Kuwait National Petroleum. One point three million dollars saved annually on IBM licensing.

Kuwait National Petroleum Company is one of the largest oil refining companies in the Middle East, with roughly six thousand employees across multiple refining sites. Its IBM estate covers Db2, WebSphere and the surrounding middleware.

Refining operations run systems that cannot stop, and that requirement shapes how capacity is provisioned. Provisioned capacity is what gets licensed.

The assessment saved one point three million dollars annually, which compounds across every year of the agreement.

The customer profile

Around six thousand employees across multiple refining sites, running process control adjacent systems, logistics and corporate applications.

Site based operations duplicate capacity for local resilience, because a refinery cannot depend on a connection to a central data centre for systems that matter.

That duplication is often necessary and is rarely reviewed once it is in place.

The opening position

IBM's position priced the estate at provisioned capacity, with sub capacity applied only where reporting evidence supported it, and support renewed across the accumulated history.

ILMT coverage was partial, which meant a share of the estate defaulted to full capacity pricing on hosts where sub capacity would have applied.

The approach

Coverage first. We established which hosts had continuous ILMT reporting and recovered the retained reports for the period.

Then entitlement, reconstructed from every source including purchases made per site rather than centrally.

Then deployment, measured against provisioning site by site, which separated capacity genuinely required for operational resilience from capacity that had simply never been revisited.

Because the annual saving recurs, the value here compounds in a way a one off renewal reduction does not.

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. One point three million dollars annually, recurring across the agreement.
• Sub capacity. Restored on hosts where coverage could be evidenced.
• Entitlement. Reconstructed including site level purchases made outside the central record.
• Provisioning. Operational resilience separated from unreviewed headroom.
• Governance. Coverage verification built into the site build process.

An annual saving is worth more than a one off reduction of the same size, because it recurs for as long as the discipline holds. That makes the governance step the valuable one.

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.