Large North Carolina city avoids $40M financial setback by leveraging ITAM services

SHI performs baseline assessments for four major software publishers and lowers compliance risk.

Challenge:

A large North Carolina city with more than two dozen different utilities and public services departments, each with their own IT processes, needed to streamline their operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and eliminate inefficiencies. After partnering with SHI, the city discovered something more – a broad discrepancy in software licensing, purchasing, and usage.

Solution:

One of the customer’s first mandates was to investigate the city’s license compliance position, revamping their IT strategy for all 24 departments and services. SHI’s initial solution included performing ITAM Baseline Assessments for the city’s four major software publishers: Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware.

Utilizing JDisc, a zero-footprint inventory tool, as well as the city’s purchase records, SHI completed a full network discovery and IT inventory collection for approximately 3,500 devices. Our experts scanned all operating systems, hardware, software, IP Networks, Windows domains, and Active Directory installations, analyzing the city’s license reports and comparing them against deployments to deliver a complete gap analysis and optimization report. As a result, SHI identified $45 million in potential financial exposure and presented a plan to mitigate this risk.

As part of the baseline assessment, SHI also conducted an ITAM Maturity Assessment, which included a workshop and interviews with key stakeholders to evaluate the city's existing ITAM processes, uncover deficiencies and shortcomings, and redesign more efficient and streamlined future policies and processes.

To ensure the city maintained ongoing compliance and audit readiness, SHI immediately began developing an ITAM Managed Service that included the management of multiple publishers, customized reporting, and a dedicated ITAM team. In the end, SHI helped the customer avoid an astonishing $40 million in initial compliance risk!

Outcome:

In just three short months, SHI helped the customer reduce their compliance bill down to $5 million, minimizing their financial risk, while helping consolidate the city’s numerous departments’ disparate software purchasing processes.

SHI continues to help the city with the acquisition and deployment of three traditional and three hyper-converged storage platforms.