Infrastructure and software solutions Value Added Reseller, Trustmarque, announced today that it has helped Bodycote PLC save £411,000 as part of a global standardisation programme to simplify its IT infrastructure. Using Trustmarque’s Commercial Benchmarking service, Trustmarque formulated a long term licensing strategy for Bodycote, allowing the organisation to optimise and consolidate its global procurement of Microsoft licensing which resulted in immediate cost savings, resource efficiency gains and improved licensing visibility.
Bodycote is the world’s leading provider of thermal processing services, providing a vital link in the manufacturing process for virtually every market sector including aerospace and defence, automotive, power generation, oil and gas, construction, medical and transportation. Grown largely through acquisition over 20 years, Bodycote now has over 170 facilities in 27 countries. As organisations were acquired, the IT systems weren’t integrated, resulting in a highly fragmented IT environment. The decision was taken to implement a global standardisation programme to homogenise and simplify its IT systems across the board from the server environment to its desktops and laptops.
“Plant managers would go out and buy the cheapest hardware and software from local suppliers and there was simply no consistency,” explains Garry Joiner, Group IT Services Director, Bodycote PLC. “When we looked into it we found that we were running half a dozen different operating systems across various regions and we had a number of different licensing agreements. Our goal was to put in place one cost effective solution in order to better manage the IT environment. As our Microsoft Agreement for the UK was coming to an end we needed to get a solution in place quickly, we decided to have two Microsoft Enterprise Agreements with the option to consolidate to one by including the North America business unit in 2012.”
Bodycote initially engaged a different supplier, but felt progress wasn’t quick enough and that the organisation had not fully understood that this was now a much larger, international requirement. Exasperated by the lack of urgency, Bodycote picked up the phone to Trustmarque and within two weeks they met and had a plan and roadmap in place of where the organisation needed to be.
“Trustmarque achieved in two weeks what our previous supplier failed to achieve in over eight months,” comments Joiner. “Trustmarque’s efficiency, understanding and knowledge was miles ahead of anything that we had experienced previously. The response and communication has been fantastic; Trustmarque set our expectations, we were kept updated on what was happening and Trustmarque never missed a deadline. We were really impressed.”
Trustmarque’s team was able to formulate a long term Microsoft licensing strategy for Bodycote by understanding the future technology strategy and commercial objectives of the business. After a period of consultation with Microsoft, Trustmarque defined a licensing solution that accurately reflected Bodycote’s on-going technology requirements, allowing Bodycote to optimise and consolidate its global procurement of Microsoft licensing.
Joiner continues: “Trustmarque really helped fight our corner with Microsoft. We started with a cost of £1.86million, but Trustmarque helped us get this down to £1.63million and then negotiated further commercial concessions on top of that. In addition by speculating a further 100 users at the beginning of the agreement we were able to benefit from additional discounts. As a result our costs reduced to £1.45million from the original £1.86million – saving us £411,000.”
The new Enterprise Agreement has also enabled Bodycote to upgrade all of its servers, PCs and laptops when previously it didn’t think it had the licences to allow it to do this. Bodycote can also now upgrade its hardware and its operating systems to the latest version of Microsoft Office every three years under the new agreement.
Moving forward Bodycote is working on a SharePoint project, a consolidation project and the implementation of Microsoft Lync with Trustmarque, which is expected to deliver further savings in terms of resources.
Joiner concludes: “The financial cost savings that Trustmarque helped us achieve are nothing compared to the operational and support savings that we have seen since we implemented the new EA. It is harder for us to put a price on this but it is invaluable to our business and now we are working on further technology projects with Trustmarque. In fact, I’d be hard pushed to name something that we are not working on with Trustmarque!”