Company Profile
This globally-renowned financial services company – which has more than $5 trillion of assets under management – has been working in close partnership with Anglepoint since 2018. The collaboration has seen Anglepoint design and implement a streamlined IT Asset Management (ITAM) program, which delivers greater transparency to the organization, ensuring its software and cloud assets are cost-optimized and in a constant state of audit-readiness. The relationship between the two organizations has subsequently evolved so that, today, Anglepoint provides a fully managed service for each of the client’s top 20 publishers, which together account for more than two-thirds of its annual software spend.
As part of its managed service offering, Anglepoint undertakes ongoing compliance reviews of each of the financial service provider’s top publishers to proactively ensure that usage aligns with its licensing entitlement, with no risk of non-compliance or overspend. In 2023, during the review of the client’s Veritas estate, Anglepoint identified a significant and unexpected spike in usage. Veritas noticed this too and proceeded to invoice the organization for the additional consumption.
Upon careful investigation, Anglepoint was able to prove that this increase was due to a flaw in the publisher’s data collection methods, rather than a reflection of actual usage. Because of this discovery, the client was able to avoid costs in excess of $250k and now has extra assurance that its Veritas licensing position is both accurate and compliant.
With more than 18,000 employees and 400 different software publishers, this organization’s software estate is hugely complex to monitor and manage, and any discrepancy between consumption and licensing entitlement could expose the company to unnecessary financial risk. With limited resources internally the client relies on Anglepoint to ensure that such discrepancies are spotted and remediated.
To streamline its ITAM processes and reduce this exposure, Anglepoint now manages the organization’s tier one publisher relationships, which constitute 68 percent of its total software spend. This service includes an annual compliance review of each deployment to ensure the company is not over- or under-licensed and is prepared for any potential audits. Veritas is one of the publishers under Anglepoint’s management, as the organization does not have in-house expertise and is a significant user of its NetBackup and IT Analytics products under a Front-End Terabytes (FETB) capacity model.
In June 2023, Anglepoint kicked off its annual compliance review of the client’s Veritas estate, which included the analysis of consumption data provided by the vendor to the client. As Anglepoint began to examine this data, it showed a notable surge in NetBackup usage when compared to the two previous years even though, in practice, there had been no significant changes to the way the organization used the NetBackup solution.
Veritas also noticed this uptick. In August 2023, it issued a bill for $250k to cover this out-of-license consumption.
Anglepoint also identified a second challenge. Veritas had granted the company a limited number of free NetBackup IT Analytics product licenses for use in test environments. However, with no paper trail relating to these licenses, Anglepoint raised concerns that the organization could face unplanned costs at some point in the future.
The increase in NetBackup consumption was a surprise to both Anglepoint and the client, as there had been no discernable changes made to its Veritas environment since its previous review in mid-2022.
Upon detailed investigation, it became apparent that there was a flaw in the logic within the nbgdeployutil , which gathers and analyzes master server information regarding capacity. Under the Veritas FETB capacity model, charges are determined by the number of primary copies of backed-up data; it does not matter how many duplicate copies are in existence. However, in this instance, the utility was mis-categorizing secondary backups stored on Oracle Exadata NetBackup Domains as primary copies, creating the false perception of inadequate licensing.
Anglepoint’s expertise and deep understanding of the organization’s IT estate meant this anomaly was quickly identified and escalated to Veritas, who in turn immediately investigated and acknowledged the error. As Anglepoint works in close collaboration with the client’s procurement as well as Software Asset Management (SAM) and product owners, they were also able to advise the company to delay paying the additional invoice until all investigations were complete. Without this close working relationship, it is feasible the discrepancy would have passed unnoticed, and that the invoice would have been settled with no questions asked.
To prevent future occurrences, the organization plans to upgrade to the latest version of Veritas NetBackup, which addresses the nbgdeployutil bug.
Furthermore, to address the second challenge around the lack of documentation relating to the IT Analytics licenses, Anglepoint advised the financial services provider to seek written clarification from Veritas of its license entitlement, including expiry dates.
Cost Avoidance: Anglepoint’s deep expertise and close collaboration with internal stakeholders facilitated the swift identification and remediation of the consumption anomaly, averting over $250k of unexpected costs.
Audit Readiness: Ongoing compliance reviews ensure a comprehensive understanding of the Effective License Position (ELP), positioning the organization to manage potential audits.
Cost optimization: Ongoing reviews also help the organization pinpoint any areas of under-consumption, enabling it to optimize ongoing software costs.
Greater transparency: Through Anglepoint’s guidance, the organization now has much greater visibility and certainty over its IT Analytics licenses.
This organization’s software estate is hugely complex to monitor and manage, and any discrepancy between consumption and licensing entitlement could expose the company to unnecessary financial risk.
Software License Management
Anglepoint’s software license management services provide deep license management expertise to deliver unrivaled cost savings right to your bottom line.