FinOps, which refers to cloud cost savings strategies, has emerged as a buzzword in just the past few years. But if you’ve worked in IT for a while, you know that strategies for reducing IT spending are nothing new. On the contrary, strategies such as IT asset management, or ITAM — a discipline that closely aligns with FinOps — have been around for years.

What this means — beyond the fact that FinOps is another example of a trendy buzzword that refers to something that’s not actually very novel — is that the traditional ITAM practices of IT operations teams can go a long way toward enabling and optimizing FinOps practices at the typical business.

Indeed, there’s a good argument to be made that ITAM and FinOps are really one and the same, and that the most practical way to operationalize FinOps is to treat it as an extension of ITAM.

Here’s why ITAM and FinOps go hand-in-hand, and how businesses can leverage both practices simultaneously to achieve the greatest overall cost savings.

The quickest way to save money on Oracle licences is to get off its Unlimited Licensing Agreements, a well placed Big Red audit expert claims.

According to Oracle, its ULA agreements are “generally considered an easy way for a large, global organization to support business agility and value creation.” It claimed [PDF] one customer saved $12 million over the three-year ULA term.

However, Craig Guarente, founder and CEO of software licensing advisor Palisade Compliance, argued: “If you’re in a ULA the best way to save money with Oracle is to get out of it. As long as you keep going into the next ULA, you’re going to pay more and more and more, not only more to Oracle but you’re going to limit your flexibility and freedom to adopt different solutions because why would you go buy something else you already pay for Oracle.”

Although seeming to offer a volume discount on Oracle licenses, the ULA more often masks a lack of understanding of the user’s Oracle license position, and where it could negotiate better deals or move off Oracle software, he claims.

Speaking with EDB during the Postgres company’s webinar, Guarente said: “The biggest mistake is inertia. That is, users not understanding if they really need a ULA. I think most ULAs are signed because people don’t have the information they need to make a more informed decision.”

Oracle has introduced seemingly tempting offers under ULA. For example, in June 2021 it introduced frequent clouding points that can be redeemed for support services. The basic rules of the “Oracle Support Rewards” are simple: for every dollar you spend on Oracle Cloud, Big Red gives you a 25¢ credit on your support bill. Oracle customers that sign up for a ULA get 33¢ on the dollar.

But Oracle’s move to the cloud was orchestrated to protect its revenue in services and support, rather than erode them, Guarente argued.

“One of the things they were very clear on is whatever you spend with Oracle on-prem, say a million dollars a year, Oracle wants you to give up all those licences and move to the cloud and spend three to four million… They did not want the cloud to be seen as a disruptor to their business. They made something like $20 billion a year in annual technical support at 95 percent margin. That is a hugely profitable business.”

Also speaking on the webinar, Scott Horn, EDB chief marketing officer, claimed that businesses made about a 50 percent saving on their database costs when moving from Oracle databases to PostgreSQL, the open source database. However, instances used by Oracle enterprise applications such as ERP or CRM would find it more difficult to migrate, he opined.

With organizations facing economic headwinds, CFOs are likely eyeing costly multiyear contracts like those for software and cloud. Use these tactics to retain the benefits while reducing the burden of such contracts.

“IT sourcing, procurement and vendor management (SPVM) leaders must take immediate action to alleviate financial pressure for a six- to 24-month period,” says Gartner Senior Director Analyst Stephen White. “Leaders need to protect their organizations from financial disruption and build resilience for what may yet be to come.” 

If your organization is under pressure to cut costs, consider these three actions to contribute savings or restructure payments in your software and cloud agreements.

IT asset management (ITAM) presents one of the biggest challenges to the federal government, and the Defense Department is no exception. The lack of visibility into the technology deployed combined with a dearth of actionable data is costing the government money that could be spent on modernization and security.

The DOD itself spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on software in an effort to keep pace with the rate of innovation and deliver mission success. But the Pentagon struggles to manage the lifecycle—including security and costs—of those assets.

As the DOD works towards deploying edge technologies, a good ITAM solution will be imperative to building a future force.

With an ever changing world of licensing, staying on top of your licenses can be a struggle. So, how can you stay one step ahead? The number of options available to you is significant, so how do you decide which solutions are best for you to adopt?

With budgets shrinking across the board, CIOs need to do more with less. While technology can undoubtedly deliver cost benefits, failure to manage IT effectively means these savings can quickly be eroded.

The procurement and management of software in particular, is one area in which expenditure can easily spiral out of control. As a result, it’s crucial that CIOs manage their software assets to deliver the maximum benefits for the minimum cost. Here are four practical ways that CIOs can reduce IT costs through software asset management (SAM).

Multicore processors are standard in enterprise server platforms. And, the changes in multicore licensing counts can have a serious ripple effect on a company’s budget, increasing licensing costs by 25 to 50 to 100 percent or more at any given time. However, on the flip side, multicore can also become a source of major savings in licensing costs and bring a bigger “bang for the buck” as well as added value to any purchased licenses.

Multicore essentially builds additional core processing capabilities into a single physical processor. In most cases performance has proven to be better than an equivalent number of single core processors. Over the years, the industry has moved way beyond the dual-core processor, offering quad (four) and hexa (six) core processor technology. Dual and quad-core processors are probably still the most common today, but some manufacturers have processors that contain up to eight cores. Software vendors that base their pricing per processor have had to revise their calculations for determining license requirements when involving servers with multicore processors.

Is it better for local government bodies to use open source or proprietary software? It’s an argument that generates heated opinion on both sides. Supporters of the former highlight the savings that come from getting rid of licenses, while those who prefer the latter argue that proprietary products need little training to use and, generally speaking, boast a wider set of features.

One case study from Italy illustrates the second point of view. Between 2011 and 2014, the municipality of Pesaro, in the Marche region, trained up its 500 employees to use OpenOffice. However, last year the organization decided to switch back to Microsoft and use its cloud productivity suite Office 365.

According to a recently published report from the Netics Observatory – commissioned by the municipality and Microsoft itself – the city administration will be able to save up to 80 percent of the software’s total cost of ownership (which includes deployment, IT support, subscription plans cost, and other elements) using Office 365, compared to its previous setup.

It might sound surprising, but according to the municipality’s head of the statistics and information systems department, Stefano Bruscoli – who was interviewed by the authors of the report – the savings are largely due to the significant and unexpected deployment costs that the administration faced when it decided to rollout OpenOffice and abandon the on-premise version of Microsoft Office that it had used up until 2011.

“We encountered several hurdles and dysfunctions around the use of specific features,” Bruscoli says in the report. “What’s more, due to the impossibility of replacing Access and partly Excel (various macros used on tens of files), we decided we had to keep a hybrid solution, using the two systems at the same time. This mix has been devastating,” he adds.

In particular, having to repaginate and tweak a number of documents due to a lack of compatibility between the proprietary and the open source systems translated into a considerable waste of time and productivity. The management estimates that every day roughly 300 employees had to spend up to 15 minutes each sorting out such issues.

With time and experience, these problems could be countered; still, they significantly affected the efficiency of Pesaro’s offices during the early phase of the rollout.

Also, OpenOffice, according to the report, was slow when used to ‘call’ specific applications the municipality used to manage its various departments. The IT support that had to be provided to employees further added to the migration bill.