Situation
Coming off of a strong corporate financial performance in 2019, a major financial services company’s IT department entered 2020 with a robust budget and a full agenda of project initiatives to support the anticipated continue growth of the company. A new reality quickly unfolded in Q1 of 2020 with world events. The company froze all budgets and the IT department had to quickly refocus their priorities to supporting customers, employees and partners. The CIO was asked by the Board to look at cost savings measures across the board including headcount reduction. One of the CIO’s key values was their team. A lot of time, effort and money had been invested in creating a cohesive team and building their skills to support the new technologies the corporation was implementing to innovate their industry and enable scale. Cutting staff would be devastating to the future initiatives and for morale. The CIO needed to find solutions to the business challenge while maintaining the team.
Where to start
The CIO convened the IT Leadership, Procurement and Finance teams and invited CloudLogic to participate as a strategic partner. The agenda was simple, find material savings in the current IT spend that could be realized quickly both one-time and recurring while preserving the team. CloudLogic’s Portfolio Optimization offerings were a natural fit. The group agreed and CloudLogic immediately went to work focused on Software License Optimization with a goal of realizing results within 8 weeks.
Key Success Criteria
1. We would meet or exceed the savings threshold the CIO defined
2. The first round of savings must be identified and implemented within 8 weeks
3. Nothing was sacred, all options were to be evaluated and presented to the executive team
4. The changes must be able to be implemented without negative impact to business operations
5. Significant outages were not allowed during the process
6. The environment must retain the existing core functionality and flexibility to support the business demands now and in the future
Challenges and Solutions
Timeline of Project
1. Establish Program Team, Guiding Principles and Goals – Week 1
2. Deploy agentless discovery tool – Week 1
3. First round of identified savings opportunities – Week 2
4. Second round of identified savings opportunities – Week 5
5. Results report and ongoing recommendations – Week 8
Lessons Learned
1. Software licensing is a material percentage of an organizations IT spend and should be maintained continuously
2. A tool alone does not adequately address the complexities of software licensing, experience-based analysis is key
3. Publisher, title and functionality sprawl is real and needs to be actively managed
4. Getting material results is a team effort and is achievable
Client Situation Today
This enterprise exceeded the CIO’s goals for cost savings in record time. The true value of this engagement was the institutional change that was implemented to create accurate systems of record and an on-going process to manage this valuable asset. CloudLogic continues to be tightly integrated with this client and continues to uncover additional savings on-prem, offsite and in the cloud.
