Jaguar Land Rover save £30m optimising SAP

SAP

Jaguar Land Rover save £30m optimising SAP

The iconic British car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover saved a whopping £30m by optimising their SAP licensing position prior to negotiation. The savings, along with other benefits of SAM including stronger commercial awareness, audit readiness and reclaiming 500 unused licenses a month – were all claimed by the Jaguar Land Rover team during a fireside chat with Snow Software Group VP Joe Francis.

Joe was presenting at the UK leg of Snow Software’s series of “Snow Storm” events; global user conferences for Snow customers. If you dislike weather based puns I’d avoid working at Snow Software!

The theme of the day was addressing the ‘disruption gap’ – the growing proportion of IT based spend being made outside the IT department and subsequent disruption of traditional IT management.

Snow showing leadership?

Snow has done a good job of capturing the zeitgeist with their disruption gap message, but I was waiting for the punch line. What is it that Snow can offer that uniquely addresses this growing trend in IT spend and how will they empower their customers to do something about it?

Yes, total network visibility of IT assets is critical for managing non-IT spend, but after highlighting one of the biggest trends to ever hit IT, I felt they missed an opportunity to demonstrate leadership and uniqueness in this area.

Put another way, the disruption gap is a good way of describing why the IT industry need to embrace SAM, but not necessarily with Snow. Perhaps this is leadership from Snow after all, in that a rising tide lifts all boats. With headquarters in Stockholm, the team has grown from about 150 a few years ago to nudging a mind-boggling 700. Freshly laden with new venture capital, they are clearly going after this market in a very big way.

ITAM in a cloud era

Snow outlined a high level of view of their roadmap, as you would expect this is focused heavily on cloud. Even if you are strategically doing no cloud whatsoever in your company, we’re living in a cloud era – In that all of the large vendors you work with are betting their futures on subscription cloud offerings. As organisations increasingly choose ‘cloud first’ for new projects, Snow is betting the farm on helping their customers get their arms around spend and risk in a subscription economy. The roadmap looks good, but if I were super critical I might say it is based on treading water with competitors rather than blowing them out of the water. I expect more from a market leader, but we shall see the full extent of their cloud strategy when we revisit our SAM Tools Universe competitive comparison later in 2017.

I also hear on the ITAM industry rumour mill that big G, at long last, are threatening to publish a Gartner Magic Quadrant for SAM tools. If true, a great watermark in the growth of this industry and certain to be a good punch up. Snow were politely goading Gartner to consider a quadrant last year, marketing dollars from ITSM industry titans Ivanti and ServiceNow muscling in this market will surely persuade them to pull their fingers out at long last and crack on with it?

Software is eating the world

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is Britain’s biggest car manufacturer, shipping cars like the Range Rover and Jaguar F-Type around the world. JLR disclosed they have been a customer with Snow for two years, that it took 12 months to implement Snow and that they purchased via partner SoftCat.

Jaguar Land Rover is a perfect case study for an industry being thoroughly revolutionised by technology, of software eating the world – a brand that has to navigate electric cars, autonomous cars and smart cars all within the same decade. All of which is underpinned by software, licensing and IP.

Kudos to Snow for hosting a useful customer centric event. Kudos to Jaguar Land Rover in raising their head above the parapet and declaring their savings in such a public forum, allowing the enormous benefits of SAM to be demonstrated. At a time when SAP customers are getting roasted for innovating with cloud (Drinks Company Diageo loses battle with SAP, ABInBev face $600M SAP fine, SAP restrictive practices rile customers. CCL files complaint with Competition and Markets Authority) it’s a great example of SAM and SAP optimisation from a great company.

Jaguar F-Type Image Credit
Jaguar IPace Image Credit

Can’t find what you’re looking for?