Menu
Menu
We got into this business because we saw there was a lot of confusion as companies struggled to simultaneously understand what was in their software licensing environment as they tried to keep the software vendors from taking their entire software budget in one fell swoop.
How do you know what is in your software licensing environment? How do you know if you are spending too much or too little and is there a better way to organize your infrastructure? The answer is yes, and MetrixData 360 is here to help!
At MetrixData 360, we define ourselves as a vendor-neutral software consultant firm, but what does that actually mean? When you fill out a ‘contact us’ form, what will happen and what sort of services can you sign up for? We want you to get the most value as possible from your engagement with us, so it’s important to understand what we do.
When you first reach out to us, you’ll be paired up with a Client Success specialist. Their first goal is for you to understand the value of the services that we provide. You see, hiring an effective in-house software asset management team requires a wide variety of skills, including the following:
• Licensing expertise
• Vendor expertise (including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Adobe, VMware, etc.)
• Negotiation skills
• Licensing Position Assembly Skills
• Data collection
• Data analysis
Finding a single person with all of these skills is impossible, so you’d need a team of full-time workers that you’ll have to train and keep on salary. This is a burden that could cost your company anywhere close to $1M. However, MetrixData 360 comes to the table with a fraction of the cost and immediate expertise in a wide variety of software vendors and their correlating licenses, which are subject to change hundreds of times a year.
Related: The benefits of hiring a software consultant.
After we make sure that all of us are on the same page, the next step in our engagement with you is to assess the problems that your company is facing.
Are you faced with a software audit that you don’t know how to defend yourself in?
Is your company migrating to the Cloud?
Does your company lack visibility into your software estate?
How much of your IT is shadow IT?
Are you going into a contract renewal or negotiation?
Do you have a new SAM tool and would like to test the validity of the data that it is gathering?
There’s no one-size-fits-all engagement with us since we treat our clients’ unique profiles and problems as just that: unique. Your case isn’t just a number to us, and we make it a point to listen to what you need and respond accordingly.
We take the security of your data as our highest priority. So, at this stage, we will arrange a non-disclosure agreement between your company and ours, just to put aside all doubt in the assurance that any sensitive data you might give us stays with us.
Also, in this conversation, we’ll discuss among our team members what sort of resources you’ll need based on the information you’ve given us. We’ll then get everything ready to have a deep conversation with you about the solution we can offer you.
At this point you will receive a follow up call from us to answer any questions or concerns that you might have. We will gather for you the right stakeholders that will need to be involved in this engagement. This is done to ensure that the right questions are being asked on both sides.
Here we often see our prospective clients come to a fork in the road with our services as we help them come to a decision about where we can be the most useful. After assessing the complexity of your case, we will often find other areas in your software licensing environment that are in need of our assistance. For instance, if you come to us looking for assistance to defend against an audit, the audit may be the product of deeper visibility problems into your software profile. So, we will not only offer to fix the problem, we will also work towards ensuring this type of problem never happens again.
The next thing to expect from us is a meeting between your company and ours, where we lay out a proposal to you. In this proposal we will go over our offered solution for the problem you have handed to us, along with the way we plan to reach that solution. It will have a clear outline of the process we wish to implement, along with the cost. The price of our engagement is based on a variety of factors such as the size and complexity of the issue you’re facing. For more information about our price range and the factors involved in it, you can check out our article: How Much Does Hiring A Software Audit Consultant Cost?
After the meeting, we will call you one more time to ensure you understand our proposed solution and to make sure that any questions or concerns that you have are answered.
At this point we might bring up some of our long-term solutions for questions you’re likely to have:
How can we ensure that you’re never in this position again?
Is this a technology issue or is this a people issue?
The best technology in the world won’t protect your company from a lack of understanding or value in software asset management.
If you’d like to learn how you can get started with software asset management you can
check out our Guide!
We have a team of highly-trained specialists that can be brought onto the project as much or as little as need be. Some of our amazing team members include:
Mike Austin
MetrixData 360’s CEO is a highly specialized contract negotiator and team leader.
Ben Tight
Ben handles Data Analysis and development of our latest Discovery Tools.
Gary Arseneau
Gary takes care of Data Analysis and assemble your licensing position.
If you’d like to get to know our team better, head over to our About Us page.
This type of support usually only occurs around a certain event. You come to us with a specific problem and we work with your team around the deadlines you provide for us. We provide valuable feedback so that you can be successful at every stage of the process. We teach our customers about software asset management while we work. Many of our competitors do not provide training, which will leave you reliant on their services.
We believe that it is important to teach best practices for software asset management so that you can remain in control of your software infrastructure, even after our engagement with you has concluded. This creates long-lasting results from our services.
Some of these one-time services include:
Perhaps you are in the renewal cycle for a software contract or you are getting a brand-new software license with a vendor you’ve never worked with before. Regardless of your situation, going into a contract negotiation with the software vendor knowing more about your software spending and usage than you do will give them an unfair advantage, tipping the negotiations into their favor. Our contract experts at MetrixData 360 have dealt with contracts proposed by Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, VMware, Adobe, Micro Focus, EMC, Citrix, and Red Hat. We know the commercial strategies and pricing structures of each, and how they are likely to approach these negotiations. The software vendor only cares to ensure your spending increases, not that you’re spending is done wisely and in a way that creates the most long-term growth for your company.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can get ready for a software contract negotiation check out our Guide to Negotiating Software Contracts.
Whatever your company does best, whether that’s innovation, creation, or serving your customers, an unbudgeted software penalty shouldn’t get in the way of that.
We believe that you should only pay the software vendors what they are owed. We act as our client’s secret weapon; the people that stand behind the curtain and whisper in your ear what you need to know while you’re sitting down with the auditors and the software vendor who has hired them. Since we deal with our client’s sensitive data, although we have worked with clients from virtually every industry, many of which are Fortune 500 companies that are easily recognizable, we are not at liberty to name any of our clients.
Would you like to learn more about software audits? What they are? How do you prepare for one? Check out our Audit Preparation series to find the answers you’re looking for.
It’s a smart idea to check in on your progress. We can check the overall health of your software estate, which can be beneficial to you for the following reasons:
At MetrixData 360, we set you on the path to SAM maturity by evaluating how organized your software estate is, what kind of visibility is in place and where you are incurring the risk of noncompliance.
If you’d like to know more about assessing the strength of your software profile, check out our article: 4 Signs It’s Time to Hire a SAM Expert.
The problem you present us may not be the type of thing that can be fixed over the course of a single engagement. Luckily, we also offer long-term engagement plans for clients who would like assistance with maintaining compliance and an optimized software environment and for large scale projects.
This type of service typically lasts from one to two years. During this time period, we aren’t just showing what you need to do, we’re doing it.
Improve your SAM Maturity: We manage your software estate and perform internalized audits on a quarterly basis to make sure that your SAM maturity levels are constantly getting better. SAM is a journey, after all. You cannot gain total visibility and optimization into your software estate simply after one engagement or after you’ve installed a single SAM tool, although many SAM tool vendors will often portray their tool as the last stop on your way to easy street. Getting to the point where your software estate is healthy so as to create value and lower risk takes time and effort and we’re here to help you through this journey.
For a more in-depth look into SAM maturity and how your company can climb the ladder to full optimization, check out our SAM maturity article.
Depending on the knowledge and skill of your IT department when it comes to software asset management, our team’s assistance might not even be needed for you to gain full comprehension of your software licensing environment. If that is the case, our custom-built tools are still available to be run either by us or your IT department to make sure that you have the accurate data you need to promote technological growth in your company.
If you’d like to learn more about the types of tools we have and what they do, you can check out our tool page!
Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what we do and how we can help your company improve their software asset management. Our business might be quite complicated but only because we strive to make an already overly complex process simple and easy for you. Software licensing is insurmountably difficult, there’s no way to possibly do through counting manually, so you need a way to get your software organized before it becomes a drain on your resources through poorly optimized licenses and heavy software audit penalties. If you’d like to know how you can organize your software and get them to promote growth of your company, click the link below to head to the Contact Us Page.
©2022 MetrixData 360. All rights reserved.