Four Common Challenges an Enterprise Software and Support Services Agreement Can Solve
As software consumption grows with your enterprise IT needs, ensuring you’re getting the most out of your spend is critical for the health and growth of the business overall. Many enterprise IT leaders realize they require a comprehensive support plan only when the management requirements and costs have grown past a point they can control. To avoid finding yourself in this situation, here are four common signs that it’s time to consider a comprehensive enterprise software and support services arrangement.
1. When Your Staff Can No Longer Support Your Environment In-House
This point may seem obvious—and it’s the common thread linking every section in this post—but when your staff can no longer support your environment alone, it’s time to call in reinforcements. Businesses are designed to grow, but this growth is not painless. As businesses grow, new licenses are added to your IT environments, and over time, this can evolve into a huge mess. Your IT personnel have more to do than try to sort out the mess, and without insider knowledge of what solutions are available, the task is both daunting and frustrating. When your team is swamped with renewals and visibility is somewhere between limited and nonexistent, it’s time to consider a software and support services partnership.
2. Mergers and Acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions mark moments of huge change–not only in leadership and philosophy, but for your IT environment. When two (or more) environments come together, they don’t always mix. Hardware differences are obvious, but even when two companies are using the same software, integrating the systems is not as simple as it should be.
As environments are standardized and consolidated, licenses can overlap, causing companies to pay twice for services they use, or even pay for services they don’t. Renewals are out of sync, and if the process is repeated several times, keeping up with renewals can become a nightmare. When your environment is causing your IT department to spend more time on it than they should, when it becomes more frustrating than it should be, when it is costing your business thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in services you might not even use, it is time to get software support services.
3. Rapid Expansion
Rapid expansion is a sign that your business is successful. It should be celebrated. It shouldn’t cause problems maintaining your IT environment…but it does. When businesses grow rapidly, IT departments may struggle to keep up with the changes. Licenses may be added as needed both to keep up with growth and to avoid overcommitting when growth ends. This can leave you with a large number of licenses that need to be managed, and your IT department may not be able to keep up.
4. Reorganization
The only thing worse than reorganization is not reorganizing. As aspects of your business are right-sized or otherwise shifted around, your IT department may find itself paying for licenses it no longer needs. If you don’t have visibility into your environment, you may never even know. With managed software support services, you know exactly what services you are paying for and which pieces of equipment are covered so you can make informed decisions about your environment.
The Purpose of Software and Support Services
Adapture is a vendor-agnostic solutions provider with a team of experts that maintain certifications across several major environments. We constantly work to find the latest solutions and take pride in finding the best fit for your environment.
Our proprietary contract management platform, Foresight, tracks contracts and the equipment governed by them including live data like serial numbers, age, contract number, and location codes on a single pane of glass so our clients can have the visibility they deserve.
To learn more about Foresight and software support services from Adapture, schedule a consultation today!
