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Business Overview

The company profiled in this case is one of the largest integrated energy companies in the world, with almost 30,000 employees located in more than 30 countries. With increasingly expensive software licenses used at research and production sites, managers needed to control costs and properly align IT investment with business. A metering and reporting tool for IT asset management was needed, one that could provide a snapshot of global software usage patterns to several layers of management for analysis and better planning. See below how they gained a ten-fold return on investment (ROI) through license cost savings in less than six months by, using OpeniT metering software.

Business Challenge

For IT Asset Managers in this technology-reliant company with roughly 1,700 high-end software users, supplying equipment needs, keeping costs down and assessing the value of each IT investment were ongoing challenges. It became increasingly important for business managers to see where and how IT resources contributed to the company’s bottom line. Additionally, a company merger required actions to eliminate duplicate software, to renegotiate vendor contracts and to provide management with an accurate reading of how and where costly IT investments were being used to further overall business goals.

Getting usage reports for management had always been difficult, since the process involved multiple steps by several individuals. It included the painstaking job of scripting and manually transferring data to Excel spreadsheets, with a reliance on technical personnel who had to set aside essential tasks in order to help.

“I was getting very tired of asking key technical personnel to help me manually put together Excel spreadsheets of software usage information,” explained the company’s Global Application Portfolio Manager. “I knew this information was critical to the company, but I also knew that important operational work had to be postponed as a result.”

The company was no effective way to integrate business data with usage data for company-wide chargeback. Management needed to see how IT expenses were used by each user at each location in order to make proper budget allocations, as well as to make critical business decisions. The same data was needed to properly negotiate the company’s long-term objectives with software vendors.