Schiavello

Maximising Compliance for Microsoft Enterprise Annual True-up

Background:

Schiavello is a respected and recognised world leader in the design and manufacture of commercial furniture solutions. Schiavello employs more than 1,200 people and is listed among the top 100 private Australian companies.

Schiavello operates from 12 offices and four manufacturing plants in Australia, including a modern 70,000 plus square metre manufacturing and environmentally efficient administrative headquarters at Tullamarine, Melbourne. Construction management, commercial furniture solutions design and manufacturing, signage, IT and group administration are conducted under one roof at this 34 hectare landscaped facility.

“Data^#3 took a very collaborative approach to the software asset management review, helping us to understand the process and working with us to gather data from existing sources and then augment it with automated discovery of installations and usage across the group.”

Bernard Wansink, Chief Technology
Officer (CTO), Schiavello Group

The Challenge:

With enterprise licensing from Microsoft and installations across all its sites and offices, Schiavello has a responsibility to undertake an annual “true-up” or baseline review to determine its licensing entitlements, installations, and finally compliance with Microsoft licensing. Microsoft offers a rebated service for an assisted true-up conducted by Microsoft Gold Partners in Software Asset Management, such as Data^#3.

The Schiavello group of companies completed a thorough analysis to understand all licensing entitlements and software deployments, the review covered all Microsoft technology across the entire computing ecosystem.

Data^#3 analysis assisted the true-up process by:

• Aligning the application road map with strategic planning
• Providing visibility of surplus licenses that can be reused to meet future demand
• Determining licensing shortfalls, and the most appropriate method of remediation.

“Office is the most widely used application in our environment”, says Bernard Wansink, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Schiavello Group, “we need to keep across our whole ecosystem and this process meets that need.”

The Solution:

Data^#3 commenced the true-up by building a Software Asset Register to record data about all historic and current Microsoft agreements, using Schiavello’s inventory management tool to capture the deployment data required to accurately analyse the compliance position for Microsoft technologies.

While Schiavello maintains good records about software entitlements and has strong, automated processes to manage compliance, it was some years since the company had done a full analysis of its Microsoft licensing position. Such analysis has been historically performed only at the time the company is considering transition to a new major operating system or application release, such as the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7, or from Microsoft Office 2007  to 2013.

The analysis was captured on the Microsoft Effective License Position spreadsheet, and contains full data including numbers of licenses, whether OEM, volume, full packaged product or individual purchase as well as upgrades, downgrades or other license use conditions.

The spreadsheet data underpins the Data^#3 Asset Management Baseline Report, which provided Schiavallo with recommendations about optimising its licensing.

The Outcome:

With compliance in the top percentile of Microsoft customers, Schiavello has the confidence that its software asset management processes are strong. By identifying the conditions that led to the few minor non-compliances, it can further close the compliance gap.

“Data^#3’s knowledge of what we can and can’t do with our licensing, especially in the areas of upgrade paths and managing licensing for suites, is invaluable,” says Wansink.

“With the complexity of Microsoft licensing and compliance management, that knowledge is hard to build up in house, but knowing Data^#3 is totally across it gives us peace of mind that we can continue to maintain our very strong relationship with Microsoft.”

Schiavello can now focus on the next steps in its software asset management journey, which include providing detailed information to the business about its current IT environment and the Microsoft product roadmap, to plan how to meet the group’s changing needs.

Download the Case Study – Schiavello.

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