Aerospace Titan Achieves $500 Million in Cost Avoidance with ITAM Managed Services

The Challenge

As one of the world’s largest brands, this company has a vast and complex software estate commanding an annual budget of $500 million. Navigating this expansive software landscape presents significant challenges for its in-house team.

In 2014, the organization turned to Anglepoint after a routine IBM audit resulted in a requirement to use IBM’s License Management Tool (ILMT) and a $250 million fine—equivalent to half of the company’s yearly software expenditure. This prompted a wider review of the organization’s entire asset management estate. Due to the caliber of work delivered in implementing ILMT, Anglepoint was invited to tender for the organization’s key ITAM managed services contracts alongside the Big Four—with Anglepoint ultimately named the supplier of choice.

Over the past decade, the organization has encountered numerous challenges, as expected for an international enterprise of its scale. It has expanded, undergone leadership transitions that impacted the ownership of its ITAM function, and migrated some of its operations to the cloud. Throughout these shifts, the company has consistently relied on Anglepoint’s expertise and guidance.

The Solution

In 2014 Anglepoint was engaged to help define the organization’s new ITAM managed services strategy and oversee relationships with its four top-tier software publishers, IBM, Adobe, Microsoft, and HP. Over the last 10 years this strategy has evolved significantly. Anglepoint now manages eight top-tier publishers, extended to include Oracle, VMware, and SAP—and also provides ad-hoc support for strategic applications from other software vendors.
For an enterprise of this scale, software overspending and licensing shortfalls are common risks. With limited internal resources, the organization has relied heavily on Anglepoint to manage the end-to-end Software License Management process. Over the past decade, Anglepoint has provided a clear, data-driven view of the company’s license entitlements and consumption, along with detailed reconciliations to ensure an accurate Effective License Position (ELP) for each vendor. This strategic oversight has been instrumental in guiding the organization through numerous software audits, including those from Microsoft, Oracle, Micro Focus, and Autodesk.
Anglepoint has also helped the organization to implement IT asset management best practices to help realize cost avoidance opportunities through software license reharvesting. Anglepoint analyzed the organization’s license usage across multiple publishers to determine where IT savings could be made. This process became even more complex in 2019 when the organization began shifting parts of its on-premise model to the cloud, leveraging three providers — Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. Anglepoint was entrusted with the highly intricate task of overseeing all these environments, ensuring seamless compliance with their software licensing agreements across on-premise and cloud models. Some licenses are exclusive to on-premise environments, while others can be leveraged across both. A key aspect of Anglepoint’s role is pinpointing licenses that can be reharvested, preventing avoidable cloud costs and ensuring optimal resource allocation.
One of the most impactful cost-saving initiatives over the last decade was Anglepoint’s role in helping the organization exit Oracle’s Unlimited License Agreement (ULA), which had been in place since 2010. Anglepoint played a critical role in synthesizing and validating the necessary data to complete the certification process successfully, enabling the organization to exit Oracle’s ULA and achieve substantial long-term savings.
More recently, Anglepoint has helped the organization maximize its technology investment in ServiceNow. In April 2024, the Anglepoint team began work on a Proof of Concept for ServiceNow SAM Pro, configuring the tool to automatically collect deployment and usage data from across the organization’s software estate, and comparing this data to the organization’s licensing entitlements. This enhanced tooling is removing laborious, manual processes from the company’s ITAM strategy, driving further efficiencies.
On top of all of this, the organization has undergone several changes in stakeholders over the years, with Anglepoint and the software asset management program under the remit of multiple different departments. Despite all this change, Anglepoint has remained a constant, providing continuous and strategic IT asset management support.

Results

• Cost savings: Through Anglepoint, the organization was able to successfully re-assign unused software and cloud licenses across multiple publishers, saving $91 million since 2014.
• Cost avoidance: By taking a strategic approach to software license management, Anglepoint successfully guided this organization through multiple vendor audits, helping it avoid costs of approximately $450m. The client has not paid a single fine for Anglepoint managed publishers since they were brought on board in 2014.
• Optimized hybrid infrastructure: Through careful management, Anglepoint has been able to help the client have full license visibility and control over both its on-premise and cloud assets.
• A trusted partner: After a decade of working together, under multiple leaders and across multiple departments, the client has gained a true partner in Anglepoint with its relationship expanding in scope over the years.