I just recently spent time at the Gartner Symposium / ITXpo in Orlando Florida. While there I spoke with several C-level executives as well as some IT engineering people and what I learned is that everyone has the same basic goals but are so busy trying to accomplish them that even the simplest activities may never get accomplished. What do I mean by that you may ask? Have you ever heard “can’t see the forest for the trees” or how about, “It’s hard to remember your job was to drain the swamp when you are up to your neck in alligators.” As a former CIO I remember this well. The CFO is saying you need to reduce spending and the CEO is saying make it secure, simple to use and with 100% uptime. Often times, I would get in the rut with my team focusing on how to make it more secure and how to make sure it never fails, all while trying to support a large user population that doesn’t understand why they have to have a login at all. I would spend time analyzing my budget and would decide whether or not the things that had been planned or renewed were actually being used. After managing my budget and questioning everything, I would pay the renewal. With every bill, purchase, and budget verifying the information was “too much”, so the easier path to take was just to pay it. Eventually, the vendors would try and sell me on cost-saving initiatives. I knew this is exactly what I should look into and invest in, but I also knew that with my busy lifestyle and workload the inevitable approval process was something I did not budget for.
At the end of the day, when you are tired and ready to go home it is just easier to pay the bill and leave things as they are. Pushing it off to the next year was always the plan. Basically, as long as you are keeping things running and not going over budget then you are doing a great job… but wait, the alligators are still in the swamp! From the C-level perspective, all is status quo but still, the CFO wants to reduce the budget. So, where do you come up with those dollars?
The first exercise is to determine the little things that can go away by canceling a subscription here and there. Then you look at the rest of your spend and determine the top five. Then walks in, Oracle. So you look at your renewals – if you have time to read all of the contracts and orders and renewals that often term at different times of the year. You determine that there are items on there that are not needed and you tell your support representative that you want to cancel items and specifically stop paying for the items you are no longer using. The typical response ends up sounding like if you cancel a part of a renewal then everything on that renewal gets repriced. Then those big discounts you were able to negotiate when you bought them could potentially go away. So you get mad and go look for something else to reduce. Maybe at this point, you bring in a firm like us, SLC, and then you are told that you can make the reductions without a re-price and might even find more that can be done. So, you schedule the meeting and look at the possibilities. Then.. fear sets in.. the biggest alligator in the swamp is sleeping and content, as long as you keep feeding it, but what happens when you start feeding it less and it wakes up and becomes hungry?
This is a fear we often hear. We have even had a procurement individual tell us they would rather pay the $3 million we could save them, than deal with Oracle coming in to find out how to get it back.
The summary of these things is that 1. You don’t have time. 2. You don’t have money for UN-budgeted activities. 3. You are afraid it will cause risk, exposure and more work. I know this and have felt it but when I stepped out of the swamp and said “ENOUGH!!” I took a deep breath and started to figure this out. Could I hire someone to remove the alligators for me? Of course, you could and probably with little effort from your team. Could removing the alligators have an impact? YES! The fewer alligators to feed then the more you have left over. Lastly, can I afford this? Again YES! When done properly, the reductions create the abundance and what you pay for the removal service basically comes out of dollars already budgeted to feed the alligators so what you end up with is a money left over and you still paid for the service. What about that fear of waking the giant? If done properly the service will look at all the contracts, all the environments and all of the usage and map it out for an effective licensing position so the if the giant comes knocking, you have the information to provide them showing compliance.
The struggle is real and you are not alone. Call us so we can talk more about getting you in the best position possible, with the least risk and the highest reward. Take that breath and realize, you can’t always do it alone! SLC has been helping companies with their Oracle licensing for over 15 years, which means we have been around the longest. Our experience and the fact that we continue to work with licensing issues every day, allows us to confidently claim ourselves as your best option.
