Unlock IT Budget Potential for IBM and HCL: A Webinar with MetrixData 360 and Origina

Hey.

Hello everyone and welcome to Metrics Data 360's monthly webinar series. This week. For those of you that don't know us, there's a few, I think a few new people on. So just give a little bit of a high level overview of Metrics Data. For those of you that aren't familiar with us, we're an organization that focuses on software asset management. So typically when companies talk about software asset management, they think of it in a couple of ways. The obvious first one is that they're trying to drive cost out of their software and cloud spend. The second piece is that they're trying to be compliant with their software vendors. We are a firm that provides everything from point solutions on helping organizations defend audits, negotiate software renewals, right up to managing software asset management as a service for our clients, whether that be in tools such as ServiceNow, SAM Pro or Flexer or Snow, to manual processes and sort of everything in between. And we're very heavily focused, for those of you that work with us, you know that we're very heavily focused on the license and cost optimization side of things. And so normally our webinars are really focused on sort of process around sam. And this week, this month, we've got something a little bit different and that we think will help our clients, particularly in that cost optimization side of the equation. As you know, if you're negotiating a renewal with a software publisher lately, it's getting more and more difficult. There's very little leverage you have with these mega vendors, whether it be Microsoft, IBM or Oracle, and you have to come up with strategies and tactics to save yourselves money. But one thing being in the software asset managed space and looking at a lot of, you know, inventory and what people are using, we also see a lot of wasted spend in terms of paying for maintenance and support on product that is either no longer support or is just never going to be upgraded for various reasons. You got applications that you've been running for years, you haven't got migration plans for them, or you're going to modernize them at some point in time down the line and you're paying for those. So I'm happy today to introduce a new partner to metrics data360 origina. And our guest speaker today, Larry Milkovich, is going to talk through some of what we're seeing in the marketplace and talk a little bit about how you can actually attack some of that maintenance and support cost and find more cost effective methods of things that you can do in order to drive some of that cost savings out. So Larry, I'm going to throw it over to you just before I do. If you do have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the chat. We'll be watching that throughout and Larry will try and answer your questions if you drop them in there or if you want to put your hand up and come on. And Chad, please feel free to do so. But Larry, over to you.

Thank you Mike. Appreciate it. Thanks everybody for joining. Looking forward to some great feedback from everybody when we're done here. But today what we want to do is I'll give you a little bit of an introduction to who I am. We'll talk about the IT mission and some of the challenges IT shops are facing today. A lot of that driven by, you know, vendor lock in from the software mega vendors. And we're going to give you some tips on how you can win that leverage back. And then we're going, going to talk a little bit about third party maintenance and support and how you can use that to, you know, drive some, some potential budget, free up some potential budget and operational expense and invest into innovation. That is going to matter to you. And of course we'll have time for Q and A at the end. But as Mike said, if, if there's, we're happy to have interaction. If you'd like to pop in with a question or comment or anything like that, please feel free. Mike, if you could advance the slide please. So a little bit of background on me. You can see I look like the same guy. So this is not my dating site picture. I've been in the IT industry for 44 years. You're saying, oh, no way does he look that old. But yeah, absolutely I have. And really every second of those 44 years have been involved in IBM technology in one way or another. I am currently a sales specialist for a company called Original. We're a third party maintenance and support provider for IBM and HCL products as well as VMware. And we'll talk a little bit about us later on. But that's kind of my background there. I've been selling IBM Cross brand software solutions for over 30 years. So I might have been the guy that stuck you with one of these big ELAs or something like that. And this is my redemption tour trying to get into heaven. Hopefully I can help you save some money on some of these software titles and such. But prior to you being a software software game, I was an engineer for 11 years and I've you know, all the way back when Novel was the Most popular operating system for a while there. But so I've had a lot of interaction with a lot of different technologies in my past. And yes, I am old enough that I have repaired card readers and card punches and vacuum tapes. If you've seen all the old NASA movies, you know, that's the kind of systems that I supported. But a little bit of background on me and if you could forward the slide, Mike, please. So let's talk about the challenge that IT shops are facing today. We're all being asked to do more with less budget. And when we look at where is that budget being spent and consumed, we're realizing that the vast majority of IT is going to keeping the lights on. I saw a little flasher. Majority of it's going to keep lights on in an industry right in your IT shop and it's leaving very little money left for innovation. That's going to matter to you. Right? We've all been tasked, we've heard the terms, digital transformation, modernization, all these different terms. And it all comes down to we need to digitize everything as much as possible and automate as much as possible to be as nimble as possible. But again, finding that funding is really a challenge. So we're going to talk about a couple different ways that you might be able to free up some IT budget if you can. Forward the slide, Mike. So one of the biggest challenges that we have really is vendor lock. And we're going to be talking about vendor lock in a lot today. And we're going to talk about leverage and how these vendors are gaining leverage to get sticky and keep you, you know, within their, within their crosshairs, if you will, and keeping their, their, their, their revenue from you ever growing. So the challenges that you're facing is you're seeing a lot of vendors, and I'll speak specifically about IBM and a couple of these incidences, but you're seeing vendors force upgrades sooner in the cycle. And really they're doing that by, you know, saying you gotta upgrade to get our support. We're ending the versions on these support as an example, you know, six years ago IBM supported three different versions of DB2. Today they only support one. And you'll notice a lot of these vendors are outsourcing some of the support. So when we talk about IBM in general, a lot of their development and support are happening by companies called hvl, Rocket Software and such. So they're kind of shifting that cost burden of support onto you with future up, you know, more frequent upgrades and less cost to them on These vendors, you know, they're not supporting as many things for them, right? So that end of support is kind of a key, key trigger, if you will, keeping you guys locked up and upgrading in their cycle. And you'll also see, you know, we get a lot of customers, we ask them, you know, are you getting the innovation you need out of these products? You know, you're paying 10 to 15% year on year increase. Is your budget, is, is your value from the software going up that 10 to 15% increase? Right. Are you getting additional revenue, reducing cost or, or introducing some kind of process efficiency that makes all these upgrades and worth it? Right. And you'll see a lot of customer, a lot of companies are kind of refactoring old products, right? So we can use IBM as an example in their integration space. There's products like MQ and App Connect and Data Power and things like that. Things that you used to buy separately. And now they're, they're saying, let's bundle all these together and sell it as a package. That increases the cost of the package as well. But, but they're refactoring for other reasons, right? So when you talk about IBM purchasing red hat for $34 billion, they are very incentive to make everything work on Red Hat, right? So you'll see a lot of these traditional products are trying to be refactored into microservices to run on Red Hat OpenShift. And there's a lot of struggles technologically with that. And really are, is your maintenance dollars going to fund innovation in your products or are you funding the software vendors, other investments? Right. A lot of this is just, it's all leading into vendor lock and they want to keep you stuck with you as long as possible. And really what we're hearing is, you know, the sport's just not what it used to be. There's not selling as many of these products. The more mature experience, higher value resources, they're generally the ones that let go from the manufacturer. So we're hearing a lot of difficulty with quality support as well. So these are some of the challenges. If you could forward the slide, Mike, please. Thank you, sir. Let's talk about the vendor playbook, right? What is it that they're trying to do? What are they trying to get out of the relationship with you? And then we'll talk about how you can get some of your leverage back. But really they want to retain their maintenance stream at all cost, right? They want you to renew 100% of the content that you have with them and by the way, they want to grow that footprint by 10 to 15% year on year. So what are the things that the vendors are doing to do this? What are these lock in tactics? Right. So we start with things like enterprise license agreements, right? So we're going to bundle everything you buy from us in the manufacturer into this one agreement. We, we're not going to give you line item price, we're just going to give you a bottom line price and everything's going to be included, right? But to get these discounts and participate into these programs, you are going to have to buy new content, right? So the software manufacturers, they need to show new license revenue growth to their stockholders. And there's a lot of different ways they do that. One of it is by saying, right, if you want to maintain your level of discount, you're going to have to buy some of these new products, right? Or they'll bundle and refactor these, these products, right. To recognize new revenue. So you might be an MQ and an App Connect customer today and you're doing just fine with that product. And IBM comes and says, I have this new thing called Cloud Pack. It runs on Red Hat openshift. I'm bundling a lot of stuff in there so you'll get everything you have and a bunch of stuff more whether you need it or not. That's kind of up to you. You, they get to recognize new revenue and both these tactics of the enterprise license agreements and having to buy new product to retain your discounts or bundling or refactoring your old product into their new footprint and their new form factor that's going to make you do it, you know, technology olympics to get it up and running. They both drive shelfware and increase the vendors financial leverage that they have over you, right? So you'll, you'll, you'll see. We'll talk about a bunch of different ways that they do that, but audits are one of them, right? So if you've been in this game for a while, you'll notice that, you know, a few months before renewal time, we seem to draw that audit card, right? And what they do is they like to come and say, oh, you know what? We found a couple problems that you know, are gonna, you know, you're gonna have to pay up on. But you know, we can probably, you know, if you agree to renew that ELA and buy these things that we really want you to buy, we can kind of make that audit penalty a lot less painful for you. And I don't have to tell you how complex their MIC making licensing, you know, there's, there's folks, you know, Mike's in business because software mega vendors have made it so complex, so difficult for you to stay compliant. You really need that expert help that folks like Mike and Matrix360 can bring to you. Right. So you throw on top of that different types of tactics like I'm going to delay your maintenance renewal. So you know, normally I'm going to send that maintenance renewal out about 95, 75 days ahead before it's due. Now, where we're seeing customers not getting their renewal until a few weeks left in the cycle, it gives you almost no opportunity to evaluate what they're doing, especially if they're starting to throw new content into, into your bundles and such. How do you evaluate that? How do you make sure that that's going to bring some type of value to your, to your organization? Right. So you know, this year you paid $8.5 million for your maintenance. Okay. The vendor is going to want to get 9.7 back from you this next year. How are they going to do that? Right. So what they'll do is they'll increase products, the cost of products that are very strategic for you when you try to move products that you're not using anymore. Right. And they use leverage to do that. And, and what does that mean for financial leverage and how do they do that? Right. So leverage is really your list price minus discount. Right? So IBM has a list price, they're going to give you a discount. Let's say we're going to give you a 50% discount off of what list price is. Right. And then you're going to move on. And then next year comes around, you're going to want to drop a product. Then they're going to say, well, you know, yeah, I know you want to drop $200,000 from that product, but we still really need to get our 9.7, our 8.5 million minimum. So we're going to increase the cost of your maintenance on these products that are strategic that you want to keep. There's little or nothing that you can do about that unless you've negotiated a not to exceed contract when you originally bought you, when you originally bought that product. So that leverage is really, really important. Right. And we're going to show you different ways that you can get that leverage back. Okay. So, and another thing that you're going to see is a big push to subscription based licensing. Because once a manufacturer has you on subscription based licensing, you're really stuck. You have to keep paying whatever they choose to charge you for as long as you have that software on the floor. So, you know, if you go from this year, you go from a perpetual license to a term license, and then you realize, hey, this is not really a good deal for me. Well, you're stuck until you can migrate off of that software, replace that solution some way, right? You're just stuck paying whatever the subscription cost is for as long as you want to want to be on that software. So those are some of the tactics that the manufacturer is going to use to lock you in. And we'll go to the next slide and talk about some of the things that you can do to kind of protect yourself and maybe get out of some, you know, win that leverage back a little bit, right? So you see up at the top there, proactive compliance management is a must. That's, that's where Mike and his team comes into handy, comes in so handy for you, right? You know, if you're compliant, that's a major leverage the manufacturer doesn't have over you anymore, right? Then there's, you kind of have to understand your technology alignment, your financial alignment and things of that nature. So when we talk about technology alignment, right? Are your business goals and technology that you have in alignment with the manufacturer's roadmap? Right. So as an IBM customer, for example, if you're not enthused about going to Red Hat OpenShift, understand that at some point you are going that way if you're going to follow their roadmap, right? So what you really need to do, you need to start doing this. And we, you know, in the old days when we all wore blue suits, we used to go out to the business and we would talk to the business, not the IT shops. We would talk to the business and we would say, hey, in this new version of this analytics tool, you're going to have these features that are going to be able to drive this business value within the organization, okay? That's just not happening anymore. What you're seeing now is the business not. Is not. Isn't even aware that there's upgrades going on, right? It is upgrading because the manufacturer is not supporting their version or for some other reason. But they're not upgrading because you're getting a feature or function out of that box that's going to drive the business value, right? So you must really start demanding those feature function roadmaps from your manufacturer. Know where they're going with this and is your investment, what, how much investment you want to make, to stay on that vendor's roadmap. Right. And correlate business value with that investment and ongoing support cost. Right. I can't tell you how many times I get on phone with the customer and I said, well, this last upgrade that you did from DB2 version10.5 to DB2 11 5, what were the features and functions that you were looking for? Or this Cognos upgrade that you just did, what was the business asking for? 9 times out of 10 that answer is, we're upgrading because the manufacturer not supporting us anymore. Right? That's really the answer that they're getting. And you have to analyze your support ticket history. What is your cost per ticket and are you getting value out of that? One of our customers was paying nearly $1.5 million a year to IBM for maintenance for a particular. And when we're onboarding customers into our organization, we go through a PMR case history analysis. What that means is we take a look at the last two years of tickets that you opened up with IBM and we're looking for things like, you know, frequently open tickets that have the same results or tickets that have never had a root cause analysis, etc. Right. And what we find is, you know, this customer had opened up two tickets, so it paid $1.5 million. They opened up two tickets and they were on two versions back. So they weren't getting value out of any upgrades. They were kind of landlocked and couldn't upgrade. When I asked, why did you open only two tickets? And well, you know, we're kind of customized and manufacturer can't really help us very much. We tend to solve our own problems, which is true because of one of those two tickets. They solved themselves. So what was the value that they were getting for that $1.5 million a year? It was next to nothing.

Right.

What they really needed was access to security vulnerability remediations. That's the only thing that they really needed. And after you go for a certain period of time, the manufacturer ends support, they'll give you an extended support contract. But after that first year, you're not getting those, those critical fixes anymore. Right. So how do you identify the software's leverage? Software vendors leverage. So understand what you're paying by line item. You got to get rid of the bundle type pricing, understand which one of these products, what are you paying for each of these products? These, these products that are strategic or critical. And all this shelfware over here, what are you paying for this? And you, you know, so it's really Important to understand that know what a product's list price, okay? That's the most important thing that you can do. You should always assume that at some point you're going to be paying list price for a software product and list price minus your discount. Discounted cost is the manufacturer's leverage, right? So if you're excited you're getting a 50% off discount, understand that 50% discount is going to go really fast away, really fast when you start dropping these products that are on the shelf. Okay? And you want to negotiate price protection on new and strategic products. You know, we're not telling you the technology is bad, we're not saying that at all, right? But if you've chosen a technology and you plan to be on it long term, protect yourself, get some contract terms, you know, get some help negotiating that contract and getting not to exceed for those strategic products, not to exceed maintenance increases. Most of all, prove the technology works. Before you invest in any of these new bundles or refractor products. I can talk to you about several of our customers that tried to move their sterling B2B file management software onto a Red Hat openshift container into Azure and I failed miserably. They had to move back. So make sure before you're investing dollars into these bundles and these refactored, you know, you know, re platform your own, the same stuff that you're currently running, make sure it works, make sure you have enough licensing in most cases, what you're going to find when you're moving to a traditional VM, to a container based deployment, you're going to need additional license to do that, right? So know what, you're going to know what that is, know what the cost of migrating is, what is it going to cost you from a time and resource perspective and most importantly, understand what the business value you're going to get out of this. So you're going to make this big investment, you're going to have a huge technology uplift and shift. What are you getting out of it? Can you recognize value out of it from a time and resource perspective? And most importantly, understand what the business value you're going to get out of this. So you're going to make this big investment, you're going to have a huge technology uplift and ship. What are you getting out of it? You know, can you, can you recognize value out of it? Okay. And then if at all possible, avoid subscription licensing, retain your perpetual rights. You know, if you're a VMware customer, this is probably, you know, top of mind right now. With Broadcom, going into subscription based licensing and you know, so a lot of decisions to make there. Do I go to a Nutanix, do I go to some other, you know, virtualization technology? Do I bite the bullet and go to containers? So there's some decisions and there's folks out here like us that can help you with that. But yeah, if you can avoid subscription licensing and retain your perpetual rights, do that wherever possible. Mike, you can Ford and you know, happy to take questions as we go along. We're going to talk a little bit about how you might be able to, you know, really unlock some budget potential with third party maintenance, you know, and, and I'm, I'm specifically talking about IBM, HCL and VMware here when we're talking about this. But Gartner has been for the last several years producing a market guide that kind of highlights the vendors in the third party maintenance space. It, it focuses on IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle. So this is a great read. You're welcome to go to origina.com and pull this down and look at this report. But you'll see they're pretty clear about saying procurement organizations that aren't at least evaluating third party maintenance as an option are potentially leaving a significant amount of money on the table, money that can be invested in innovation that is going to drive business value to the, to the, to the business. So Mike, you can move forward, please. And of course we wouldn't mention that market guide if we weren't the leader in this space. Right. We have been for the last five years. So I'm just going to. This is the, this is the original sales pitch here. I'm going to tell you who we are and what we do. So we are a third party maintenance and support organization. We have two primary use cases, we have a lot of use cases, but the two primary is a support extension. You know, the manufacturer's not supporting our product anymore. We still need access to things like security, vulnerability, remediations. We have to be able to pass our PCI audits, our HIPAA audits, our NIST audits. So we need to be able to satisfy the compliance involved with, you know, remediating security, etc. So the other use case that, that's really predominant with us is we call it save to invest. Right. So you've decided, you know, your technology roadmap is not in alignment with the manufacturers. But how do you, how do you, how do you get the funds to invest in that innovation, those new products and things that, that move to cloud, whatever it happens to be. Well, you can use a third party support provider like us. Save yourself 30 to 50% off of what you're spending today and that money can go directly into investing into new solutions that are going to drive business value. And what do we look like? So we're an organ. We support over 800 products from IBM, HCL, VMware. We support them distributed in the mainframe. We have a massively, massive, deep technical bench behind us. And you know, I mentioned earlier those more mature experience, higher value resources that get let go. We've been the beneficiary of a lot of them. So many of the folks that work for us actually wrote the products that you're using today. They've been involved in this technology for 20, 30 plus years. And we're definitely recommended. We have a significant customer base. If you could go to the next slide please. And we're getting close here. So this is what we really help our organizations do, right? Kind of get, you know, optimize your, your maintenance spend and we do that on both sides of the fence financially as well as technology. Right. So we can give you confidence in your technology roadmap. Are you making the right decisions? Whether it's stay with the manufacturer, move on to a replacement. And we don't sell any replacement software products. We're not a software sales organization. So it's not us trying to pitch you leave IBM and go somewhere else. That's decisions that you make. Right? But we can give you confidence in the roadmaps. Where's the manufacturer going? Where are you going? Where's your business going? We're going to give you that first class maintenance experience. We built in a lot of consultative value into our program. So it's not just about fix me when I'm broke, but can you help me enhance the experience I'm delivering to my end users? And most importantly from that technical technology side of the house, you know our risk based defense in depth, holistic security approach. We give you access to a vulnerability advisory portal. You're going to be so secure when you come over to us. And that's really what you're looking for when, when I'm leaving the manufacturer, how do I get my security vulnerability remediations? And that's where we help you out there. Okay, but we can also help you on the financial side. You're in procurement, you're in purchasing. You need to understand what is my cost exposure visibility by product group. Can I really break apart this 20, 30, 40, 50 million dollar ELA and start you know, buying back some of my leverage. We can help you with that. We can help you with things like renewal, contract negotiations, advice, fix me when I'm broke. But can you help me enhance the experience I'm delivering to my end users? And most importantly, from that technical technology side of the house, you know, our risk based defense in depth, holistic security approach. We give you access to a vulnerability advisory portal. You're going to be so secure when you come over to us. And that's really what you're looking for when, when I'm leaving the manufacturer. How to guidance, you know, how can we, how can we get you an immediate cost reduction but more importantly set you up for the next several years to reduce that cost exposure and that leverage the manufacturer has on us. So we work with you on those things to provide a maintenance value optimization. Next slide please. And finally, you know, what are the motivations for customers going to third party support providers really? Cost reduction, cost reduction, cost reduction, it's such a big thing. You know, you have to be able to have funding to improve and modernize your environment. The declining support performance is right up there on the list of reasons people are coming back to us or coming to us. But really lately it's really been the difficulty negotiating fair contracts and these law, you know, the fallout from license settlements and things like that. It's really, you know, people are just getting tired of being beat up by these big software vendors. They're just feeling beat up right now and the relationship has deteriorated. You know, we used to have a client rep that used to come and visit us and cared about a business. And now I just see, you know, young people trying to sell me new licensing and things like that. So these are the reasons people come over to us. And I think that's the content for today. We can now open it up to questions.

Larry, I have a couple of quick questions for you.

Sure.

So is there a couple of products like when we look at our clients environments we'll see like say Cognos in an environment, most of our clients, when we see that they're running two or three versions behind and they're continuing to pay support and IBM wants increased support cost each year so it's increase at 5, 10% and they're running way behind. And I think that would be an example of a scenario I get my.

Security vulnerability remediations and that's where we help you out there. But we can also help you on the financial side. You're in procurement, you're in purchasing. You need to understand what is my cost exposure, visibility by product group? Can I really break apart this 20, 30, 40, $50 million ELA and start buying back some of my leverage, where.

A client, you know, could potentially talk to you guys and potentially reduce that support cost by 30 to 40%? Is that a fair, fair statement?

It's, it's very fair. And I promise everybody on this phone, I did not give Mike any money to mention the word cognos. But that's a perfect example. It's just a perfect example, right? It's a high end visualization tool. Most customers that have it rarely unlock all the features and functions it has. And most of those customers also have a subscription to Power BI or Tableau. There's usually three or four, five different visualization tools. So you're generally kind of paying a little bit more than what you're getting out of that box. A perfect example is one of our customers, Valvoline. They've been with us for about nine years. They're on a version 10.2 of Cognos, you know, that was released in 2012, I believe. They came on board with us nine years ago and they said, we're just not getting value out of this product. We can help you with that. We can help you with things like renewal, contract negotiations, advice and guidance. You know, how can we do, how can we get you an immediate cost reduction, but more importantly, set you up for the next several years to reduce that cost exposure and that leverage the manufacturer has on us. So we work with you on those things to provide a maintenance value optimization. Can you, can you support it while we, while we evaluate new features? Absolutely. Or new replacements. Excuse me. Absolutely. We could. So I mentioned briefly that consultative value of our program. Right? Unlimited service requests. Those are how to questions. I'm not broke, I'm not down. I just need to know how to do something. How do I turn on this feature, how do I prune this database, how do I add these users or recluster my servers for better performance, things of that nature. And we also offer meet the expert sessions. Those are consulting hours that are actually built in. Next slide, please. And finally, you know what are the motivated support contract for no additional charge. So Valvoline started turning on more features. Lo and behold, they're using more cognos than they ever have in the past. Okay, fast forward nine years later, they're still paying us 50% of what they paid in IBM nine years ago for the Cognos. So they're. Their costs remain flat with us over all those years. And they just recently used for customers going to third party support providers really. Cost reduction, cost reduction, cost reduction. It's such a big thing. You know, you have to be able to have funding to improve and modernize your environment. The declining support performance is meet the expert session to re platform that 12 year old piece of Cognos to a Kubernetes container in aws.

And I brought up Cognos specifically because we see a lot of clients that have it that are looking at alternatives, but they have business processes that are embedded in it. So they're not looking to upgrade it, they're looking to maintain it as they figure out plans to move to a more modern platform like Power BI or something like that. Are there other products similar to Cognos that our clients would be wise to look for in their environment that you guys, you know, support? Like, you know, other than just Cognos, that's one that I know. But I got to guess there's a couple of other products out there that are very, very similar to that in terms of old legacy systems. They're just not upgrading, but they're paying this support tax to, you know, either you say that they're, you know, get security patches or support exposure for various compliance reasons, right?

Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a bunch of them. One that comes to mind right away is the information server product line. Right. Data stage, quality stage, ETL tooling. Right. And data cleansing tools. You know the, the old, the old concept of export, export, transform and load has kind of gone the, you know, the way the past as we get into more data, more modern data warehouses and things like Snowflake and things like that, who are, are really doing a lot of the transformation on their side of the house. So and if you look at what we, what we do is we help you look at the manufacturer's roadmap as well. So if you look at how long the current version, version 11.7 has been out in its traditional VM format and now the same version 11,7 they've tried to refactor to run on top of Red Hat OpenShift and what you're seeing is, you know, the features and functions that are going to be available in the two different paths are becoming very different, right. So if you haven't bought into this new technology roadmap that they're going, you know, your products, you know, your on premise product is kind of dying on the vine a little bit, right. Your, your old version of that. So that's another thing to really look, look for as well. You know.

Any HCL products like where IBM sold off product to HCL that you know, I'm guessing is right up.

There on the list of reasons people are coming back to us or coming to us.

They sold off non strategic assets that HCL is probably just milking for revenue streams around maintenance. Right?

Yeah. So I'll tell you, there's two very particular products that we're just getting a lot of. So one is their digital experience. That's the old Webster portal and content management product. HCL has come out and said, you know what, here's where we're going as of June of this year. So June 30th this year they're not going to offer perpetual renewals anymore. You're going to have to buy a subscription license, then you're locked in forever, the prices are going up and all that kind of stuff. And then to take that a step further, further they said well as of June of 2025 we're only going to support one version and that's version 9.5. But really lately it's really been the difficulty negotiating fair contracts and these law, you know, the fallout from license settlements and things like that on the cloud native version. So if you want to stay in that technology, you know, not only are you going to have to meditate really, you know, people are just getting tired of being beat up by these big software vendors. They're just moved to a subscription based licensing but you're going to have to refactor to a cloud based, you know, container based format. Right. A lot of expense for technology that's you know, a little bit old in the tooth. And you know, most of the people that are running it are it, you know, it's supporting something old. They have very similar to as dominant. Right. So you know, IBM lost the email wars, Microsoft, everybody's moved to Microsoft Outlook. But there's this whole group of domino customers that have built workflow applications that run great, they run their business, they're embedded, really hard and expensive to move to things like ServiceNow and stuff like that. So you know, current version of Domo's version 14, we're still supporting a customer that's version 6.

So I think those are a couple of good examples. Now I would assume, you know, we talk about, you talked a little bit about leverage in your presentation and particularly one of the leverages that the vendor has is audit. Now I would assume that making a switch, one of the biggest concerns that anybody making the switch would have would be the threat of being audited by IBM if they move to third party support. Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of how that can be alleviated?

So a couple promises I can make with fairly certain competence. Right. If you've been audited in the past, you're going to be audited again. Especially if they found something, if they haven't seen you do some things like work with the Matrix Data360 to get your license metric tool in order and all that kind of stuff, they're going to keep coming back. Can it raise the audit? Well, there's anytime you drop any content, whether you're dropping it, feeling beat up right now, and the relationship is deteriorated. You know, we used to have a client, because you're not using anymore, you're coming over to third party maintenance. You know, you don't have to tell the vendor, hey, we're, we're not, we're not renewing this product because we've got a third party maintenance. It's not going to matter. You're going to say we're not renewing this product. They're going to see their number drop from 8.5 million to 6 million million that used to come and visit us and cared about a business and, and now I just see, you know, young people trying to sell me new licensing and things like that. So these are the reasons people come over to us and I, I think that's the content for today. We can, we can now open it up to questions. They got to recoup it some way. They're gonna find, they're, they're gonna, you're gonna draw the audit card and you're going to, you know, you're going to have to battle with that. So we don't see any increase in audit activity. You know, we have, you know, an audit defense service that we've, you know, we've, we've been successful with. So we know how it all works and we can, the most important thing is working with metrics data360 to, to really be compliant before you make your moves. Right. So that, that's the best coaching there.

One last question. You dropped a Broadcom a couple of times and I think I have a couple of quick questions for you.

Sure. Right.

So it's there, is there a couple of products like when we're, when we look at our clients environments, we'll see like say Cognos in an environment, you know, we're having a lot of conversations with our client base that's really struggling with VMware. Tongue in cheek, say Broadcom's work, good software goes to die, unfortunately. But we have a lot of clients that are struggling with the change to subscription process for core licenses. You know, seeing anywhere 400, 500% increases in some cases is original. Most of our clients, when we see that they're running two or three versions behind and they're continuing to pay support and you know, IBM wants increased support cost each year, so it's, you know, increase at 5, 10%. Picking up Broadcom for third party support, is that what you were alluding to?

Yeah. So we are supporting VMware. There's other Broadcom products that we've looked at and for one reason or another we get the question, do you support CA on the mainframe? That's unfortunately because of the, the types of contracts. They have unique one off type contracts and things. You're kind of stuck there. But yeah, VMware is wildly popular right now with us. I'd say a significant number of our new conversations are really around VMware and people are moving relatively quickly on that. They have a renewal coming up and they know once they're locked in, they're locked in. It's just the way it is. So we can work with you. I mean, there might be some strategic things that you want to keep locked in with the manufacturer, some things that you want to die on the vine and have somebody support and get it out of the game. So different things that we can work with, Jan, in that space. Excellent.

Thank you. And I think for our clients, you can see why this is, you know, an organization that we're happy to introduce you to. We believe that there's an opportunity to drop a lot of cost and maintenance, particularly in these couple of these scenarios that we're talking about older technology that you're not upgrading or you plan to modernize, but it's going to be a period of time and you know, not be stuck on these maintenance, maintenance way. And they're running way behind. And I think that would be an example of a scenario with Windows. So if anybody has any questions, please feel free to reach out. We're happy to, you know, set up a call and have a deeper dive discussion. But you know, thank you Larry, for your time today. We really appreciate it and thanks everybody for coming out.

Thank you so very much for having us. Really appreciate it.

We're a client, you know, could potentially talk to you guys and potentially reduce that support cost by 30 to 40%. Is that a fair, fair statement?

It's, it's very fair. And I promise everybody on this phone. I did not give Mike any money to mention the word Cognos, but that's. And looking forward to helping your customers out any way we can.

Excellent. Thanks, everyone.

A perfect example. It's just a perfect example. Example. Right. It's a high end visualization tool. Most customers that have it rarely unlock all the features and functions it has. And most of those customers also have a subscription to Power Bi or Tableau. There's usually three or four or five different visualization tools. So you're generally kind of paying a little bit more than what you're getting out of that box. A perfect example is one of our customers, Valvoline. They've been with us for about nine years. They're on a version 10.2 of Cognos, you know, that was released in 2012, I believe. You know, they came on board with us nine years ago and they said, you know, we're just not getting value out of this product. Can you. Can you support it while we. While we evaluate new features? Absolutely. Or new replacements? Excuse me. Absolutely we could. So I mentioned briefly that consultative value of our program. Right. Unlimited service requests. Those are.