Ottakringer toasts to the success of SoftwareOne optimization

Why SoftwareOne?

This was Ottakringer Group’s first project with SoftwareOne. The beverages group considered other advisories but selected SoftwareOne based on its expertise, methodology, and the happy mix of SoftwareOne’s analytic and customer-oriented working approach. One of the main challenges of the validation project was the restricted timeframe, and it, therefore, required a vendor that would go the extra mile. Ottakringer’s Head of IT had the gut feeling that SoftwareOne would be the type of partner that was supportive of its clients. “And in this, I was not mistaken,” he says. “SoftwareOne proved consistently that it was on our side. This was key to our successful collaboration.”

Ottakringer beverage group achieves double-digit percentage savings on Microsoft Licensing

The Austrian beverages group Ottakringer Getränke AG employs almost 800 people, of whom roughly 600 use Microsoft 365. In the closing weeks of 2022, with its Microsoft EA up for renewal at the end of Q1 the following year, the Vienna-based business hired SoftwareOne to assess and optimize its licensing position.

There was no suspicion that it was in any way incompliant with the terms of the existing Microsoft EA. “We did not engage based on the idea that we had any exposure in terms of compliance,” explains Antonius Bruckschwaiger, the Group CIO, “but we had the will to understand our potential to improve, and to get a second opinion with regards to the fairly fragmented structure of our Microsoft product portfolio.”

This opinion was solicited from SoftwareOne, whom Bruckschwaiger had first encountered at a Data Forum in Vienna months earlier. “We looked at other vendors but we choose SoftwareOne because we had the best overall impression that there was a good combination of knowledge and expertise, and also customer orientation.”

There was something else too: a gut feeling that SoftwareOne would prove a supportive partner, willing to go the extra mile to bring home a challenging project.

“And in this, we were not mistaken,” says Bruckschwaiger. “I found it a very good partnership and a very reliable and robust consulting that we received on schedule within a fairly challenging timetable, obviously driven by the renewal timeline which was tight.”

The agreement with SoftwareOne was signed in Q4 of 2022 and the job of preparing for the April 1 Enterprise Agreement deadline commenced in the new year.

Streamlining for efficiency: how SoftwareOne helped Ottakringer rethink its Microsoft product portfolio

“The aim of the assessment was a combination of cost avoidance and efficiency,” says Bruckschwaiger. “We were looking at providing the right structure of products to our staff and to optimize the design of Microsoft features provisioned to the right people in the right format.”

The SoftwareOne assessment cut licensing costs in two ways.

Prior to the SCA, Ottakringer employees were on Microsoft’s premium E5 Plan; SoftwareOne’s analysis revealed that the more cost-effective E3 license subscription was more than adequate to its needs.

The second plank of the project related to security because Ottakringer deployed a set of security solutions to cover different areas such as endpoint protection, mail protection, URL, and so on.

“We wanted to see to what extent we should stick to the initial set of security-oriented software solutions,” explains Bruckschwaiger. “And we took SoftwareOne’s advice of picking up more of the Microsoft security features, especially for endpoint security. Shifting from non-Microsoft to Microsoft simplified our vendor landscape and cut costs because some of the security features were part of the Microsoft package.”