A little while ago DSP had an inbound enquiry from a major University wanting a second opinion. They had just been audited by an Oracle Partner and were told that if they don’t buy £100k’s worth of licensing, things will get ugly.
The client engaged us not to audit their environment and confirm if they were under-licenced (they knew they were), but engaged us to actually consolidate and reduce the licence requirement!
The licensing costs were £100k. The consolidation piece cost £74k. The consolidation piece was actually a no-brainer.
Thanks to the insistence of our competitor, we won the consolidation project and our client saved £26k. They also got a little satisfaction in finding an alternative to being held to ransom.
I love this story as it shows there are alternative ways to skin a cat – exploring different avenues and ideas more often than not lead to deferring or avoiding non-essential spend.