In recent years, members of the Business Software Alliance (BSA) such as Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec have begun to enforce their rights to audit corporate consumers of their software to ensure that sufficient licensing is in place to cover usage. This has exposed a critical weakness in the ability of many firms to keep accurate inventories of software licenses, leaving them susceptible to substantial financial penalties. Moreover, piece meal purchase of software licenses means that the full negotiating power of a large corporation is not being leveraged to achieve optimal pricing on end-user agreements.

When our client came to us for assistance in managing the deployment of a Software License Management (SLM) solution, the system had already been deployed to the major hubs; however branches in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC) regions had yet to be brought online. While smaller in size, these branches posed a significant risk as insufficient support staff led to poor historical license management and financial exposure for the client.

The client required a Project Management Office (PMO) set up to coordinate the rollout of the solution to branches in EMEA and APAC to close out the remaining internal audit points that had been flagged against this issue.

FinServ brought in a senior project manager with an in-depth understanding of the client’s existing technical infrastructure to set up the PMO. The solution was rolled out simultaneously in EMEA and APAC through close coordination between the PMO and local branch resources.

A hierarchy of license managers by business line and region were set up to have representative ownership and serve as single points of escalation for all software license requests. FinServ utilized it’s PMO Methodology and industry best practices in developing a global communication plan, training materials, project reporting, issues management, and executive and board level presentations.

The end result of our efforts was global coverage on the client’s software licensing program for all their business lines and the closure of all outstanding audit points. The implemented solution, which tied together an existing contracts database with an automated software distribution tool enabled the client to realize projected saves in excess of € 1 MM.

Furthermore, by maintaining a clean inventory of end user licenses across the entire organization, the Global Sourcing division of the client was able to consolidate purchasing power when negotiating the seat price on enterprise licenses and realize material cost saves.