Project "Liberate" for CIOs - reducing licensing costs paper

September 26 2008

Many of you have heard about Project "Liberate", IBM's consulting team that can help you save costs on Microsoft licensing.  If you haven't, you should, because they have helped companies to save billions of dollars in IT budget expenditures, as well as make strategic decisions about user segmentation and desktop optimization.

The Project "Liberate" team recently put together a white paper with case studies from real-world customer engagements.  This ten-page paper can help you save significantly, just at a time when such savings are more and more the focus for businesses.  I went ahead and posted the paper on my Slideshare:

Project "Liberate" for CIOs
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Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  IBM  Add/View Comments [10]

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  1. 1  David Price http://www.meridianitinc.com | 9/26/2008 10:24:33 AM

    This is interesting timing. I was at a customer this week and they commented their MS enterprise licensing was going to cost more than they had expected. I had remained silent but I had plenty of thoughts.

  1. 2  John  | 9/26/2008 6:35:24 PM

    Interesting - and IBM or Lotus has never increased prices?

  1. 3  Flemming Riis  | 9/27/2008 5:03:39 AM

    -Interesting - and IBM or Lotus has never increased prices?

    PVU is the answer to sneaking in license increases when people are looking the other way.

  1. 4  Doug Finner  | 9/27/2008 5:54:33 AM

    'No Charge' in quotes? What does that mean?

    This is a very interesting strategy - don't sell the customer anything but take profit away from your competitor; brilliant! It builds mind share and makes the customer believe you have their best interests in mind next time they need a 'friend' to help out! LOVE it.

    I'm going to pass this along to our CIO; hope he bites.

  1. 5  tonyo  | 9/28/2008 12:13:24 AM

    so.. how benefit does IBM derive from providing this "free" service.

    Last time I looked, IBM wasn't a non-profit organization :)

  1. 6  John C. Cummins http://www.adobe.com/consulting | 9/28/2008 7:44:03 AM

    I used to be part of the Lotus Competitive team (2004-2007) and did a lot of Project Liberate work. The concept is basically, that even if customers stick with MSFT, they can optimize (i.e. reduce) their costs dramatically. The bigger the org, the bigger the savings. This money could be used for IBM, but there were no strings attached. The lack of strings was something the sales guys were not wild about, since there was sharing of the savings with IBM and hence no guarantee it would increase the deal size or even lead to a deal.

    You would think customers would love this idea and some do. Other customers have agendas that don't include saving money. I had one very large German customer, who said it was too complicated to figure out the MS licensing and the CIO was worried about compliance (source of revenue "growth" for all vendors right now) and it was "easier" to just get an EA. Besides, he got a "great" deal and he refused to let us talk to him about it.

    He renewed not for 1 or 3 years (typical renewal lengths), but for 5 years. I seriously doubt the deal was great, as the the list price EA for him would have had him paying $150 million Euros over those 5 years.

    Most parts of the company already had 2007 versions of Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Vista, etc. due to the existing EA's upgrade rights. On top of that, some subsidiaries had Lotus. Even with a "great deal" he must have paid ~100 million for SW he already owned. There was no way that they would upgrade any of their infrastructure to an Exchange 2007 Next within this 5 year period. If only the shareholders knew that the potential to save 50-60 million euros was "too complicated" for this CIO. That would easily pay for people to manage their licenses and any compliance requests...thank goodness I don't have any of their stock. :)

    In case you are wondering, I am now at Adobe Consulting (not sales) and don't work with Lotus, MSFT or any other "collaborative" vendors. So, I am truly independent (this is all my personal opinion/exp and has nothing to do with my employer). :) If you have questions, you can reach me at johncum(at)adobe.com.

  1. 7  John C. Cummins http://www.adobe.com/consulting | 9/28/2008 7:46:35 AM

    Sorry, forgot the word "no"...although I think it was clear from the context that it should've been there.

    "...since there was NO sharing of the savings with IBM..."

  1. 8  Jay Zeltzer  | 10/4/2008 9:14:42 AM

    This is a great offering that IBM provides free to clients.

  1. 9  ORAC  | 10/13/2008 8:02:51 AM

    The Supplier Relationship Director of a multi-national CPG company recently said to me that he has saved Millions of Dollars through this project, and I have heard a Senior Microsoft manager dealing with European Public Sector clients describe the program as "IBM having a whole team of people doing a very good job on this".

    Sounds like a great endorsement to me. Can't you get some headline trade press to pick up the message?