US Health Insurance Provider Cuts Risks And Automates Remediation During Period Of Acquisitions And Divestitures

With more than 12,000 employees and five million members across the US, this well-known health insurance provider manages a large and complicated IT estate. To add to the complexity, in the last two years, they have made two major acquisitions while also being involved in one divestiture. Each of these major organizational changes has brought its own set of licensing challenges, and the company is particularly keen to ensure that all subsidiaries are compliant with the terms of their software licensing agreements.

With a dynamic IT environment – as well as multiple agreements with each of its key vendors – the insurer has increasingly recognized the need to refine and improve its Software Asset Management (SAM) program to provide better governance and management of its complex estate. Rather than establishing a compliance position each year or in advance of an audit, they wanted to move to a position of continual compliance where they could identify, reduce and mitigate risks in a much shorter timeframe.

To achieve risk reduction and automation, they would need to educate their in-house technology and business owners about the potential value delivered by a robust SAM strategy and build new working processes and systems to track and remediate risk on an ongoing basis. They engaged with Anglepoint to provide the expertise and resources they would need to implement the changes and support the sharing of SAM best practices with the technology owners.

Anglepoint has been working for this organization since 2019, providing fully managed services for each of its top tier publishers. To help this client reach its desired level of SAM maturity, the Anglepoint team has worked alongside the client to transform its SAM program, including undertaking ELPs for each of their software publishers on a rolling basis. This affords the client much greater certainty over the risks it faces, which is particularly important as subsidiaries join and exit the umbrella organization.

Increasing the cadence of ELPs has already had a significant and positive impact on the way the company manages its Oracle deployments. In a previous year, Anglepoint identified risks of $9.7 million across its entire Oracle estate, triggering an extensive cost avoidance program. In 2023, with more frequent reviews now underway – but with a more complex estate and multiple agreements to consider – identified risks fell to just $217K, with fewer mitigations required.

Alongside the introduction of rolling ELPs, Anglepoint has focused on educating the client’s business and technology owners on the importance of strategic Software Asset Management operations. With a greater understanding of licensing and the introduction of more collaborative working practices, client stakeholders now have a clearer picture of how to provision, reprovision, and decommission licenses, and are better equipped to mitigate risks at speed.

Anglepoint has also designed and built a bespoke executive dashboard to provide these in-house teams with vital intelligence on their usage and entitlement for the company’s top software publishers. Ingesting trustworthy, verified data from across its estate, this dashboard provides a single pane view into ongoing consumption, automatically creating alerts and assigning tasks to remediate non-compliance. Crucially, it also displays the monetary value of costs saved and avoided, proving a return on investment (ROI). This data can also be used to steer successful contract negotiations. The client is already planning to reduce its Oracle spend by more than $450,000 at its next renewal.

Reduced risk: By moving from one-time to rolling ELPs, this healthcare insurance provider is proactively reducing its exposure to risk. For its Oracle estate alone, identified risks have fallen by 97 percent.

Greater program maturity: Now that business leaders have a clear understanding of the program’s ROI, Software Asset Management has become a strategic priority.

Stakeholder empowerment: An ongoing education program, together with greater collaboration between stakeholders, has led to smarter decision-making and swifter remediations.

360-degree visibility: The client’s bespoke dashboard allows it to quantify its software usage and liability at any moment in time.

Automated remediation: The dashboard alerts to any incidents of non-compliance and assigns remediation tasks to the appropriate stakeholders, helping them track, manage, and accelerate resolutions.

Contract renewals: With access to more granular data, the company can enter negotiations from a position of power. For example, it expects to reduce its Oracle spend by more than $450,000 at its next renewal.