CASE STUDY

Management was aware that ac-curate and comprehensive knowl-edge of IT and usage patterns could potentially yield enormous savings in software alone. One known area of widespread costs was in database software. World-wide, the company had approx. 30 different license agreements with their database suppliers. These agreements were based upon estimated usage, while ac-tual user statistics remained un-known.

Open iT Software provides ac-curate overview thus reducing li-cense costs Open iT Software was purchased to measure a variety of IT system statistics, with the Open iT Licen-seAnalyzer module applied to documenting its company-wide software license usage. Upon viewing the license usage reports, the company quickly discovered

that its maximum number of si-multaneous database service us-ers was signifi cantly lower than had been estimated and paid for. With this knowledge, the com-pany was able to match software license purchases to actual need and reduce license costs by 30%. Additionally, with a better under-standing of software user trends through-out the organization, the company was able to save more money by consolidating software license purchases and benefi t from enterprise discounts.

Multi-national company has extra-ordinary IT needs and expenditures.A large, industrial conglomerate, involved in such diverse activities as oil and gas exploration, fertilizer pro-duction and light metals, wanted to assess how its computer resources were being used to better manage its IT expenditures. With a complex IT infrastructure distributed in multiple sites around the globe, getting a system-wide overview of its resource usage patterns and needs seemed a formidable task.

Perception of software need vs. reality of software usage

Why Open iT LicenseAnalyzer?Identifi es application users and distributes licenses to the users who need themMeasures usage continually, so trends can easily be seenCounts the user once, regard-less of whether he/she is using more than one application at a timeProvided by an independent vendorStores measurements as signed, encrypted, read-only logs, preventing data manipulation

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60% more licenses than necessaryThe Gartner Group predicts that companies lacking a reporting system for their software usage will have 60% more licenses than necessary.

Overlicensing in many compa-nies is due to the fact that pur-chases are initiated by software users, who typically over-esti-mate the time to be spent using the applications – and they are made at the local level, robbing the company of the benefi ts of centralized purchasing, such as fl exibility and savings found in corporate license deals.

HOW A FORTUNE 500 COMPANY REDUCED ITS DATABASE COSTS BY 30%

© 2004 Open iT, Inc. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. Open iT makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary. Open iT is a registered trademark of Open iT Inc.

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