How to Cut Software Costs in a Crisis

Hi there. I'm Mike Austin, CEO of Metrix Data 360. A lot of you are asking us what we're seeing in the market with these hard times that Corvid 19 is causing. I didn't want to send out the typical Corvid 19 message that you're seeing from a lot of organizations. I want to actually give you something that is actionable and is based on things that we learned in the past. The number one thing that we're seeing is inertia. Everything has stopped, both on the buyer side and on the vendor side. People just aren't doing anything, whether they're fearful for their jobs or whether they're, you know, checking in on the news every five minutes. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of activity happening right now, which is not to be unexpected. But on the vendor side, we are seeing, you know, things where they are playing nicely. There's no aggressive sales tactics happening right now. They seem to be lax around the renewal dates and things like that. Anybody that's in an audit, currently, the pressure to get data and things like that has subsided. And the vendors are doing the right thing, and we applaud them for that. On the buyer side, many of you are facing discretionary budgets that have been cut or taken to zero and trying to figure out how to deal with that as well as I'm sure upper management is coming to you and asking you to find savings within the organization and. And you're not sure how, where, what to even do in order to go out and do that at this point in time. The conversation this week has started to shift with my clients. They're asking me, Mike, what can we do now in order to write our contracts or to go out and find some of these savings that we're being asked to find. The first thing I tell them is, be assured, I saw this before. The same sort of thing happened in 2008. One of the things that you need to be aware of is that the vendors right now are being nice, but when things get better, they're going to become very aggressive. You have to know that their quotas are not going to be reduced. So the aggressive sales tactics will start again. Audits will kick up and maybe even increase as they try and make up for the shortfall of revenue that they miss during this period of time. When they ask me, how do they do this? I tell them to use the principles of software asset management. And no, I don't mean the entire process of retire. Deploy the software asset management ring, implementing A big tool. I mean, using the fundamentals to do what software asset management is really meant to do. One, drive cost savings. That 20 to 30% savings that everybody says is there is there. Believe me, it is there today. And two, ensure that you're compliant. You're going to want to look at your software contracts and look at where your highest spend is. You're going to want to then go out and get the data specific to those software vendors. By data I mean inventory, user counts, all of that sort of stuff. You then want to go to use that the way that we've typically used that in the past to create a fact based information pack around what you actually require and what you don't require. I know what you're thinking, Mike. I don't have that data today. How do I do this? The reality is that data exists in your environment today. But getting this data that's required is not a big project. It can be done with as little as 10 hours of IT teams time over a course of two or three weeks. You're going to need the information and the data that's required to actually negotiate from a position of power. So what do I mean? You're going to need to have inventory counts on what's being used, understanding the license metrics, and go out and get that information and assemble it to understand what you truly need. You're going to want to also be looking at forecasting potentially what's going to happen over the next two, three, four months to understand what you're going to need in that time period so that you can then go and negotiate with the vendor from a position of power. I know that the amount of data that's required a lot of the times for these vendors, especially the big ones, is a lot. And it can be complicated. Again, you can do this yourself, but if you need some help, we're here. We have tools that require no implementation. We take the data and we assemble it in a manner that's required for you. If your discretionary budgets have been cut and you can't get third party help to come in and do this for you, I've got a solution there as well. In the past, I've always been hesitant to do contingency based deals because I want to be a true partner with my clients. But in times like this, if you can't get budget, we're willing to work with you to pull costs out of your existing contracts in order to save you money. I'm not talking soft costs and productivity gains. I'm talking real dollars that you can put back into your IT budget. One of my clients asked me why the change in position, and my answer was simply because I saw in 2008 that the companies that acted the fastest were the ones that came out ahead when the economy started to turn. And I want that to be you. So if you want to get ahead of this, so that when the audits start turning back and the gears of the economy start coming back and the sales reps start to get aggressive again, and you want to try and get savings now, please feel free to reach out and have a conversation. We're happy to chat about what you can do yourself or how we can potentially help you find savings during these tough times. One of the things that I'm going to do is I'm going to set up a gotowebinar and you're going to see a email come from me next week. Where this is not a presentation, we're not going to do a webinar, but I'm going to have the chat room or the webinar open all day for people to come in and talk and ask questions. And hopefully what will end up happening is that a few of you will be in there and you can talk peer to peer about what you're doing specifically to help your organization in these hard times so that we can all learn from each other. So please stay safe, look forward to chatting with you, and our doors are virtually open for you to come and come and visit and let's help each other get through this. Sa.