What we solve ·Where do I put the budget?
Forge · Build
How much of your software and AI spend can you cut without breaking anything?
We were told to bring the budget down and every owner defends their application.
The real spend, not the contracted one: what capability you pay for twice, which renewal is leverage and what is better shut off, renegotiated, consolidated or built.
Technology spend rationalizationSend this page to whoever decides
What you receive
- The spend inventory with annualized cost, owner and renewal date.
- The map of capability paid for more than once.
- The renewal calendar ordered as a negotiating sequence.
- The decision sheet with saving, cost and risk per item, including the cost of operating whatever is decided to be built.
The proof that applies here
- License elimination program worth more than 100 million dollars a year in a global financial institution.
- IT operations leadership at the scale of 60,000 servers.
- Two products taken to the Gartner Magic Quadrant: how the price gets built on the other side is also known here.
How we solve it
The method, not the promise.
- The inventory gets built against the general ledger, not against the application catalog. The two rarely match.
- Real usage gets cross checked against what is contracted, idle cloud included.
- It gets sorted by function so that capability paid for twice comes into view.
- The renewal calendar gets turned into a negotiating sequence: what gets touched first and with what argument.
- Item by item, the decision is made between shutting off, renegotiating, consolidating or building, and each one comes out with its number.
Use this today, without hiring anyone
The four spend lines that never reach the inventory. Look for them this week in your general ledger: between the four, they usually explain the entire reduction target.
- Idle cloud. Environments left running that nobody uses and reserved capacity sized for a peak that no longer happens. It is the largest one and the least political.
- Licenses assigned and unused. Not the ones contracted: the ones with an assigned user and zero activity in ninety days. Ask the vendor for that figure in writing and compare it against what you contracted.
- Automatic renewals. List the dates for the next twelve months. Every one that passes without being negotiated is leverage lost to the calendar, not to a decision.
- Capability paid for twice. Make the list by function, not by vendor: storage, signature, ticketing, messaging. The duplicates show up when you sort by what something does and not by who sells it.
The most expensive mistake in this exercise gets avoided before it is made. If a build instead of buy decision comes out of this, demand the three year cost of operation before approving it. The cost of software was never the license, it was the maintenance nobody was doing.
This sounds like you if
- The portfolio is past a hundred applications and some functions are covered more than once.
- The technology budget has to come down and every owner defends their application.
- The cloud bill grows faster than usage and idle consumption does not come broken out.
Before you hire
Consolidating lowers spend and raises dependence: every saving through concentration comes with its risk named in the same document, not in the next one.
Whoever resells licenses has a stake in the renewal. The firm does not resell technology and takes no commission from any vendor, and that is in writing: it is what makes the recommendation to shut something off worth the same as the recommendation to renew it.
Of your renewals in the next twelve months, which one comes first and what do you have ready for that conversation?
If the problem is a different one
The vendor's dashboard shows green and the operation keeps going down.
Vendor contract and performance audit
My team signs service agreements we cannot enforce afterwards.
Workshop: how to audit your vendor
The areas built their applications with AI and the person who made them left in March.
Self built software debt