- The agency was concerned that it was out of compliance with their IBM and Oracle license contracts
- They have no centralized purchasing or license management mechanism available for the agency’s business components
- Multiple independent business units that utilize multiple hosting vendors made information gathering difficult
Executives and IT Leadership at the agency was concerned about their software asset management and licensing compliance for multiple vendors including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and others. While they had enterprise agreements with these vendors, they thought that they still might be in violation of those contracts and wanted to be sure.
The leadership team tasked their general IT contractor to find a specialty consulting firm that focused on software licensing compliance to assess their audit readiness and uncover any violations or licensing shortfalls in their current and planned environments. Their IT contractor chose Miro Consulting as the best organization able to handle a multi-vendor project of this large size and complexity.
The agency had plans to upgrade their systems in ways that would have violated their licensing agreements, but Miro was able to identify them. With slight and subtle changes suggested by Miro, the agency was able to use existing licenses that were not being utilized, and upgrade their systems without the need to purchase any additional licenses.
Unfortunately, one of their other vendors decided to audit the agency in the middle of the engagement with Miro. The auditor came back with a finding that the agency was $254,000,000 out of compliance. Miro set to work analyzing the auditor’s findings, and was able to discover multiple errors, omissions, and incorrect licensing calculations that the auditor had made.
These errors amounted to 97% of the out-of-compliance costs. To settle the audit, the agency only had to purchase about $10M in licenses for products they were using and getting value from. The agency was very pleased with the results and continues to employ Miro for their other large enterprise vendors’ compliance requirements.