Traditional reselling – The tip of the iceberg

To say that business — and specifically, the Digital Supply Chain (DSC) — has been upended in 2020 would be an understatement. Due to the pandemic, organizations have had to pivot, and today most are working remotely. This has forced companies to accelerate their digitization and become cloud-ready. Traditional procurement and vendor management processes no longer cut it when it comes to meeting the needs of an organization’s rapid digital transformation – a typically years-long process that has been compressed into months.

Along with rapid digital transformation is the fact that it’s necessary to move away from the traditional, classic reselling model. This model is essentially transactional, doesn’t include dedicated services to improve value to the customer, and can lead to an inconsistent quality of services. This type of selling is considered “Level 1” on SoftwareOne’s Digital Supply Chain “Iceberg” model for cost optimization. However, there’s much more than just the tip of the iceberg to achieve success with a digital supply chain — it requires all levels of interaction and innovative solutions. Let’s break down each level of SoftwareOne’s Iceberg model down further to uncover more insights.

Level 2 — One supplier model

Level 2 of SoftwareOne’s Iceberg model essentially entails supply consolidation. Specifically, improved process and cost savings via integration and defined SLAs, as well as the elimination of inefficient and obsolete RFX processes.

Whereas customers used to engage with us through an RFX at one point in time to request a quote, that model has become inefficient and ineffective. As an alternative, we're moving to DSC and giving that up-front commercial value to you, the customer, meaning that you won't have to run an inefficient back-end process any longer. Instead, you will get the best commercial outcome and pricing, plus an efficient procurement model without any of the prior ineffective use of time and resources.

Level 3 — One reporting

Level 3 of the model revolves around One Reporting. One Reporting cuts down on multi-step processes and hands you back time that can better be spent continuing to focus on your core business needs. Rather than having to go to multiple sources to receive renewal information for a particular publisher, everything is available right through us here at SoftwareOne. All historical reporting is completed through us as well. Essentially, everything goes through a single channel, and we provide users with full transparency, aggregation, and sanitization of data. By having just one dashboard to manage, you will gain these time efficiencies like never before.

Level 4 — Contract aggregation and consolidation

Next in the model is Level 4, which focuses on economies of scale and improved commercial optimization by consolidating contracts. When a customer is at Level 4, they have access to a full data source. At this level, you can consider — based on historical trends — a series of critical questions:

• Should you or should you not be moving to full-enterprise agreements?
• Should you be consolidating similar disparate publishers into a single publisher?
• What can you do to drive ongoing optimization?

The answer to these questions comes through a partnership with SoftwareOne and the strong data we can provide. Once we've provided a customer with the right data, they are ready to drive contract consolidation.

Level 5 — Improved renewal efficiencies

At this level, we eliminate unnecessary renewals and reinstatement fees by delivering renewal efficiencies through our Renewal Manager:

1. SoftwareOne will show you what you should and should not renew, and provide you with a graphical format to reveal what renewals are required.
2. If you have renewals that need to be completed, we will provide you with data around the potential aggregation and consolidation opportunities, insight on the co-termination options, and teach you how to negotiate down or optimize renewals.
3. We make sure you remain compliant. If you do need to renew, we ensure you renew on time so you don't have to pay a reinstatement fee to get back on support for something that has lapsed in payment. You must remain compliant at all times. If you don't renew or don't reinstate and you continue to use the software, then you're going to get hit with audit fees.

It’s important to note that all of this is not just a verbal commitment that we're making to our customers. We have a complete delivery model built-in which drives deep analytics and insights, which is the last step in the iceberg model: Level 6.

Level 6 — Data analytics and data enrichment

Last but certainly not least is Level 6, where we provide enhanced data to allow entitlement grade reporting, enabling deep technology optimization via an SLM tool. We've built a framework around data analytics on the back end so everything that has to be processed can be done so efficiently, and we have a team that reviews the CRM data. This team works hard to ensure that it's fit for the Renewal Manager, and that everything is then reflected in PyraCloud. Lastly, we make sure PyraCloud is giving the right information to customers. We also have publisher experts who make optimization recommendations through the QBR, which are also funneled right to you.

Also included in this level is data entitlement and enrichment. The customers that we're transacting with may or may not have a Software Lifecycle Management (SLM) tool in place. With an SLM consultant on demand, we are able to commit to future-proofing the data. The idea is to natively export and migrate the data into an SLM tool that can track entitlement, inventory, and consumption. Then, based on this comparison, we will be able to tell you such things as whether or not you're in compliance or whether you can optimize or consolidate.

It is important that the entitlement data has a consultant with competency across technology and commercial transformations in order to interpret the data and properly upload it into the SLM tool. Therefore at SoftwareOne we’ve put that intelligence and enrichment into our procurement data. The result? If you have an SLM tool, you can carry out native migration, eliminating a lot of the hard work up front.

What if you don't have an SLM tool? No problem. Since we've future-proofed this data, we can start advising and consulting with you right away. We are here to be your trusted advisor so you can spend more time improving your software asset management (SAM) maturity.

At this level, it is also a good time to look at the tools you have in the market and realize the value of an SLM tool. What we’ve found is that customers typically buy the tool, try and implement it, and perhaps don't implement it correctly — or don't input the right data — and really struggle with it. Now, what we know moving forward is the time to value for an SLM tool, thorough optimization, and deep savings come from having good entitlement data.