According to a poll of economists recently conducted by Reuters, it would take two or more years for euro zone GDP to reach pre-COVID-19 levels. That means company revenues will remain moderate and cost cuts will need to go deep into budgets.
There is one category that all companies have, but few consider when it comes to saving money: software.
License Review
When it comes to cutting costs with software, licensing enterprise systems may be an area worth checking. Briefly: software systems developed by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and others have complex licensing agreements. One example: licenses are sometimes issued not per computer, or processor, but sometimes per cores of the processor, and with a multiplicator factor.
Sellers regularly perform audits at partner companies, and if the result shows that the users accessed features that were not licensed, the fine can result in a shocking amount.
On the other hand, the company may be paying license fees for features that employees never use, which means unnecessary costs.
These issues can be handled through Software Asset Management (SAM). Sándor Zsoldos, CEO of Budapest-based IPR-Insights License Consulting explains how it works.
“We can reorganize the license structure set up 10-20 years ago at a company, assign the necessary license to the corresponding user, find the cheapest license for him or her. Thus we may find a lot of unused licenses in the company, which can be used for many goals, for example, to sell on the second-hand software market or exchange them for a new module.”
So, is it better to hire a SAM manager, or outsource this area?
“There are many cases in which it is worth outsourcing, as we are talking about many products of many vendors. One or two employees will never be able to complete the tasks of a consulting firm with 35 specialists, each of them having extensive knowledge about a specific vendor,” Zsoldos says. “So, yes, the administrative tasks are worth outsourcing. We can prepare decisions, offer the necessary information, but the CIO or the CEO has the responsibility to decide what and how he or she will buy; the decision is ultimately his or hers,” Zsoldos says.
Read the full story in the Special Report of Budapest Business Journal (BBJ).
