Rewritten from “Deploying Leading Edge Controls to Rein in Global Software Expenses,”Jason Daigle’s presentation at the 15th annual PNEC conference in Houston, Texas.

 Business Overview

 Murphy Exploration & Production has five primary offices around the globe, in addition to a retail business including over 1300 gas stations. Murphy E&P relies heavily on geological and geophysical software to support its production activities, which contributed to $23 billion in revenue in 2010. A merger of two large business units, domestic with international, required consolidation of disparate IT assets. Further, reorganization spawned new leadership and an opportunity to create a software asset management foundation, with new strategic goals for developing more effective business processes, technologies and governance. OpeniT LicenseAnalyzer helped Murphy to rein in their global software expenses, and to achieve the foundation’s goals.

Read on to see how the company garnered a savings of $1.3 million with an initial investment of only $43K in the first year, by using OpeniT LicenseAnalyzer.

Business Challenge

Balancing between effectively managing IT resources and delivering expected IT services, all while keeping within a budget, is always difficult. An IT department may be viewed only as a cost center and not as a strategic business strength. Late in 2006, Murphy Exploration and Production reorganized and merged the domestic Gulf of Mexico Exploration business unit, in New Orleans, Louisiana, with the International Exploration unit in Houston, Texas. A Geoscience IT managerial position was created to run the new Upstream Exploration business unit in Houston, and entrusted with developing new IT strategy and methodology, better aligned with business exploration strategies and goals. The new director, Jason Daigle, had to find a way to consolidate the diverse IT assets, human resources and different business cultures into one efficient, well-performing unit.

The director created a Software Asset Management Foundation, and set the following goals for 2008:

• Establish a Business "Champion" at the highest executive level possible, to support IT strategies

• Centralize the IT support organization, SPOC managing the software portfolio

• Centralize the application portfolio, (overview of all resources)

• Invest in software usage reporting tools (to see who uses software, how)

• Establish effective standards for communication and accountability (with monthly usage reports)

As the Single Point of Contact (SPOC) to all software vendors, Mr. Daigle took responsibility for the entire Geoscience exploration application portfolio, consisting of over 250 individual applications and data subscriptions, costing more than $6 million annually in Maintenance and Support (M&S). As SPOC, Daigle established processes and communications with Murphy E&P business partners, accounts payable, and software vendors to ensure executive control over all software procurement, evaluation, implementation, and harvesting.

OpeniT Solution

The Geoscience IT director set criteria for selecting a tool with which to monitor the portfolio. He needed a software license monitoring solution capable of tracking usage on both Windows and Unix platforms, of generating detailed concurrent usage reports at both application and end-user levels, and of releasing application licenses during extended periods of inactivity.

Having met all the criteria set, OpeniT LicenseAnalyzer was chosen to meter Murphy Oil's software assets, and was implemented in March, 2008. An initial $41,000 investment included M&S for a 35 end-user seat license was made, and would leverage the existing hardware infrastructure. An additional $2K was spent on administration training for the tool, which would initially meter all Murphy's expensive Geology, Geophysics, and Reservoir Engineering (GGRE) applications running on Windows, UNIX and Linux operating systems in two regions. Detailed information including the application name, end-user id and “denial” statistics for these expensive GGRE subsurface applications was presented in concurrent usage reports, and surplus licenses.