It has been about a year since Microsoft announced Microsoft Fabric, which provides customers with an end-to-end unified analytics platform that aims to address every aspect of an organization’s analytics needs. Per Microsoft’s website, Fabric “integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single unified product, empowering data and business professionals alike to...
When you consider that IT spending in 2023 topped $4.6 trillion globally and is forecast to reach $5.1 trillion in 2024, making sure you manage your IT budget effectively and get a fair price for what you’re buying is crucial. Unfortunately, most enterprises are overpaying. NPI’s objective price benchmark analysis turns up savings on more than 85% of the quotes we examine. Savings can range from 10% to 50% and higher.
With cloud migration growing rapidly, companies are spending a lot more on SaaS platforms. Gartner forecasts SaaS spending to top $232 billion globally, growing at a rate of nearly 18% annually. These investments are accounting for larger shares of IT budgets as vendors are increasingly aggressive about phasing out residual perpetual licenses in favor of subscription models that provide recurring monthly revenue.
If you’re an Oracle customer, expect a license audit in your future. Oracle has become much more aggressive in pursuing audits in recent years — especially for companies running Oracle’s solutions in conjunction with VMware virtualization. Java users are also facing heightened audit risk since the introduction of a new pricing model for Java SE subscriptions.
Microsoft is no stranger to antitrust investigations, but the latest inquiries coming out of the European Union have given the tech industry (and some Microsoft customers) pause. If you’re not already familiar with Microsoft’s antitrust investigation history, here is a quick primer: In 1998, the Justice Dept and 20 states charged Microsoft with violating antitrust laws.
Enterprise IT buyers are no stranger to software price increases these days as most vendors have raised rates on incumbent solutions to drive revenues higher. In some cases, the scope of these rate hikes is justified given external economic factors like inflation and supply chain disruptions. But there are other times when the scope is beyond justification. Smartsheet’s recent price increases are a good example of the latter.
In the past seven years, the SaaS industry has grown an estimated 500%. It’s no surprise that organizations with more than 1,000 employees use an average of 177 SaaS applications. Today, SaaS applications account for 70% of total company software use and that number is expected to grow as many IT vendors phase out on-premise software offerings.
Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Teams Premium in February 2023 to much fanfare as well as a few criticisms. While the debut of several AI-powered features were received enthusiastically by some enterprise users, the vendor also stirred frustration when it announced some features that were previously free in the standard edition would now only be available in Teams Premium.
The evolution of enterprise IT sourcing is an interesting one to chart over the decades. Twenty years ago or so, the procurement of enterprise IT was largely handled by the organization’s IT department. Not yet a distinct category of sourcing expertise, IT was believed to be too complex, too technical, and too important to be under the purview of procurement.
On November 22, 2023, Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware leaving many wondering what the impact would be at a customer level. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on perspective, they didn’t have to wait very long. In the days following the acquisition, Broadcom made significant changes to VMware’s offerings that will affect countless enterprise customers. And this is likely just the beginning.
In September 2023, Cisco announced end-of-sale and end-of-life dates for its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. The last date to order the product will be September 11, 2024, and software maintenance releases and bug fixes will no longer be issued after September 11, 2025.
On a monthly basis, Microsoft can change the use rights and offerings for their license agreements and these changes can be found on their Product Terms page. This page isn’t very intuitive, and changes are often hard to spot. One such example is the recent removal of O365 from Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement offerings.
Despite the critical nature of IaaS and PaaS, it’s not uncommon for customers of the industry’s largest hyperscalers (e.g. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) to overlook some of the fine print in contractual business terms. One example is the "end of term" clause in AWS and Google Cloud agreements. The verbiage should set off alarm bells for anyone in enterprise sourcing, legal, or risk management.
In the intricate web of IT vendor intelligence, sometimes the most revealing insights come from unexpected sources. Instacart’s recent S-1 filing, a prerequisite for its IPO, has inadvertently put a spotlight on the competitive dynamics and behaviors of cloud solution providers, particularly Snowflake pricing. This revelation not only sparked a battle among industry giants but also raised crucial questions about cloud computing costs for businesses.
From an IT procurement perspective, the large enterprise Oracle software estate has always been difficult to navigate. Overspending and overprovisioning is rampant. License terms and rules are complex. Customers regularly end up with less-than-optimal pricing and business terms when negotiating contracts or renewals. Negotiating a world-class outcome with Oracle requires careful assessment of deployments and deep pricing and negotiation intel to optimize enterprise agreements.
Companies will spend an estimated $273.5 billion on Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings in 2023 and over $900 billion by 2030. Unfortunately, most will overpay at a staggering rate. Within large enterprises, 30% or more of total SaaS spending goes to unused licenses and features. Even when customers buy only what they need, they’re often paying prices that are above best-in-class rates.
This past January, Oracle quietly rolled-out a bold change to Java licensing and – in effect – how it generates Java SE Subscription revenue. Oracle’s new Java SE Universal Subscription is, in effect, a replacement for the Named User Plus (NUP) and Processor license models. Under the new model, Oracle now bills customers for Java based on the total number of employees rather than processors or desktop users.
Oracle's Unlimited Licensing Agreements (ULAs) have long been a staple for larger enterprises looking to navigate their relationship with the tech giant. The allure of such agreements is undeniable: a seemingly unending use of Oracle's vast software library. But it comes at a cost—steep annual fees that typically increase over time. Often, these fees have been counterbalanced by a protective umbrella against Oracle’s progressively more frequent software license audits.
SAP has long held a significant and relatively conservative presence in the enterprise IT landscape. The vendor’s more recent push to the cloud (and resulting solutions and programs like S/4HANA Cloud and Rise with SAP) have revealed new agility – a positive for their customers’ fast-changing technology ecosystems. However, the vendor’s recent support fee increase has raised eyebrows and concerns.
In October 2022, Microsoft quietly introduced key amendments to licensing requirements for Windows Server/CIS. These changes were a conscious deviation from Microsoft’s stringent approach to licensing products in cloud and virtualized environments. At the time, Microsoft had been criticized by enterprise customers for its lack of flexible licensing policies.
A little over a year ago, Zoom announced the Zoom One platform. Essentially, it bundles together options for team chat, phone, whiteboard, meetings, and other Zoom services into a single solution. Currently, Zoom offers six types of bundles that range from least to most robust. They include Basic, Pro, Business, Business Plus, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus.
Microsoft’s increasingly broad portfolio of SaaS offerings can be overwhelming for many customers. They range from productivity products like Office 365 E3 and E5 to advanced security and compliance products like M365 E5 Security to the M365 E5 eDiscovery & Audit products. The sheer quantity of products isn’t the only factor – there are various versions of each (E3, E5, Standard, Enterprise, Premium, and more) to consider.
With some form of cloud adoption and digital transformation touching every industry, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Today, managing every phase of the SaaS lifecycle is challenging. From procurement and onboarding, to integration and training, to security and compliance, to usage and cost optimization
Pricing for Microsoft Copilot has given many enterprise customers a case of sticker shock. NPI’s Microsoft licensing experts share what IT buyers need to know as they consider integrating Copilot into the enterprise.
Negotiating a fair deal with Adobe can be tough, especially given how pervasive its products are in the enterprise. But is it impossible? Certainly not. These Adobe negotiation insights will help you formulate a go-forward strategy.
Globally speaking, M&A activity has been lackluster throughout 2023. Q1 2023 saw a global deal volume of $559 billion, one of the lowest quarterly volumes in the last 10 years. But there are bright spots – like tech M&A. In the tech sector, cautious optimism has been the prevailing sentiment with a 20% increase in deal volume and a 40% increase in average deal size according to PwC. Leading PE firms with large tech portfolios also remain active.
Microsoft announced an overhaul of its endpoint management products during Microsoft Ignite 2022 including the introduction of a new family of products. While Microsoft introduced Microsoft Intune as the new name for all endpoint management-related products, the name itself is not new. The cloud-based endpoint management platform has been known as Microsoft Intune since it was rebranded from Windows Intune in 2014.
Qlik recently announced it has completed its acquisition of Talend, an open-source data integration platform. This acquisition aims to bring together a shared vision and a rich portfolio of solutions for data integration, quality, and governance. As reported by Diginomica, Qlik CEO, Mike Capone shared some highlights of the acquisition:
This month marks NPI’s 20th anniversary! It’s mind-boggling to think about how much has changed in the last two decades. In 2003, there were no iPhones or Netflix, MySpace was the hot new thing, Google was barely five years old, and Yahoo and AOL were the top two most popular websites in the U.S.
In February 2023, IBM unveiled changes to its Passport Advantage Agreement terms that will become effective on May 1 for existing customers. These changes significantly affect customers' software license compliance obligations. Considering the heightened risk, it's crucial for customers to do two things.
IT vendor lock-in – should companies fight it or embrace it? Historically, IT procurement best practices have suggested companies should push back against vendor lock-in. Competition provides buy-side leverage. But the reality is IT vendor lock-in is virtually impossible to avoid in the current enterprise IT landscape – especially with mega vendors that power critical business operations.
As enterprise software costs spike, many IT procurement organizations are feeling new pressure from executive stakeholders to reassess and rein in spend. This is especially true for organizations that are also balancing transformation priorities. We’re frequently asked questions like: Where can we reduce IT spend without affecting “X” initiatives? How can we spend less without causing business or technical disruption? Are IT cost-cutting initiatives worth it in the long run?
As economic headwinds gained strength in 2022, many IT and procurement organizations mobilized to execute IT cost optimization exercises that would reduce spend, deliver hard-dollar savings, and establish a more efficient run rate for 2023 IT operations. Now, as we speed towards the second half of 2023, it’s clear these budgets are under attack from an unanticipated adversary: software license audits. And the cost risk is quite grave.
In 2022, NPI analyzed over $25 billion in IT purchases made by large enterprises. What does that data tell us about where we’re heading in 2023? Economically speaking, the trend of volatility that shaped much of 2022 is still defining the market as we enter the second quarter of 2023. During this time, most enterprise IT leaders have enacted a more conservative approach to IT spend management.
Akamai, widely known for its content delivery network (CDN) and security offerings, recently made a surprising announcement. The company is entering the world of cloud computing with the launch of Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform.
Recent news of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse has taken center stage and drowned out other significant moves in the market. One example is the $12.5 billion acquisition of Qualtrics by Silver Lake and CPP Investments. Qualtrics is a customer and employee experience management company that offers a cloud-based...
IT procurement leaders have always had a data issue. For years, the challenge was a lack of visibility into vendor pricing, licensing and use rights – and that’s still a major issue today. However, one could argue that leaders who are committed to strong enterprise IT procurement strategy are now drowning in data.
A change to Java licensing rules could have major cost implications for Oracle customers of all sizes. Oracle recently announced a new pricing model for Java SE subscriptions. The Employee for Java SE Universal Subscription replaces the Named User Plus Licensing and Processor licenses (user and server licensing, respectively) and is based on the customer’s number of employees.
The pressure for SAP customers to convert from ECC, its legacy ERP platform, to S/4HANA looms large in 2023. Despite the fact that mainstream support for ECC ends in 2027, most customers are struggling to make the switch. Recent data indicates 69% of ECC clients have not yet licensed S/4HANA. That’s a concerning number as the window to begin making changes grows surprisingly short.
While some anticipate PC and tablet sales to continue to decline in 2023, much of that decline is expected to stabilize by 2024. That could have something to do with growing adoption of tablet and tablet PC configurations as business-standard devices by enterprise customers. NPI data reflects this trend as we see more of our clients adopt (and refresh) these kinds of devices.
The Microsoft reseller ecosystem is large and complex – but, for many enterprise customers, resellers are an integral part of the Microsoft relationship. To better understand how the vendor does business with its largest accounts, it’s important to understand the differences between Direct and Indirect Microsoft Resellers.
It’s been an interesting year for Salesforce. For the second time in under three years, co-CEO Marc Benioff will part ways with his co-CEO. There appears to be internal strife around the company’s acquisition of Slack, the most expensive subscription software acquisition of all time. And perhaps most telling is the vendor’s revenue growth rate. According to the vendor’s recent quarterly earnings, revenue grew 14%
Microsoft is known for its stringent rules around licensing products in cloud and virtualized environments. It’s been the subject of complaint among enterprise customers as well as the crux of anticompetitive accusations in the EU. In response, Microsoft has announced more flexible licensing policies for some products over the last several months – including Microsoft Windows Server.
NPI observes a lot of mistakes in IT vendor price quotes. Over the years, these (mistakes) have ranged from inaccurate quantities and incorrect part numbers to things like “free” equipment or licensing that was never discussed. What do they all have in common? They typically benefit the vendor’s bottom line. Hand in hand with these instances are errors in tiered pricing.
When large companies ask us where they can make a meaningful impact on reducing IT spend, one area we advise them to focus on is their largest SaaS software deployments. They almost always reveal significant cost-saving opportunities. One great example is Microsoft 365. Companies are spending more on M365 than ever before for several reasons.
What steps can companies take during the SaaS contract negotiation process to improve negotiation outcomes? NPI’s SaaS cost optimization analysts share their suggestions.
As IT vendors acknowledge the complexity of customers’ digital transformation initiatives, many are engineering new products and solutions specifically designed to simplify and accelerate those projects. Enter SAP. In 2021, SAP launched RISE with SAP – or RWS for short. But like a lot of SAP offerings, it’s not easy to understand exactly what RWS is, its pros and cons, and who it’s best suited for.
It’s not uncommon for vendors to tie IT contract renewal price increases to the Consumer Price Index (CPI). But given current economic dynamics, does this really make sense?
Across the enterprise IT ecosystem, more and more vendors are passing on some of the burden of high inflationary costs to customers. In the past, a 1 to 3% rate hike was within Fair Market Value (FMV) standards in most cases. In 2022, the perception of “fair” looks more like 3 to 5% as vendors grow increasingly inflexible in their minimum price increases...
Sales teams for enterprise IT vendors have always had to be creative in order to make quotas. Meanwhile, customers are scrutinizing larger purchases as IT spend continues to climb year over year. That’s leading many to question the value of vendor’s sales propositions – including whether an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) makes sense.
We’ve written about SaaS cost management extensively on this blog in recent months. Why? Because companies are spending more on SaaS...a lot more. Gartner estimates SaaS spend will grow by 20% in 2022, and that estimate is conservative for many enterprise customers.
NPI and Procurement Foundry recently hosted a Topics in Technology Sourcing panel on Optimizing Licensing and Cost in Large Software Estates. Procurement executives from American Airlines and ADM as well as NPI’s own software licensing experts covered a lot of territory on how IT procurement can reduce cost and improve license management across their largest software deployments.
Much has been written about the concept of cloud cost management with a lot of it centered around workload planning and clearly defining requirements. While these things certainly important, the work doesn’t stop there. NPI explores 5 often overlooked activities you should be doing to keep cloud costs in check.
Avaya, a once multi-billion dollar cloud communications and collaboration company faces new fiscal hurdles after a debt refinancing plan ran aground. Now, only five years after a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and entry back into public markets, Avaya’s financial stability is in question again as investors fume at potentially being led astray.
SaaS spending has been on the upswing for decades. But it’s only recently that we’re seeing SaaS spend overtake traditional software investments. Now is the time for companies to make sure they have the tools and practices in place to eliminate SaaS overspending.
As supply chain issues persist across the IT world, shortages have started hitting a new area: cloud services. Recent reports show that capacity issues are affecting Microsoft Azure customers globally – from Washington State to Europe and beyond. More than two dozen Azure data centers are experiencing limited server capacity, and Microsoft expects capacity to remain limited until early 2023.
There has been a lot of debate about the phasing out of on-premise software in favor of SaaS. The overall consensus is something like this – on-premise is going the way of the residential landline. Sure, it will continue to exist and some will continue to use it (more than enterprise SaaS providers would have you believe). But the overall transition to SaaS is accelerating.
A number of big tech companies are increasing their focus on healthcare, including Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and others. Another big name on the list is Microsoft. Microsoft is no stranger to investing R&D dollars in healthcare solutions, but its latest result – Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare – is certainly its most ambitious.
Economic headwinds are putting pressure on most businesses in most industries – including tech companies. For customers with large software estates from certain enterprise vendors, the effect is a bit of a double whammy. Not only are IT costs rising, but the risk of a software license compliance audit has also become significantly greater.
Many large Salesforce customers struggle to identify opportunities for cost reduction in their estate as they prepare for their renewal negotiations. Optimizing Salesforce assets is often a cross-functional collaboration exercise. But many enterprises don’t have vendor management functions to assure that procurement, IT and business...
Over the last year, Microsoft has launched a new category of product to the market – the Cloud PC. In this article, we’ll discuss what Microsoft Cloud PC is, how it works, what makes it attractive, and how to determine if it’s a fit for your organization.
For the most part, NPI’s clients have good relationships with their IT vendors. Sure, some vendors are less pleasant to do business with than others. But, by and large, there is mutual respect – customers need their IT vendors to be successful and vice versa. Every now and then, however, an IT vendor goes rogue.
NPI is often asked “How much time before the end date of our current Salesforce contract term should we begin working on the next renewal?” The answer may surprise you – especially since many Salesforce customers wait until a few months, sometimes even weeks, before the renewal date to start thinking about it.
f you’re a customer of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, you’ve likely heard of Oracle’s Universal Credits subscription model. Oracle introduced it back in 2017 to better compete with increasingly flexible consumption and pricing options offered by IaaS and PaaS leaders like AWS.
Here’s a comment we heard recently from a NPI client executive at a Fortune 500 Health and Life Sciences company after they’d just finished a Salesforce renewal negotiation: “We go through all this pain to sign the agreement and I wake up the next morning and have no idea what I paid for.”
Last week, all eyes were on the Masters Tournament as legends and legends in the making competed for the coveted Green Jacket. But what on earth does that have to do with IT procurement? Here’s what NPI CEO Jon Winsett had to say over on LinkedIn...
Inflationary pricing, supply chain challenges and increased labor rates has made strategic IT sourcing more important than ever. Developing the right strategy is critical to protecting your IT budget and heading off any disruptions to your company’s purchasing plans.
Environmental, Social, Governance – ESG for short – has changed how many investors and companies assess risk and opportunity as they invest in and fortify supply chains. As any procurement team will tell you, these non-financial indicators have become increasingly important in recent years. Initially, ESG compliance and evaluation was a qualitative analysis focused on unearthing risks...
Whether you’re pondering a new purchase or have a renewal on the horizon, there are changes to LinkedIn Sales Navigator pricing that you should be aware of. For the uninitiated, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn several years ago – but that doesn’t mean Sales Navigator is a standard part of Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement. To the contrary, actually...
Procurement could learn a thing or two from Inventing Anna. Not the imposter bit, of course. But something about what’s made the story so interesting to so many people. If you’ve been keeping your ear to the ground, you’ve probably noticed a handful of new terms pop up in procurement circles. One is “world-class outcomes.” It’s a world-class result as compared to peer purchases in the market. Noble for sure, and viable for many organizations. But “world-class” anything doesn’t just happen...
Late last year, Microsoft “rebranded” its Workplace Analytics product. The new product name is Microsoft Viva Insights and it aims to pick up where Workplace Analytics left off – or, depending on how you look at it, fell down. One obvious change is the pricing. There was a price reduction of about 43% with the introduction of Viva Insights. In addition to the rebranding, Microsoft has somewhat changed the messaging...
As we approach the end of Oracle’s fiscal year (May 31st), many customers may find themselves on the receiving end of a Java license audit. There appears to be a concerted effort on behalf of Oracle to increase pressure on clients to spend more on Java – or face the consequences.
There are almost always opportunities to save on an IT renewal, but it calls for a bit of forensic analysis to reveal your options. Preparation is key – and it needs to begin months before the expiration of your current term! Questions to ask and data points to collect include...
Late last December, as most folks settled into the holidays and a slow business news cycle, Oracle spiced things up. It announced the acquisition of medical-records systems provider Cerner Corp. for $28.3 billion. An Oracle Cerner acquisition was – and is – big news that deserves revisiting. Cerner is among the top EHR vendors in the world, competing with market leader Epic Systems, Allscripts and a handful of...
As the crisis in Ukraine unfolds, we’re reminded of the connectedness of the global economy and how it impacts all facets of business – including IT and the IT supply chain. How will this conflict impact IT costs and what can companies do to mitigate and prepare? NPI’s experts weigh in.
Before smartphones and text were a thing, there were pagers – a cute little box that sent alphanumeric message alerts. While pagers are (for the most part) an outdated artifact, PagerDuty has added panache and modernization to the concept. It provides a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments that has attracted customers like SAP, Zoom, Yelp and others. As its popularity has grown, PagerDuty pricing has taken some twists and turns...
New technologies like NFC and EMV chips are helping to drive many POS upgrades. Mobile can require a complete and potentially expensive change to current systems. Integrating a mPOS system that can also be used for inventory management can be a huge benefit, but also add to software costs. With a potential move to mPOS, there may still be use cases to implement for customers that want to pay in cash...
Cisco’s latest price increase is significant. While the vendor claims the hike to be an “average” of 10% across its entire portfolio, the reality is most offerings will cost 15 to 25% more. In this post, we discuss three things customers can do to offset the financial impact of these changes.
Despite customers demanding easier ways to engage and source with software providers, there are some vendors that are holding the line on the status quo. Complexity continues to rule the day for many software sourcing transactions, and the Workday renewal is an excellent example of this. Years ago, when NPI began seeing Workday renewals and new purchases on a regular basis, transactions were relatively easy to evaluate...
As the pandemic continues to dominate headlines and every aspect of our lives, the technology industry continues to adapt. Similar to manufacturing supply chains, the global supply chain for technology professional services has been impacted. We now find ourselves amid a global talent shortage due to various factors like the Great Resignation and higher demand...
Earlier this month, I wrote a blog about Microsoft’s Power BI Premium Capacity licenses, which is a good way to share dashboards and reports throughout the enterprise. This month, though, I’d like to briefly review the Power BI Premium Per User licenses. As you probably know, Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft and part of the Microsoft Power Platform. It aims to provide...
Overpaying for enterprise software, cloud infrastructure, hardware and IT services is all too common. Unfortunately, inconsistencies in market pricing can make it difficult for buyers to determine whether a vendor’s pricing is within fair market value range. Below, we dive into the importance of assessing fair market value pricing for enterprise IT purchases, as well as a few tips to consider before your next transaction...
Microsoft’s latest Office 365 price increase will mean higher costs for many of the vendor’s enterprise customers. If you’re wondering if the O365 price increase will impact your spend, here is what you need to know...
As adoption of enterprise-scale cloud services has become commonplace, so have the challenges associated with managing them. Decades in, the evolution is still underway with many companies adopting a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) and, more recently, the establishment of FinOps. But before we delve into what FinOps is and why it is important, let’s review...
In a crowded business intelligence solution marketplace, few solutions match the popularity (and revenue) of Microsoft’s Power BI. More than 250,000 organizations use Power BI, including 97 percent of the Fortune 500. Over the years, the offering has evolved quite a bit – most recently with the introduction of Power BI Premium capacity licenses. For many customers, these...
It’s impossible to ignore the seemingly ubiquitous nature of the cloud and the services it now renders to businesses of all sizes all over the globe. But the scale of adoption within these businesses varies greatly (along with cloud costs) – especially when it comes to the enterprise sector...
As a spend category, IT is undergoing its own transformation and pressure on procurement teams is increasing. Is it an exciting time to be in IT procurement? You bet. But the pressure and stakes are high. As the discipline undergoes changes, new resources and approaches will be critical to sourcing IT effectively...
As ServiceNow becomes more entrenched in enterprises’ IT ecosystems, its product portfolio becomes more complicated. With each biannual release comes new subscriptions with enhanced capabilities, and changes to existing offerings. The latest example is the ServiceNow ITSM Enterprise offering...
Volume purchasing programs can be an attractive way for enterprises to do business with their largest IT vendors – including the Cisco Enterprise Agreement. Large customers with significant levels of Cisco spend may be inclined to default to an EA to help streamline purchasing. But spend size, while certainly important, should not be the only determining factor...
It’s that time of year again, where IT and IT procurement teams find themselves eyeballs-deep in a flurry of software renewals. With fiscal year-ends approaching for dozens of enterprise IT vendors, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Heck, considering all of the nuances of each software renewal, it’s difficult not to.
Remember when wireless service providers like AT&T and Verizon offered unlimited plans? And then they tried to get rid of them and substitute pooled-data plans instead? Today, we’ve come full circle. Providers are re-introducing unlimited plans to the market, which gives rise to a few questions. Why did that happen?
Negotiation leverage isn’t always easy to come by in IT buying – especially for more routine “auto-pilot” transactions like renewals. A few recent purchase optimizations we helped clients with got us thinking about how we achieved savings despite low leverage. These were mainly renewal events...
Shifting clients from an on-premise license model to cloud subscriptions has been a priority for many software publishers over the last few years, and Citrix Systems is no exception. Historically, Citrix provided its desktop and application virtualization platforms through perpetual licensing and renewable maintenance. However...
Enterprise IT vendors tend to have vast partner ecosystems and aggressive strategies to monetize those relationships. One example is the “marketplace” – a single point of entry where customers can easily purchase from multiple solution providers. The marketplaces hosted by Google Cloud and AWS continue to grow and have an influential effect across the broader cloud provider landscape...
A great deal has been written on the subject of how to manage a software audit. You can find easy-to-follow, multi-step software audit management programs that align neatly with a logical workflow – all claiming to lead followers towards a successful conclusion with minimal findings and penalties levied. The issue, of course, is...
AI – along with machine learning and automation – has been a part of the enterprise IT lexicon for some time. However, recent innovations and tailwinds from the pandemic have accelerated their adoption. That’s led to greater focus on cost control. Many companies are looking for ways to keep AI pricing and costs in check as they embark on new AI-related projects and expand those that are delivering value...
ERP implementations remain one of the most complex and expensive IT projects for large enterprises. A recent report from Software Path found the average budget per user for an ERP project to be $8,265. Other data suggests ERP implementation costs for large enterprises start at $1M to $10M and up to 200 percent of license fees, and go up from there.
Project Portfolio Management or PPM software has always been a mainstay of enterprise IT. Interestingly, pricing for these solutions is on the rise according to pricing data NPI tracks across clients of that are $1 billion or more in turnover. It seems what was once a minor spend concern is steadily becoming a major recurring annual investment in many cases...
As companies adapt their IT ecosystems to changing business requirements, the cost of change is becoming harder to gauge. More specifically, it’s becoming harder to determine if companies are paying a fair price for these changes. It’s worth revisiting certain IT budgeting best practices that govern this aspect of IT sourcing...
Several vendors selling in today’s marketplace would have buyers believe that “the quote” has gone the way of the dinosaur, or at the very least is heading towards extinction. But the IT vendor quote is far from dead. In fact, it’s never been more important...