French Professional Services. Twenty five percent saved on the IBM ELA.

A French global professional services company operating in more than thirty countries with roughly one hundred and fifty thousand employees renewed its IBM Enterprise License Agreement. Its estate covers Db2, WebSphere, MQ and Cognos.

An IBM ELA bundles products at a single price. The bundle is convenient, and it is also where products nobody uses quietly become products you renew.

The review cut twenty five percent from the agreement.

The customer profile

One hundred and fifty thousand employees across more than thirty countries, delivering professional services with a technology estate that supports both internal operations and client delivery.

Professional services estates churn. Environments are built for engagements, run for their duration, and retired, which makes both deployment and entitlement moving targets.

The opening position

IBM's renewal position carried the existing bundle forward with an uplift, priced against the agreement rather than against measured deployment.

A bundle renewed as a bundle is never examined product by product, which is precisely the property that makes it comfortable for the vendor.

The approach

We unbundled the agreement on paper and priced each product against measured use.

That exercise separated three groups: products genuinely central to operations, products used by a fraction of the estate, and products nobody had deployed in years but which had renewed automatically inside the bundle.

We then reconstructed entitlement across the group, verified ILMT coverage for the sub capacity position, and tested the bundle price against the sum of the parts.

The eleven moves

1. Reconstruct entitlement from every source. Passport Advantage agreements, individual purchases and anything inherited.
2. Verify ILMT coverage host by host. Sub capacity is a reporting entitlement, not a pricing one.
3. Recover retained reports across the period. The reports are the evidence.
4. Reconcile PVU and VPC separately. Two metrics, two counts, no blending.
5. Identify shelfware by cause. Unassigned, unused and structurally stranded need different remedies.
6. Rebuild deployment from your own systems. Virtualisation platform, configuration records and change history.
7. Match products to genuine business need. Not to what a bundle happened to include.
8. Reconcile support against live deployment. Retired capacity should not carry maintenance.
9. Negotiate across the whole estate. Not product by product, which is how IBM prefers it.
10. Diary every termination window. They are narrow and missing one costs a full year.
11. Re verify quarterly. Coverage and deployment both decay between reviews.

The commercial outcome

• Saving. Twenty five percent against the IBM ELA renewal position.
• Bundle. Unbundled and priced product by product against measured use.
• Shelfware. Products carried inside the bundle for years without deployment, removed.
• Entitlement. Reconstructed across a thirty country group.
• Sub capacity. Coverage verified and evidenced.

Test every bundle against the sum of its parts. If the bundle does not win on that comparison, it is not a discount, it is a delivery mechanism for products you would not have bought separately.

How we engage

• IBM scoping. A six week engagement that reconstructs entitlement, verifies ILMT coverage host by host, and reconciles deployment against what is owned. IBM services practice.
• IBM licensing assessment. The full internal assessment across Db2, WebSphere, MQ and Cognos, separating shelfware by cause. IBM licensing assessment.
• IBM ELA renewal. We unbundle the agreement on paper and price it against measured use before the renewal opens. IBM ELA renewal strategy.
• Vendor Shield. Always on cover across IBM and the wider software estate. Vendor Shield.
• Run the numbers. The software spend assessment sizes your IBM position against what is actually deployed.