Discounts and negotiations are good but don’t compromise on technology. Optimize on what you can buy from where you buy, says Mayank Srivastava, Founder & CEO, Silver Leaf Solutions Pvt Ltd.
While addressing a technology presentation titled “Software Licensing Cost Optimization Advisory Services” at 4th BFSI CTO Summit, Mumbai, Srivastava spoke on how a customer can optimize his spend on software licenses.
Excerpts of his address:
Silver Leaf was founded in 2015 and since then it’s been about four years of journey. We expanded to five continents and we’ve tried to build a very strong focus on software licensing and asset management.
We are the only company that can help you save a lot of costs that you can use to buy all the products.
Our vision is to try to become the number one global IT cost Optimisation Company. Our mission is typically to provide research-based independent software licensing software asset management on software procurement advisory services that will help you save about 10 to 12 percent in annual costs.
According to IDC, the software license complexities is so high that organizations spend about close to 5 to 20% of their budgets only to manage the complexity around licensing. According to Gartner, the entire business of enterprise software licenses is estimated to be about 420 billion dollars is growing at about eight and a half to nine percent CAGR.
Similarly out of this overall market of 420 billion dollars 75 to 80 billion dollars is the annual contractual market taken by the top five publishers whether it’s Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Amazon, Salesforce, they typically occupy and signup seventy-five to eighty billion dollars of contracts on a yearly basis.
Gartner typically says software licensing optimization can definitely lead up to savings of about 30% on all such contracts. Over the next 12 months, it is estimated that most organizations across the globe will typically overspend on 75% of the spends that they do across all of IT.
These are figures and facts that’s been said by Gartner IDC and many such forums across multiple platforms globally which is where we thought of this vision. We can join together and probably become your partners or extended trusted advisors to be able to help you advance even cost. Some of the challenges that customers face are, face-first licensing, an extremely complicated subject.
There are multiple reports available on the topic for e.g a 430-page document of Microsoft, 244-page document of SAP, 323-page document of Oracle but nobody reads them. Neither the sales guys read nor the partner reads it.
We have built a bread and butter business on reading each and every product use, program contract laws of all such licensing contracts that we sign across the globe.
The reason why we expanded globally is not because those markets are attractive; it is because of the fact that the contracts are customized in a different manner in a different geography.
The pricing arbitrage is different exceptions given to different customers. Whatever happens in our vertical India, happens differently in Europe and therefore we wanted to get that knowledge because which we opened up centres all over the globe. Today, we have understanding access to all typical customizations exceptions and grants which are given by these companies and software manufacturers to all large customers.
Discounts and negotiations are good but don’t compromise on technology. Optimize on what you can buy from where you buy.
We don’t have a single sales guy in our team because we don’t need one we just need people who are very strong and core.
Who understand technology across platforms and we need people who understand licensing and pricing and contracts as well.
