Major Telecoms Brand Partners with Anglepoint For IBM Estate Management
Company Profile
As one of the leading telecommunications companies in the world – and one that is highly active in the M&A market – this company’s IT estate has, over the years, become increasingly fragmented and complex. Eager to make efficiency gains, the company has set a highly ambitious, medium-term goal to reduce its total spend.
Effective IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a vital component of this cost-saving program, and the company has partnered with Anglepoint since 2023 to help transform its ITAM program for each of its top-tier software publishers.
The organization’s IBM estate is a key priority. Anglepoint’s team of experts works alongside the company’s in-house stakeholders to gain a more accurate picture of its software licensing and usage across its entire operations, helping the telco to manage its long-term IBM expenditure, obtain the most value out of its investments and to ensure compliance with all the vendor’s terms and conditions.
In addition, Anglepoint has re-architected the organization’s catalog management program, devising and rolling out a new ticketing system to streamline day-to-day software license management and ensure IBM license usage is both optimized and compliant.
The Challenge
This multi-billion dollar, global organization has a vast and complicated IT estate. In the past, the company’s different business divisions managed their own software estates and appointed their own software asset management (SAM) partners. In 2023, it decided to look for a partner in IT asset management that could help it centralize its ITAM strategy to gain a 360-degree view of its license usage and entitlement. Not only would this new approach enable the organization to utilize its software licenses compliantly and efficiently, it would set it up for greater success during contract renewals.
The organization’s IBM estate posed a significant challenge. In addition to contending with IBM’s complex and varied license models, the company’s IBM estate was operating in siloes, with the group level and multiple business divisions each managing their own environments. A single view of the entire estate was required if the company was going to achieve maximum efficiency gains and mitigate all risks.
The organization also required assistance with its catalog management. Traditionally, it negotiated two separate enterprise licensing agreements (ELAs) with IBM, the first covering its day-to-day IBM operations and the second including a high volume of pre-paid licenses to support additional growth as well as any one-off projects and/or proof of concepts. The company needed a robust way of managing these license allocations, ensuring each user request and deployment fell under the appropriate ELA. Wherever possible, the organization wanted to use the primary ELA before the secondary agreement, as this would place it in a more favorable position during future negotiations.
While this company previously worked with a software asset management provider to manage parts of its IBM estate, this provider could no longer meet the client’s evolving needs. The company wanted to make sure that its IBM catalog management was undertaken in-house, supported by a SAM provider that could architect, deploy, and manage a new ticketing system.
This ITAM program transformation was complicated and far-reaching and came with added time pressure. With a shift in internal resources planned, any new ITAM partner would need to get up to speed and execute these tasks within a finite timescale.
The Solution
Anglepoint was brought on board in 2023 to steer the organization’s new ITAM strategy. The partnership covers the telco’s top-tier software publishers, although immediate attention was given to its IBM-related challenges.
Here, Anglepoint’s solution is two-fold.
Firstly, Anglepoint—one of just four IBM Assured Service Providers (IASPs) worldwide—instigated an extensive license validation exercise to discover what IBM software had been deployed and what was being consumed on an ongoing basis. As data was generated, it is compared to the organization’s entitlements in the context of IBM’s complex and often-changing licensing models.
As software asset management technology cannot fully measure all IBM products, the Anglepoint team needed to collect, consolidate, interpret, and measure data manually, a labor-intensive process which required precision. Close attention was applied to the organization’s different business divisions, which had previously been responsible for managing their own software publisher relationships. A further workstream helped baseline sub-capacity usage—around which IBM has strict licensing rules—a prerequisite for joining the IASP program.
In parallel, Anglepoint collaborated with the in-house team to architect and introduce a new ticketing system to ensure license requests map to the appropriate ELA. This involved close alignment with the in-house IBM licensing expert and the company’s application packaging teams and security teams to create a comprehensive IBM catalog management program with defined rules on how license requests are submitted, approved, and deployed. A first for the Anglepoint team, this request process could be used as a blueprint for other publishers.
With this additional oversight of how its IBM licenses are allocated, the organization expects to realize future cost savings as any unused prepaid licenses can be rolled over for use during the next contractual period. This initiative alone could generate a cost reduction of approximately $20 million at the next renewal date.
Results
- Future Savings: Potential to save $20 million at the next renewal with IBM—a key initiative in the company’s strategy to reduce its total IT spend.
- Greater Visibility: 360-degree view of its entire IBM estate, including sub-capacity consumption.
- Streamlined Operations: New catalog management platform ensures compliant and efficient use of all IBM licenses while supporting swift approval and deployment..
- Improved Governance: More control over license deployment, entitlement and usage optimizes spend and reduces risk of non-compliance.
- Strengthened Software Vendor Relationship: Consolidation of IBM ITAM program places the organization in a position of strength and ensures future discussions between the vendor and organization benefit both parties.