How much does your organization spend each year on technology? Not just new technology but maintenance and subscription renewals as well?

 

If you’re a medium or enterprise-level corporation, it’s probably not an insignificant amount

 

For that matter, relatively speaking, a lot of small businesses can also point to technology as a good chunk of their operating expense

 

But now the more uncomfortable question…are you using all of that technology you’re paying for?

 

I was going through my invoices last week and realized that I’m still getting charged by our old hosting provider even though we moved our website to another platform several months ago

 

It’s a small monthly charge but, if I hadn’t caught it, who knows how long I would’ve kept paying those fees

 

Now imagine if that were to happen in a larger organization. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen in large organizations, there’s not much left for the imagination

 

A few years ago, we were doing some consulting work for a client who’d heavily invested in a premier financial platform that was running on their on-premise servers

 

They’d paid seven figures for the initial license fee plus a year’s worth of consulting for customization, implementation and testing

 

And every year since they’d been paying close to six figures for annual maintenance

 

During our review we noticed two invoices our client had received from the same software supplier

 

One was for the annual maintenance, but the second one was for annual subscription fees

 

What had happened was, during the year they were going through their implementation, the supplier released a cloud version of the same product

 

And got the finance department to sign up for a one-year subscription so that they could start using the software right away

 

With the idea being that everyone would get moved to the on-premise version when it went live

 

But that road from on-premise to cloud is usually a one-way street. Rarely do you see an organization go the other way

 

So they went live, but everyone kept using the cloud version

 

And because there was a disconnect between the business and IT, the subscription would auto-renew each year and finance would pay the renewal

 

At the same time, IT would get an annual maintenance invoice for the server-based version and that would get paid as well

 

Now I know that a lot of you are hearing this and thinking about a time when this might have happened in your organization

 

Or you’re wondering if it’s happening right now

 

Folks, it’s September, which means a lot of your IT contracts are going to be coming up for renewals

 

And if there’s ever been a year when it was absolutely critical that you only pay for what you’re using…it’s this year

 

If you’re going to survive 2020 and still be standing in 2021, you have to get a handle on your IT spend

 

But you’ll never be able to do that until you have a handle on your IT contracts

 

And that’s where I believe we stand head and shoulders above everyone in this space

 

Because I designed a platform that gives your procurement team everything they need to properly manage contracts…and they’ll do it for pennies on the dollar

 

So take 5 minutes to see how OneView works

 

And if you need some help with your year-end renewals, reach out to us. We can help with that too

 

Mohammed Faridy

[email protected]