IT Procurement & Sourcing Summit USA 2025 I MetrixData 360

Good morning, everyone. I'm Mike Austin, the CEO and founder of Metrics Data 360. Everybody hear me? Okay, if I don't use the mic, or would you prefer. I'm good. Okay. So I'm the CEO and founder of Metrics Data360. We're a firm that does software asset management, heavily focused on license and cost optimization. And that's the only commercial I'll do today. What I want to talk about. Yeah, go ahead. I need to use the mic. Okay. Okay. So what we're going to discuss today is that it and procurement is facing a big battle with all these software vendors. So if you're responsible for renewing a software contract in 2026, here's sort of what you're facing. If you haven't renewed Broadcom, you're probably looking at 300 to 400, maybe even 500% price increase. Microsoft just dropped all of their EA levels as of November of this year. So if you're one of the, you know, a level D customer with Microsoft, your price just went up 30% overnight. Right? Not to mention all the price increases and things that they've had. Salesforce, they increased their price 7 to 8% and nobody's budgeted for this stuff. And what happens a lot of the times are organizations go into these contract discussions with these software publishers based on a narrative that comes from the software publishers, right? They don't have the data internally to truly understand what it is they're using, what it is they need. And they come in and basically start a negotiation based on whatever it is the vendor tells them where they want to start those negotiations from. Okay, so how do you actually drive cost savings out of this? If you're in procurement, and that's your number one objective, is to drive cost savings out of it. How do you do this? Right, so the biggest threat is it's all based on vendor defined, what I call vendor defined spend. Okay. So if you look at, I'm going to talk a lot about Microsoft today, but this applies to SAP, IBM, Citrix, Broadcom, Oracle, Salesforce, right? They come in and tell you what you want to buy, they tell you what they believe to be strategic to you, whether you require it or not. So with Microsoft, if you're familiar with what the Microsoft 365 suite is, even if you don't need it, they're going to tell you E5, if you don't want an E5, you only want E3, they're going to tell you no discount, you're not a Strategic customer to us. And that's the conversation that they have because they're defining what you need, right? And if you make a misstep in this, it's millions of dollars. I see a lot of contracts that look like this, okay, we'll buy a bunch of copilot to get a discount on E5. Never deploy copilot. And the discount that you got on E5 is less than what you spent on copilot. I see deals where people go out and Microsoft says, oh, you're gonna deploy things like PowerApps. Okay? You can buy 20,000 PowerApps for everybody in your organization. We'll give you a sweetheart deal. And then three years later, you deployed it to 2,000 people. And they won't let you out of these contracts costing millions of dollars. So the thing is, they're ready before you are. Again, just replace Microsoft. I'm going to use Microsoft today just because we only have a short period of time, but just replace Microsoft with any software publisher you're dealing with, okay? They're ready before you are. Typically, if you've got a Microsoft EA renewal, what happens is Microsoft is gonna come in somewhere between nine to 12 months before your renewal. They're gonna drop a proposal on your table, and it's gonna be something like 70 to 100% more than what you're currently paying. Right? And then what happens is you start to panic, and you pull together a team and you try to figure out, okay, what are we going to do? We were spending $3 million a year. They now want six or five from us. We don't even know what we need. And we definitely know we did not budget for $5 million. Right? So this is where it starts. It starts right there. And they have a playbook. They run this because I see people's head, like, you know, across the room, people's heads are nodding. Yep, this has happened, right? It's the same playbook. No matter where you are around the world, you know, no matter what geographic location you live in within the US they run this same playbook start to finish, with all their clients. So what's happened is you're in the vendor's negotiation room. That's the reality. You're not in your negotiation room. You're sitting in their negotiation room. They defined the negotiation before they left their office to come for their visit. And that's where you're stuck. Right? Because typically, what happens if we were sitting around here and, you know, I'm the Microsoft rep, and I come in and drop that in. And we might have somebody from procurement, couple IT people, maybe somebody from Finance. Everybody's in the room, they leave, and everybody just goes, what just happened? Right? You're overwhelmed. They put some dates on us that we got to respond fast. We really don't know what we need. You know, if we talk to different departments, you know, one department says, we need 300 of this. Another department says, well, no, the number's actually 500. Right? And so we don't even know really where to start. And Microsoft brought an army with them, right? They probably had like three people for every one that you had in the room. And those people, by the way, have been running around inside of your company talking to everybody and anybody for the last year, trying to drive up a lot of stuff, because they'll say things like, oh, we talked to the security team. The security team says they're going to do this, right? And then you go and have a conversation with the security team. And security team's like, yeah, we talked to them. We didn't say we were going to do that, Right? But they've represented it like, yep, they're going to do this, right? So you get stuck and you go, okay, where do we even start? So sometimes what happens is we just start internally and try and put together a team. Other times, like, you know, maybe the CIO knows somebody that used a firm that helped before, right? And so, you know, you start going, do we have the knowledge to do this ourselves? Maybe not. Do we know anybody externally that can help us? Maybe, you know, what's the real demand? What do we actually need versus what that vendor just dropped on us in that inflated proposal, right? And then you start going, what are we missing? Right? How do we. How do we prevent this scope creep? How do we not buy a bunch of stuff that we don't need for the fifth EA in a row? Because I talk to people all the time. They're like, yeah, for five EAs, we bought a bunch of crap that we didn't deploy. How do we stop that? But I'll tell you that the teams that win do this differently. They build their own negotiation room. They start before Microsoft starts, and they come in and they basically arm themselves with their own data. Not with Microsoft data, Not with conjectures of Microsoft running around talking to a bunch of people. They go and talk to their own people, figure out what they need, start to build roadmaps, start to look at what the quantities are, and they really start to dive into their own data. And I'm going to talk a Little bit about how, how this works here in a couple of seconds. But they really start to align their stakeholders around facts, not around fiction. Okay? And that's the big thing, is the more data that you have, the better off you're gonna be. And I'm gonna show you how this works today. So we had this happen. We had a CIO bringing in a large firm that they knew who they thought, okay, our war room's not good enough. We're gonna bring these guys in because they've done this a lot. They're big company, big global company. They're gonna tell us how to do this, okay? And so they thought, yep, we got the pitch. They tell us they can help us save 20, 30%, pull out a bunch of cost. This sounds great. Then what happened is there was a SQL deep dive that was done. So they said, okay, we're going to look at all your products, but we're going to start with SQL because it's one of the bigger spends. We'll get to M365, which is probably the biggest spend here shortly. And they basically ran an audit, okay? So they went out and said, let's go out and figure out what you have deployed out there. We're gonna figure out what licenses you have, we're gonna figure out where you're overspending, and we're gonna drop the, you know, then we're gonna be able to drop 20 or 30% out of your SQL spend because we're optimize your licenses. This is exactly what they heard, right? That's not what happened though. What happened was they were told they were $5 million short on SQL Server licenses. Now imagine you're in the boardroom again, right? We just brought these guys in to save 20%. Now they're telling us for $5 million non compliant. What the heck happens here? Imagine your CIO if you got to go and deliver that message. By the way, guys, this scales. It doesn't matter if you're 2,000 people and that's 500,000 or you're 200,000 and that's 50 million. The impact's the same on your budgets, right? So if you're a little bit smaller, a little bit bigger, just add a zero, take a zero off, it's the same impact. You know, procurement's panicking and legal's already trying to figure out how do we minimize this risk. Right now it happens all the time. I see it constantly. I get asked to go in and help clients that are in this situation all the time. After this has happened, right? The problem is they hired somebody that was trying to sell them more licenses. So they were conflicted to begin with. There were a reseller that was trying to sell more licenses that came in and said, we'll help you save money on licenses, and basically said, hey, Nope, you owe $5 million hoping to get a bigger sale, right? So the internal scramble comes next, right? For the next six weeks, they tried to fix it. They knew it didn't feel right, but they didn't know why. And so, you know, they went and then did their own audit. So they just had an audit done by third party. Then they went and spent time for six weeks doing their own audit, trying to figure out, how do we minimize this $5 million, right? And they did find some issues. The data was bad. Anybody ever tried to figure out, you know, what's good in their input inventory data, right? You know, decommissioned servers that are still in there, you know, you know, servers that were supposed to be gone two years ago show up in there, you know, wrong classifications. You know, dev servers that are classified as production servers. It's a. It's a very difficult task to stay on top of this, right? And so they found some, and they were able to get it down from five million to three and a half million dollars. But they're still panicking at three and a half million because, remember, they were supposed to be saving money on this exercise, right? Now, this is a little hard to see, but what happened in this case and what happens with most organizations is in order to do any of this effectively, you need to have very strong data, okay? And so if you think about what it takes to determine if I have the licenses that I require, I need to go out and have inventory, right? So I need to know I have devices, servers, physical, virtual, in the cloud. Doesn't really matter. I need to know how many of those I have that are active, and I need to have inventory on them. That's step one. If you do not have 90 to 95% in that check, do not pass go. Do not go to the next step, because when you do, it causes all kinds of problems. These guys were yellow. They're about 80% there. Okay? So the next step and what this shows you is just the attributes that you need to do SQL Server licensing, okay? And so what I mean by attributes are, if you think about it, SQL Server is licensed based on cores or virtual cores. So I need to know a number of things. I need to know how many virtual cores are in my servers. I need to Know how many hosts, I need to know what clusters are out there. I need to know if they're active, passive. I need to know if they're dev and test servers. Again, I don't want to get into the real technicalities of this, but think about all the things that I need to know. There's probably about 15 things that I need to know to make a license position on a product. And you can change that, right? If I'm doing IBM and it's Cognos, I need to know how many PVUs I need, I might need to know how many users I have. Just look at what the license says. What's the license? What am I counting? Right? And go figure out what I need in order to count that. So basically these guys are all red and yellow. And the reason it was $5 million is because what happens here is when I don't know, the addition of SQL Server, it just gets assumed to be Enterprise. 40,000 bucks for a few cores versus Express. That's free. It could have been Express. They didn't know that. They didn't have the data to even look at guess the host relationships to figure out how to optimize that licensing, right? So now all of a sudden the people that came in to help them save money are doing a license position for them based on really bad data. Okay? So they called us, they said we were supposed to save money. You know, this is not happening. Can you take a look at what's going on? And we didn't come in and show up with a pre written report or anything like that. We just came in, rolled up our sleeves and started attacking that chart that was on there. Because we knew when they shared with us what was done, we knew why it was done, we just didn't know what the solution was yet. Okay? And so what I mean by that is we built our own negotiation room. We went and started to get the data that they were missing. So remember how I said need 95% before you start? We went and said, you're at 80%, where's the other 15? Because these are the assumptions they're making on those 15%. So we need to go get inventory on these 15% and we need to understand that because if we don't now, we're going to be in trouble. Right? And that's exactly what's going on. So we went line by line, server by server, and filled in all those attributes for them. Okay? Wasn't manual. It's not quite that hard, it's not easy, but it's not quite that hard. And so what we did, this is what I always tell people. If you look here, what happens is if you don't have that bottom layer, that data layer, I can't create an optimized, what I refer to as an optimized estimated license position. So think of a license position as I have this many deployed, own this many licenses. So do I have too many licenses or not enough licenses? Right? And then I can optimize that. And I'm gonna talk about what the difference between creating just an ELP and an optimize EELPR here in a couple of seconds. But I can optimize that when I have a really strong foundation of data. And if I have that strong, then I can go and negotiate from a place of strength. Now what most teams do when they're trying to put in Sam, cause we're talking about SAM here at this event is they decide that they're gonna go and Talk to Flexera ServiceNow, SAM PRO Sotero, all those guys out there and say, I don't have all this data, I need a tool, let me put in the tool. Then they spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars putting in a tool. And then they get crap results and they go, why did I get crap results? That happened to anybody in here? I see a couple of heads nodding, okay? The reason they get crap results is they started with bad data. They were at 60% and they just thought, I can put in a tool and it's going to solve it. It doesn't. The data work is hard. It has to be done first and it's not glamorous. Nobody in IT is going to put up their hand and go, I want to go and figure out where we don't have core accounts and go and get those in the cmdbs, right? But you have to do that. And there's ways to make it easier. They just don't know how. It just seems like work to them, right? Mostly everybody in here is procurement, right? Or vendor management. So think about your IT counterparts, right? How over taxed are they? Right? They have no time, right? They're all over taxed. I don't know any IT guy that's going, hey, give me another project, I got a lot of time over here, right? So that's the truth. They were about 50 to 60% there. And so we rebuilt the foundation, right? We didn't argue hypotheticals. We went out and found the facts, right? And we turned assumptions into evidence and we basically took that five million non compliance. They Got to three and a half to zero in two weeks. And then it gets better. Okay? So we got to an ELP at zero because that was my first goal. Go in and get them to zero, show that they don't owe anything or as close to zero as possible if they own anything. Right? And what we did was we did things like this. Again, I'm not gonna get into the technicalities of licensing. You can license SQL Server a bunch of different ways. They have a bunch of these things called server CAL licenses that the guys that were auditing them said they couldn't use. And we said, okay, let's talk about how your network set up, right? They had a division, fully internal, 300 people that was consuming almost 200 cores of SQL licenses that we could put these in. Now, what they were told by the other guys, oh, you gotta worry about multiplexing and you gotta worry about all this stuff. We just asked a few questions to make sure that they weren't the case, that wasn't the case, and then documented it for them. And we handed them the documentation, said, this is why you can use them. Right? Got rid of almost a million dollars right there. And that was just because instead of saying, you can't do this, we said, how do we use these? Where can we find places to use these? Because our next step was, if we didn't find that, it was like, what departmental servers do you have? What are those departmental servers doing? There's a few things you go a little deeper with, right? So then I already talked about that. So basically, these guys go from a place where they have no clear visibility to complete visibility. We went in and we looked at things like active and passive clusters. They were told, well, if you're doing this, you can't use passive. So for those of you who don't understand, don't know SQL licensing, passive should be free. In a lot of cases, there's certain circumstances where depending on how it's set up, it's not free. And so they were just told, it's not free. And. And we went in and said, open up VMware. Take a snapshot of this, show us this. Okay, cool. That's not turned on, that's free, right? It was literally a five minute conversation with the VMware admin, okay? And so now all of a sudden they went from this place where they had no roadmap, no idea what was going on in the environment to clarity. And what we did was we looked at this and took all the data that now we have. We're about 95%. By the way, if anybody ever tells you you're gonna get to 100%, just run. It's nearly impossible in today's world, right? Like, just think about VMs, how they fly all over the place. You know, we have clients that in their AWS or Azure environments, throw up and take down 2,000 servers a day. Right? So how do you, how do you track that? How do you get to 100%? You can't, right? 90 to 95% is all you really need. That'll pass an audit, by the way. That's why we say 90 to 95%. If any software publisher audits you, they'll tell you at 90, 95% they'll accept your data. But now we have all their data. So then we started looking at how do we optimize, how do we actually decrease your cost. On SQL Server, I can prove you're compliant. By the way, they took that, sent it to an auditing firm, an auditing firm stamped it, say, yeah, this is completely compliant. Now what do we do next? We started to look at how their SQL was configured, not from a technical perspective, but from a licensing perspective. And we found ways that they could move their licenses around, move their SQL around and cut 400,000, I think it was 400, maybe 500,000 out of their SQL renewal because they didn't need all the license, they did if they made a few technical changes. Okay, I'll use another example here. Okay. In IBM, I can license based on PVUs. So think about a processor, they put a value unit on it. I can license on pvus or I can license on named users. We got called into a client and they were showing $750,000 non compliant on their Cognos software. And we went in and we did our thing and we said, okay, cool. You have two environments, you have a production environment and you have a non production environment. And you're absolutely right. The auditors are absolutely right. You're three quarters of a million dollars non compliant with PVU licensing. Now, the good news is in your dev environment, you got 50 users. That's $5,000 of licenses. Let's go buy $5,000 of licenses, move those PVUs that you have in your dev environment over to your production environment. And now you pay 5,000, not 750,000. Right? That's because what happens is most people when they do these things, they look at what they bought, think that that's what they need to do. Right? What you need to be doing is looking at what you Bought and looking at what other options are out there to figure out what the most effective way to be doing this stuff is moving forward. Because when you bought it 10 years ago, it was a different game, right? It's set and forget. I see it all the time. That's what they did. They bought this stuff 10 years ago, set and forgot, thought it was all good. You know, their environment grew and then all of a sudden they find themselves in this non compliance issue and nobody really realized it and they just, we're gonna do continue doing the same thing, right? So that's how, that's what, when you get to this data perspective and what you can do, this is how you really start to drive cost out. Because now I can make decisions right now, I can actually go ahead and drive forward with this. So we started to build this roll room for them because now we want to look at the bigger context because numbers without context is no leverage. Stories behind those numbers becomes a lot of leverage. Right. And so we started doing what Microsoft never expects, right? Because they said, okay, you saved us on a SQL, now help us on the ea, because remember, that's what they originally wanted to do. Right? And so we came in, we started talking to people, we interviewed 10 different departments to understand exactly what they were doing with Microsoft for the next 18 months. When we took that back to the CIO, he went, I've never seen this before in my organization. Because he has a conversation with infrastructure, security, messaging and gets pieces of it, but it's never seen how it all comes together. Right. And these vendors are becoming so pervasive. You know, it used to be that Microsoft was like kind of email and maybe database and servers and Office. Now think about what they're in, right? They're in every department. Those licenses cross departments now, right. So it's very difficult to get a picture of what's going on. So we built that picture for them. We understood their initiatives, we understood their time frames, we challenged their time frames. Oh, we're going to deploy PowerApps to 5,000 people within 12 months. Cool. What's the project plan look like? Oh, well, we haven't got there yet. We're just kind of assuming. Okay, the last time that you assumed on a project like this, how much was it delayed? Oh, it's delayed by 24 months. Let's assume 24 months now. Right. Because we can build something into a negotiation that protects you if you accelerate it. But let's not overbuy. So we mapped the reality, not the proposal. Right. And so what that meant was we pulled utilization data from O365, talked about in detail a little bit what we did with SQL Server, and we looked at all their Azure spend as well. We reconciled their contracts, their entitlements, their actual usage, and we built a clean baseline with no Microsoft spin on it. Okay, so in other words, what I mean by that is we told them exactly what they needed to buy. Here's exactly the quantities, the licenses you need to buy. Okay? So we turn that two and a half percent price increase that they started out with into a solvable math equation. Now, because now we just look at, okay, what you need to buy, how much does that cost versus what Microsoft's positioning. Right? So we had that $500,000 reduction from SQL. We pulled a million and a half dollars out of O3.65. Doing a profiling exercise, by the way. I'm gonna demo how exactly we did that right after this, just out there. But we did a profiling exercise. We had all their usage data. We could tell you whether their people were sending emails, not sending emails, whether they were using Office, not using Office. You know, when you go into that data and start looking and find things in job codes, like, why do you have 2,000 people in this job code that have never used Office, never even log into your network, and you're paying for E5s on them. Oh, those are all our contractors. Cool. There's a different way to license them, by the way. Right, but before, they didn't have the data, they just knew they had all these contractors and, oh, we gotta make sure that they have access. Well, then we could show them the data. Right, so we turn that defense now into offense. So Microsoft proposal 7.5, that victory at 7.8, should say 6.8. That's a typo. So typically, what happens is you get that proposal From Microsoft at 7.5, you start negotiating with them, and you get it down to 6.8, and you're up from 5 million. You're like, okay, well, we did the best we can. At least we got it down from 7.5 to 6.8. So we just settle on that. That's the way these negotiations go. Nine times out of ten, we started asking. We had them at 5 million to start. No discount, no nothing. We took that defensible position, walked into Microsoft and said, we only need $5 million worth of stuff. And then we started asking ourselves, how do we get it even below 5 million? Right. How do we get leverage to actually get them, maybe to give us some discount? Maybe to do some other things, right? So we weaponized the war room. Now, this was a full Microsoft thing. So if you're familiar, Microsoft has Unified support, which is based on how much you spend. We analyzed that, we found stuff in there that wasn't true. Microsoft had parented a sister company that wasn't part of their organization, was independent and was putting that into their Unified Support contract to the tune of $100,000 a year. They had no clue. We figured that out for them. Microsoft was charging them from this. By the way, these are the, these are things you guys can take. And if you're negotiating with them right now, your Azure spend, they charge you 10% down depending on how much your Azure spend is per year on Unified support. I guarantee if you're making Marketplace, they have Marketplace embedded in your support cost. For those of you who don't know what Marketplace is, it's buying third party software through Microsoft. You should not pay support on that. Just go and tell them to pull the Unified. The Marketplace cost out most organizations, that's anywhere from 5 to 12% of their spend on Azure nowadays. So you're getting charged for stuff that you shouldn't even be paying for. Okay? So we challenged that. And what we did was to get to that 5 million. We reprofiled how they were buying stuff, right? So we went to Unified and said, by the way, your baseline, because you do a 12 month look back, is way too high, right? And they're like, no, that's what your spend was. And we're like, yeah, our spend was that because you, Microsoft, as the great partner that you're not, didn't come in here and help us figure out that we had 2,000 contractors that we shouldn't be paying for and that we had all kinds of other things. And it was bloat. So it was all based on bloat. So you either need to discount your proposal on Unified or do it based on our go forward spend. Because we've been giving you guys way too much money on licenses for the last two years and on Unified support, right? That's a different discussion right now. You got leverage because what you leverage with them, if not like it's like, oh, Unified support, it's just so expensive. I'm going to go to third party. Microsoft doesn't take that as a threat. But I got data and numbers, right? Go and sit in front of them and go, yeah, it's bloated by 2 million because we did this. If you were in my position, what would you do? And then just shut up and then watch them squirm and laugh a little bit when they leave. Because it's fun sometimes, right? So that's kind of what ends up happening with these things is once you change this, now you're changing things. So if you put together a war room, how does it work? First off, we gotta go and do discovery, right? We have to understand what exactly it is that we're using today. And we can't have the look at it of what we've been doing in the past is the right way to do it. We have to have the data so that we can look at it and say what can we do differently that actually decreases our spend, right? Because I guarantee every one of you are probably metric on how much you save, right? And unit pricing discount is not savings anymore. When the price is up 40% because Microsoft dropped levels, even if you get a 10% discount or 15% or even 20% discount off of that, you're still 20% up year over year, right? Your unit price is not the place to go look anymore. You have to look at optimization. You have to look at it in a different way. Then you have to validate that. You need to make sure that that's rock proof, defendable, right? Because. And you have to validate it for your internal teams as well. Imagine going to a company that's got 2,000 contractors and saying pull away those E5s. They don't need office anymore. Right? The business is gonna freak out. But when we said pull away those E5s, here's all the data that says they're not using it and proves it. And oh, by the way, here's what we can do. We're gonna take 30 of them, let's go find 30 of them. We'll make this change tomorrow. And let's see if any of them call the help desk this week. Can we do that? Because it's gonna save us a million dollars this year. And that's what we did. Nobody called the help desk so we knew we were right. Instead of trying to wait until after the EA renewal and then you kind of go and do it and you find out it's not working. You do it wrong and everybody's calling the help desk and then it becomes a big problem, right? And then once you've done that, now you can develop a negotiation strategy. Now I used to tell people with all these big publishers that you should be preparing, you know, depending on the size of your company. Where from 6 for kind of mid market ish type companies to a year for your renewals. You have to be managing this all the time now. Okay, I'm gonna fast forward. That deal I just went through was two years ago. So fast forward to this year when we were looking at their data. We found another million and a half dollars in there that we thought they could pull out last year. They looked at it and said, change management. No way. We sort of believe you. Cause you've done some good things here, but we don't trust you or we don't trust in this change. We think it'll be too disruptive to the business. We're not gonna do it. So we said, okay, fine, let's strike up a project in six months. We'll run some pilots, we'll rerun the data, we'll redo it. And on their anniversary date this year, they went and pulled $2 million more out of their Microsoft contract. Right? And people don't understand that you can do that. Right? So you can do that with anybody. I always tell people all the time, you sign a contract, they're like, oh, we're in a contract. I'm like, a contract's just a contract. You can negotiate anytime. The question is, can you get enough compelling argument to convince them to open up a contract and do something different? Right? And. Or do you actually know that in your contract it allows you to do this? When I tell people that you can decrease your subscriptions with Microsoft on your anniversary date every year, 8 out of 10 people have no clue that you can actually do that. And it's contractual in your contract, they can't stop you from doing it. You just got to tell them 30 days before your anniversary date that you're doing it. They can't stop you. If they try, you pull out a clause of the contract and go, here's what my contract says. Please tell me why this doesn't apply to me. Right? So here's what happened. Microsoft proposal, 7.5 million. They're about 50% data confidence brought in. Somebody else got got to about 70. They got it down to about 6.8. We came in, we got it at 5. We actually ended up settling just shy of 4.7. Okay? That's why data wins negotiations. Every time you control that story, you win. Because if you think about it, think about how every single one of these guys sell SAP, IBM, Oracle, they all run the same sort of playbooks. They come in, they tell you what they know about you, what their data says about you. This is where we're going to negotiate from. And Then you go and negotiate a deal with them, right? In this case, we had very defensible stories. Okay? Now I will tell you, people ask me all the time, there is no silver bullet. Every organization is unique. We never know where we're going to find it. You just got to go and look and you will find it. It's out. So like I said, they're not the only one. They're just probably the biggest one for most people in this room now, like Microsoft spends probably your number one, or number two, maybe number three software company that you have nowadays, so you can run this playbook on everybody. We're running the exact same playbook on SAP at one of our clients right now. It's massive. They started with a billion dollar proposal. We just got the. I think we're at revision 22 and it's 222 million now. But these guys were ready to go and try and get it from a billion to maybe 800 million. And they were happy. And we're at 222 million now. We're just running these playbooks because we didn't let them fall into the trap of they needed to move to S4, Hana. Not on their terms. And this is how you do it. This is very simple. If you can figure out how to do this, that data layer. So I'll just go through it one more time because this is the magic sauce. People ask me all the time, mike, how is it that you guys do what you do? This is it. Okay, you need to understand what you have that's active in your environment. Doesn't matter. The software salesforce, how many active users do we have? Right. You need to understand the attributes that I need to determine licenses. Not just the licenses I have, but all my options. Okay, so by attributes, what do I mean? I mean the things that are what I need to count in order to determine the number of licenses. So those are gonna look like things like processor counts, desktop counts, user counts, storage API calls. There's all kinds of different license metrics, probably about 200 or so common ones, and there's probably 10,000 of them across all the software that's out there. And then I need to know what I own and what I'm paying for and what my contractual terms are. Then when I put those together, then I can start figuring out what to do. I take that, I create a position. Your number one goal when you're creating a position is to get to zero. Right? In other words, I don't owe anything, I'm compliant, and you want to do that with the lowest number of the least cost licenses. You can. Very simple. Then once I've done that, then I can go and do things like our friends did with IBM. Started to look at different license types to figure out how to drive cost out. And then I can use that data to go and negotiate, right? And if I want to put in a SAM program, once I figured out how to do this, go buy a SAM tool. Because the SAM tool will work if you put this in place. It won't work. If you got a cmdb that's at 60% data quality and slap in ServiceNow, SAM Pro and Go, why can't I get a license position? Right? Why doesn't it work? And then, you know, you can add on to that KPIs and governance and all the fun stuff that once you get into SAM programs. So we do a couple of these, a quarter, we have some room. If anybody's interested, we're across the hall, you can come and talk to us. But you know, this is the process that we run. This is how we save our clients on average about 22%. Okay, I think I can open up to questions.