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4 Software and Maintenance Tips You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Understand Software and Maintenance Overspend

As anyone with visibility into business IT costs knows, it’s incredibly easy to overspend on software and maintenance without realizing it. The average organization uses upward of a hundred software applications. As a result, the asset portfolio becomes complex and disparate, driving up maintenance and support efforts and cost.

The bottom line is, it’s easy for software and maintenance to drain internal resources and budgets, and tough to get it all back on track. You have multiple renewal timelines, support levels, questions around right-sizing and licensing, and limited bandwidth for finding answers.

In addition, timing is everything. David Watkins, GDT VP of software and support services, notes: “The mistake we are seeing organizations make is they wait until a key renewal event — three months before a key renewal event — before they look at this estate and assess: Are they right-sized in this area?” By letting the software estate fall on the priority list, decision-makers paint themselves into a corner, failing to leave enough time to truly dig into their asset portfolio or software estate, ask the tough questions, and get strategic about answers.

Whether software and maintenance contracts have fallen by the wayside, or you’re on your A game and just looking for ways to drive more improvements, here are four areas we encourage clients to review.

4 Tactics to Help Save

1. Consider an enterprise agreement (EA).

Find out if you can consolidate your contracts into an EA to take advantage of economies of scale. Oftentimes, many (if not all) of your contracts can be bundled in a way that offers financial benefits such as a fixed price for the duration and reduced cost per license.

For example, a Fortune 500 bank approached our team for support resolving operational complexity, skyrocketing costs, and compliance concerns around disparate Cisco software and maintenance contracts. Consolidation with a Cisco EA empowered us to uncover $3M in savings, plus additional benefits such as locked-in five-year price protection. 

2. Address utilization.

Take a good look at utilization so you can stop paying for underutilized assets. Too often, an organization purchases licensing based on ballpark estimates. This can work as long as decision-makers have the bandwidth to assess utilization and adjust at renewal. But, more often than not, renewal is status quo without reconsideration of actual needs. As a result? Money lost and complexity added.

Identify which assets your teams aren’t using and adjust. Even better: Find a partner you can trust for recommendations on optimizing existing utilization and spend. You might be surprised at how much you can save. Negotiating a contract based on actual needs helped cut this broadband provider’s software and maintenance agreement costs by a full 25%.

3. Standardize coverage.

Get the same level of support for all your assets to prevent resource waste related to questions around troubleshooting and maintenance. Nonstandard hardware maintenance coverage can create a host of challenges, including rising costs and unmanageable admin burden. A strategy that standardized services helped save one FinServ customer $5.5M on its Cisco environment.

4. Align contract expirations.

Avoid surprise costs and penalties related to missed renewals or noncompliance by taking the opportunity to align your contract expiration dates. We’ve found that 58% of recently purchased assets are not actually under proper OEM coverage, adding major risk for the organization.

It’s Not Just About the Money

While following the tips above will help you save up front on software and maintenance costs, taking a strategic approach to contracts also results in additional benefits. These include better software performance and business agility, the ability to leverage internal resources for strategic efforts versus maintenance, and better service for customers.

GDT’s Cisco Software and Maintenance Lifecycle Assessment

Conducting the above strategic efforts on your own can be difficult — especially if you’re already facing some of the challenges covered early on.

GDT offers an easier way to ensure investments are aligned and optimized with the Software and Maintenance Lifecycle Assessment. This is a no-cost assessment that combines an automated review of your Cisco estate with our buying program expertise to help find opportunities to save money, time, and stress.

The assessment is no strings attached, so you have nothing to lose, but so much possibility for gain. Through the assessment, we’ve been able to uncover an average of $1.75 million in cost-saving opportunities for our customers along with many other benefits. As David says, “The outcome of the lifecycle assessment is a cost-effective buying strategy taking full advantage of those Cisco buying programs that are specific to you, that your organization can take advantage of.” 

See how much you can save: Sign up here for a free assessment or refer to this page to learn more.

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