SoftwareOne case study

North American bank achieves big savings with new visibility into IT assets

A North American bank expects to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and reduce risk after SoftwareOne helped to optimise its ServiceNow platform and gain visibility into its IT environment.

A bank that serves individuals and businesses across North America knew it wasn’t using its ServiceNow platform effectively to manage its vast landscape of software and hardware assets. The data that powered its ServiceNow capabilities was inaccurate or incomplete, leaving the bank with poor visibility into its systems, resource consumption, costs and risks. So it turned to SoftwareOne for help.

USD 650K
potential savings in Microsoft licensing costs and unused Atlassian Confluence subscriptions identified
Centralised visibility
into software, hardware, licensing terms and software support status
Automatically reclaiming
unused Atlassian Confluence subscriptions after 60–90 days

Client: North American bank
Industry: Finance
Services: IT Asset Management Assessment Services

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Seeking a better ServiceNow foundation

With several thousand employees across the country, the bank uses a wide array of applications, with many thousands of licences with different software publishers, contract terms and end-user licensing agreements. With no centralised system for managing these assets, it had no way of knowing whether it was overpaying for software or complying with contracts, putting it at risk of audits and steep fines from software publishers. The aim of the collaboration with SoftwareOne was to improve practices in the areas of contract management, software asset management (SAM), hardware asset management (HAM), configuration management database (CMDB) and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (Microsoft SCCM).

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Assessing the bank’s ITSM maturity

SoftwareOne began by conducting a thorough assessment of the bank’s ServiceNow platform to understand its level of information technology service management (ITSM) maturity. The assessment, which took about eight weeks to complete, sought to understand the bank’s current systems in light of its future goals, using that to identify areas for improvement.

With the findings from that assessment in hand, SoftwareOne then organised a series of requirements and integrations workshops with key stakeholders across the organisation. These helped to further refine understanding of current SAM processes and pain points, as well as the technical and functional steps that would be needed to achieve the bank’s goals. SoftwareOne used the insights from these workshops to create a roadmap for implementation.

After the roadmap was approved, SoftwareOne began working with the bank to help it implement the recommendations. One of the first steps focused on discovery of software and hardware assets across the business, using that information to auto-populate the ServiceNow CMDB. Building a solid CMDB foundation would then make it possible to improve the bank’s other application practices and ServiceNow tools. At the same time, SoftwareOne also worked to develop the internal resources the bank needed to use ServiceNow effectively. This included extensive training of people who would be using and managing the ServiceNow platform.

SoftwareOne then guided the bank on implementing the recommended improvements to SAM and HAM processes and contract management. This included assisting with the resolution of issues identified with ServiceNow’s SAM Publisher Pack for Microsoft – the most significant of which was the identification of major compliance issues during the discovery phase. Other issues identified during this phase included an oversubscription for Atlassian Confluence – where the bank was not using more than 60% of the licences it had paid for – and hundreds of software products that had reached the end of support, end of extended support or end of life.

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SoftwareOne's recommendations included:

ServiceNow SAM Publisher Pack for Microsoft: Review to adjust installations and clustered environment to comply with licensing requirements and reduce true-up cost risks.
Atlassian Confluence: Create rules to automatically reclaim unused subscriptions after 60–90 days and consider a true-down at next renewal.
End-of-support/end-of-life products: Automate monitoring for products approaching end of support, end of extended support and end of life, with cyber review to determine decommissioning or sustainment strategies for each.

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Achieving best practices in SAM

SoftwareOne’s recommendations provided the bank with improved data insights to help it reduce software consumption and avoid the need to pay vendors for licensing true-up costs.

By right-sizing its use of ServiceNow’s SAM Publisher Pack for Microsoft and automatically reclaiming unused Atlassian Confluence subscriptions after 60–90 days, the bank has the potential to avoid more than USD 650K in costs. SoftwareOne also advised the bank to consider a true-down of its licensing requirements during the next renewal negotiations for Atlassian Confluence. The bank has also added monitoring for products at end of support, end of extended support or end of life, so it can decide whether to decommission or sustain those to reduce security risks.

With a centralised system for viewing and managing hardware and software, the bank now has visibility into all of the resources it is using, as well as into the status of licences for all applications. Automation also helps to reduce the time to analyse consumption, review requests for new hardware or decommissioning and optimise its infrastructure.

“SoftwareOne was an excellent partner that enabled us to implement service,” says the bank’s vice president of technology enablement. “Now, our SAM Pro and SAM best practices are excellent. I would absolutely recommend them and I’m thankful for all they have done in support of our objectives.”

North American bank achieves big savings with new visibility into IT assets

USD 650K

Centralised visibility

Automatically reclaiming

Seeking a better ServiceNow foundation

Assessing the bank’s ITSM maturity

Could you benefit from a similar service?

Could you benefit from a similar service?

ITAM Assessment

Achieving best practices in SAM

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