Martin/Williams Case Study
Efficient Use of Software Assets
Software licensing costs and annual maintenance renewals were out of control. Martin/Williams needed to improve management of their Microsoft Enterprise Agreement and other licensing contracts. Illegal peer-to-peer downloads were threatening the security of their network, and corporate computing standards needed to be actively managed to improve the efficiency of their design teams.
Corporate Computing Site reduces licensing costs and increases availability of software to staff with K2 – KeyAuditor & KeyServer.
License optimization yields significant cost savings.
Annual licensing fees out of control:
Martin/Williams maintains a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement for volume licensing. They “true-up” their licensing annually with Microsoft by running reports of all the computers that have Microsoft products loaded and report their findings to Microsoft. Microsoft then determines their licensing costs for the next year based on installed copies. The flaw in the process was that they could not identify abandoned copies of the software in order to uninstall them and remove them from their list.
Licensing costs under control with K2:
All of the M/W computers are now supported by K2. Licensing administrator, Libby Lester explained: “Before we started using K2, our annual numbers were just a guess. Now, with K2’s reports, we save money. We can track usage and determine which programs are actually being used at each computer. If someone has licensed software installed that they never use, we reclaim it and repurpose its license to others who will use it, rather than buying more licenses unnecessarily.”
Microsoft Office 2004 Example
- 280 computers
- Only 197 computers touched it in one year
(148 Windows computers & 49 Macintosh computers) - Purchased 200 licenses
- Set “Node-locked” (per-device) licensing to “200”
- Savings: ~$14,320 (80 licenses x ~$179/each)
Business Benefits
With corporate computing standards in place, and an enforcement tool that prevents the use of unauthorized software, M/W designers are able to focus on client projects without the interruptions that can happen on an unmanaged network.
Managing Corporate Computing Standards
The success of software migration plans, as with any corporate computing standard, requires monitoring by plan administrators. Says Libby: “We established a corporate standard for all of our design projects to be produced with Adobe InDesign. While we do have both Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign installed, we monitor the usage of each program with K2 to ensure the success of our designers’ migration to InDesign.”