Case study: Arup slashes licensing bill with Snow

Arup claims to have saved £4m on licensing by weeding out unused software

Engineering firm Arup is spread across the globe, with 92 offices in 42 countries, split amongst five regions; among its successes are the structural design of the Sydney Opera House, England's HS2 rail link and the new concourse for the Hong Kong International Airport. But that worldwide presence is a problem when it comes to software.

It's a truism that as a business scales, looking after the software estate becomes exponentially more difficult. Arup - with 14,000 employees, 12,000 laptops, 6,000 desktop workstations and 600 servers - is certainly one of those ‘scaled' businesses.

Arup's split into five regions was a challenge for effective Software Asset Management (SAM), with enterprise agreements with software vendors conducted on a regional or local level. The firm took on IT consultant Softcat to control its costs, which elected to use tools from Snow Software.

One of the first changes that contractor and former soldier Mark Bonham, global Software Asset Manager, made using the Snow Platform was to track and remove or re-harvest inactive software licences, saving £4 million in unnecessary spend. He has also established a global SAM team, which meets weekly on a regional level and quarterly as a group.

Licensing audits can be a stressful time for the IT department, but one of Bonham's early wins was to handle one from Autodesk. He was able to generate a report showing all of the different installations (67,000 of them) with a three per cent error rate, which the vendor was "more than happy" with. Most of the errors were due to improperly-removed software and incorrect licence keys.

The visibility that Snow provides to Arup has changed the way that it handles licensing. Bonham said, "We were able to see it, remove it, and also because we could see it, we could see whether it was being used or not used. And in a lot of cases, we just removed it."

That visibility provides more information than simply whether or not software is being used. Bonham can also see what version of is installed, and can opt to upgrade rather than investing in a completely new licence: "Suddenly instead of paying £3,000, we pay a few hundred. And it makes a big difference to the software budget."

Bonham has made several changes, using the insights gained from Snow. One of has been to narrow the company's focus to a smaller list of top 50 vendors, which he drew up based on several factors: cost, the number of installations, the software's long-term importance and the vendor's appetite for audits. A report about licences and enterprise agreements with these vendors, generated in Snow, is sent to the UK Director of IT every week.

Looking to the future, Bonham said that VR and the cloud are likely to present his next big challenge. Arup is using an increasing number of cloud-based licences, which have poor visibility; increasing visibility through allocating licences and automating workflows are next on his agenda.