Easi
Reduced the amount of manual work and time required for licensing administration.
Background
EASI is a Belgian IT company specialized in multiple domains like application management, cloud & security solutions and IT infrastructure services. EASI was founded in 1999 and has been working with Octopus Cloud since 2017.
Throughout the years it became more and more difficult for EASI to measure the use of applications and servers and calculate the needed licenses to report this usage. This caused them from a license administration perspective a lot of manual work and time.
Main challenges
The major challenge for EASI was to report the correct monthly SPLA usage to their Microsoft SPLA reseller and to be sure that they are in line with the Microsoft entitlements called the SPUR (Service Provider User Rights).
- EASI was looking for a company that can analyze the historical usage reporting of licenses and be able to advise them of potential noncompliance and optimization opportunities.
- There was no SPLA usage reporting tool. Reports were created based on the information available during the provisioning of the services and the Active Directory User Group Memberships. But they were not a true reflection of the real situation.
- Both under reporting and over reporting at customer level could remain undetected by EASI. The biggest consequence for EASI were overpayments to Microsoft and missing revenues due to undercharging customers.
Our solutions
Accurate reporting
The once-difficult license calculation and reporting is now secure and efficient. At EASI we spent now 50% less time into the SPLA reporting and our licensing report has the best Total Cost of Ownership calculated automatically every month.
Different reporting perspective
Octopus Cloud is easy to work with and reporting can be done from broad or from customer per customer perspective. The information is available through the APIs for billing purposes and helps us maximize customer lifetime value.
Reduced risk
Octopus Cloud reduced risk of a high settlement fee dramatically. EASI reduced the potential penalty by 83%.
Final outcome
Jean-Michel Block said "Octopus Cloud was not only the right choice from a tooling perspective but also the right partner in crime to help us to solve the challenges in regards to compliance and licensing optimization when facing a Microsoft Audit. The tool is great to achieve transparency. After the rollout we knew all the information required for the reporting and compliance analysis.”
Jean-Michel Block calls the difference between what it was like before Octopus Cloud View was installed. “We haven’t got any more budget for SAM tooling, but we had to invest to reduce our risk and reduce our Software costs. The need of Octopus Cloud is from a risk management perspective and overall cost optimization. With Octopus Cloud we improved our own license compliance situation, received tons of information for infrastructure and cost optimization opportunities and improved our operational efficiency.”
“We have compared different tools and I have to say Octopus Cloud is the most convenient tool to be used because it is a tool which is fast to deploy, simple to use and the reporting is also clear to understand. You can create a monthly SPLA usage report and split it also per end customer for billing purposes.”
