vendor relationships: Foster transparency and collaboration based on mutual understanding of needs and performance
- Alignment with business goals: Ensure your vendor portfolio directly supports strategic business objectives and innovation
Elevate your approach
Transforming vendor management into a strategic asset
Effective vendor management is not just about managing contracts; it's about cultivating strategic partnerships that drive business value. Flexera helps you gain insights to proactively manage these relationships for long-term benefit.
COMPLETE VENDOR DATA
Flexera provides a complete view of technology use by vendor
Most large software vendors offer products across multiple environments – IaaS, SaaS and on-premises software. To effectively negotiate with vendors, it is important to have the bigger picture to understand where you can maximize your value. Flexera provides visibility to license compliance and cost optimization insights across your IaaS, SaaS and on-premises environments for the most critical and expensive vendors.
The Flexera difference
Technology and expertise for vendor excellence
Flexera’s Technology Value Optimization (TVO) platform offers robust capabilities to streamline and optimize your software vendor management, providing deep visibility across your entire IT estate, including on-premises, SaaS and cloud environments.
Comprehensive visibility and data intelligence |
Proactive management and optimization |
| Unified asset repository: Track all software assets and associated vendor information in one place. | Automated contract lifecycle management: Track renewal dates, notice periods and contractual obligations. |
| Technopedia™ for data accuracy: Leverage the world's largest IT asset data catalog for normalized and enriched vendor and product information. | Spend analysis by vendor: Identify top vendors by spend and areas for potential cost savings. |
| Cross-platform vendor insights: Understand your commitments and usage for vendors spanning on-premises, SaaS and cloud. | Compliance position per vendor: Understand your license compliance status for key software providers, crucial for audits and renewals. |
Flexera provides the trusted data and insights needed to effectively manage your software vendors, mitigate risks, optimize spend and build stronger partnerships.
Enabling stronger vendor positions: A client success story
Ten years ago, we had five to six audits a year. Now we have zero to one because they talk amongst each other and they know they will never find anything wrong with our data. And we can prove it
FAQ’s: Your vendor management questions, answered
SAM ensures transparency and compliance with licensing terms, building trust with vendors. This leads to smoother audits, better negotiation outcomes, and collaborative partnerships.
Start by inventorying all your software vendors and contracts, centralizing this information. Then, assess current spend and usage per vendor to identify immediate optimization opportunities and risks.
Flexera provides a centralized repository for all contract details, renewal dates, and entitlements, offering a consolidated view across your vendor landscape to simplify management and ensure no critical dates are missed.
Yes, by providing a holistic view of your software estate, Flexera helps identify redundant applications from different vendors and opportunities to consolidate to preferred suppliers, thus optimizing overall spend.
Approach negotiations with a clear understanding of your actual usage (your ELP) and future needs, backed by data from Flexera. Also, understand the vendor's priorities; they might offer discounts on certain products to meet their own strategic goals.
Strategic insights for effective vendor management
Informing IT, Transforming IT
Ready to optimize your software vendor relationships and spend?
Transform your vendor management from a complex cost center into a strategic value driver. Connect with a Flexera specialist to see how our solutions can provide the visibility and control you need to master your vendor landscape.