How Communications Giant Achieved Multi-Millions in Cost Savings

Providing wireless, TV, internet and phone services to homes and businesses in all US states, this $100 billion+ organization has an enormous software and cloud estate. With no centralized SAM tooling and a single source of accurate data, effective management of their estate was extremely difficult, and they had no clear visibility of potential risk. Historically, the operator’s different business divisions have been responsible for their own purchasing decisions which meant that the organization was not leveraging its bargaining power or being proactive with optimizing purchases and renewals. With imminent renewals, no Effective License Position (ELP), and numerous contracts held by different departments, they needed help to gather the information required to negotiate the renewals with the best commercial and contractual agreements. With an objective to make annual cost savings totaling tens of millions of dollars, in early 2023 they recognized they needed to change strategy and seek expert support to deliver the required outcomes.

Although the organization had been working with another Software Asset Management (SAM) provider for over 10 years on a series of discrete projects, it wanted to appoint a new strategic partner who could help it centralize and rationalize its operations, define and roll out best practices, boost its purchasing power, and ultimately realize its ambitious commercial goals.

Anglepoint was brought on board in early 2023 to help shape the organization’s new SAM strategy as well as to identify and secure immediate cost savings.

To kick off the engagement, the Anglepoint team facilitated a SAM Workshop, which included all major stakeholders from across the client’s business. This collaborative exercise uncovered several pain points associated with the current SAM strategy, with clear areas for improvement. With no specialist SAM tools deployed across the client’s infrastructure, it also provided an opportunity for Anglepoint to educate the company on the tooling market. As a result of the workshop, the Anglepoint team provided the client with a comprehensive action plan to drive new efficiencies.

As a next step, Anglepoint was contracted to support the client’s top publisher relationships, including Adobe, Broadcom (with separate workstreams for Broadcom Mainframe, Distributed and Symantec), IBM, Micro Focus, and Red Hat. With a renewal imminent, Adobe Cloud was the initial priority. Anglepoint had just two months to establish the Effective License Position (ELP) for 13 different business units with 43 different contracts and purchase orders, as well as support all remediations. By collecting accurate data relating to the organization’s Adobe Cloud usage, Anglepoint detected a potential risk of $1.5 million and provided its client with actionable advice on how to right-size its deployment to reduce this exposure. It also identified potential cost savings of more than $1.1 million, achievable by moving users to the most appropriate license: Adobe Creative Cloud, Acrobat Pro, or other single application licenses.

Anglepoint also discovered 26,500 deployments of on-premise products that had reached end-of-life, representing a security and commercial risk to the organization. Under Anglepoint’s guidance, the client was able to determine which of these installs should be decommissioned and which should be upgraded as part of the company’s continued migration to the cloud.

To bolster the client’s negotiating power, Anglepoint also provided commercial insights into the average unit price paid by similar companies. This benchmarking exercise found that, compared to its peers, the company had been paying almost three times more for its Acrobat Pro licenses, and 13 percent more for its Adobe Creative Cloud bundles. Armed with these benchmarks, the procurement team could enter the renewal process with greater confidence in a positive commercial outcome.

This exercise is being repeated across all of the publishers under Anglepoint’s management, while its team of experts has also begun to implement strategic improvements to the client’s SAM strategy. These include an analysis of the company’s cloud and software estate to map where usage and entitlement data resides, together with information about the corresponding stakeholders, of which there are more than 100 across the entire organization.

In addition, Anglepoint has created a roadmap to enable the operator to consolidate its multiple licensing agreements, while also transferring knowledge about each publisher’s licensing metrics to the company’s business and technology owners so they have a clearer understanding of how to install products and services to remain compliant.

Strategic SAM Framework
The telecoms operator now has a SAM strategy that is aligned with its goal to reduce software expenditure by tens of millions of dollars. Tangible outcomes include:

Risk Reduction: Identification and remediation of $1.5 million Adobe Cloud risk.

Cost Savings: Potential $1.1 million Adobe Cloud cost optimization at its next renewal.

Discovery and Removal of End-of-life Assets: 26,500 on-premise Adobe products identified; with recommendations on whether to decommission or upgrade, to mitigate associated risks.

Holistic Optimization: Cost optimization plans for all other top tier publishers.

Negotiation Support: With access to accurate data, and by benchmarking the company’s spend against its peers, the operator’s procurement team can start new negotiations from a position of strength.

Operational Streaming: Improved documentation and processes for streamlined usage and entitlement data.

Knowledge Empowerment: Education on each vendor’s licensing metrics, allowing business and technology owners to optimize installations.