How ongoing ITAM advisory turned licensing complexity into $41.5M in negotiated savings

SHI's IT Asset Management services helped a biopharma giant achieve significant cost savings, optimize their cloud strategy, and maintain Microsoft compliance.

Challenge:

As a global biopharmaceutical leader operating across dozens of markets, the customer faces a Microsoft licensing environment of considerable complexity – one that doesn't pause between renewal cycles. Having partnered with SHI's ITAM practice through several service extensions, the company recognized that sustained compliance and cost discipline require continuous attention, not periodic intervention. With a current engagement running through August 2026, the customer entrusted SHI with maintaining an accurate, continuously optimized license position across their Microsoft environment while preparing for what would prove to be one of the most challenging Enterprise Agreement renewals in recent memory.

Solution:

SHI delivered ongoing ITAM advisory services built around a foundation of rigorous license forensics and continuous environmental analysis. Rather than treating compliance as a checkbox exercise, our consultants combined SHI tooling with the customer's own data outputs to maintain a precise, up-to-date picture of actual software usage.

That environmental intelligence proved critical when the customer entered EA renewal negotiations. The Microsoft licensing landscape had shifted materially, with reduced program flexibility, tighter pricing controls, and multiple baseline price increases making favorable outcomes harder to secure. SHI brought a disciplined, evidence-based approach to the negotiation table: detailed license forensics, value-over-time analysis, and a clear articulation of both partnership priorities and specific areas of dissatisfaction – including concerns around Purview – that gave the customer legitimate leverage in a constrained environment.

Beyond the renewal, SHI's continuous analysis of the customer's infrastructure produced meaningful optimization opportunities. An assessment of their cloud strategy identified a compelling case for migrating portions of their workload from Amazon Web Services to Azure, unlocking Azure Hybrid Use Benefit licensing in the process. As the customer re-architected their SQL clusters, SHI identified a further opportunity to use technology to restrict database movement to limited nodes within each cluster, a change that significantly reduced architectural complexity and, by the customer's own estimate, saved three to four months of resource work on subsequent clusters by enabling parallel builds rather than sequential ones.

SHI also implemented a proactive compliance control for Visual Basic Community edition installations: when deployments are detected in the environment, the relevant compliance teams are automatically notified, enabling immediate remediation and targeted education on appropriate licensing for the intended use case. The customer also participates actively in SHI's Customer Advisory Board, where they both contribute to peer discussions and draw on the collective experience of other organizations navigating similar ITAM challenges.

Outcome:

The results of SHI's ITAM engagement speak across both cost and compliance dimensions. Following $548,000 in cost savings and mitigated risk achieved in 2023 and an additional $1.66 million in 2024, SHI's service delivered an additional $908k added to the bucket in 2025, representing a 557% return on the service cost invested over the same three-year period.

A significant portion of the 2025 achievement came from two elements: Microsoft 365 E5 subscriptions and SQL Server, which were realized savings at their EA renewal. These opportunities arose from the expert guidance and customized, bespoke approach from SHI’s licensing consultants that meet the customer’s representatives on a basis that reflects their needs and availability.

A reduction of 1,780 Microsoft 365 E5 subscriptions at renewal was achievable through optimization of the customer’s environment at that time, resulting in a reduction of around $789k annually.

SHI helped the customer secure $41.5 million in total negotiated savings under some of the most difficult EA conditions in more than two decades. Despite a deliberate reduction in M365 E5 license counts, the customer achieved a 31% discount off M365 E5 Software Assurance and standard licensing, along with a ramped M365 Copilot discount structure of 35% in year one, 28% in year two, and 22% in year three. Annual ramped discounts of 28%, 27%, and 26% across the three-year term further reduced the overall EA cost by 2%. SHI also secured a Not to Exceed pricing amendment for M365 E5 at current price less 26%, and preserved a previously negotiated Copilot pricing amendment. These structural protections will materially strengthen the customer's Microsoft position well beyond this renewal cycle.