Utilities Provider Gains Greater Software Visibility and Control Over its Oracle SaaS Estate with Custom Dashboard
Company Profile
This US-based utilities provider—with revenues of almost $4 billion and more than 30,000 employees—heavily relies on Oracle, spending over $30 million each year with this software publisher alone.
Like many organizations, this company has the desire to gradually migrate its infrastructure to the cloud, utilizing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based solutions rather than on-premise deployments. While this has delivered flexibility and functionality benefits, it also means that the company has faced some challenges in software visibility and control over some aspects of its Oracle estate.
Anglepoint has been working with this organization since late 2021, providing an Oracle Managed Service to ensure that the company’s license entitlement aligns with both its deployments and usage. In 2024, Anglepoint has developed a progressive approach and built a custom dashboard to track metrics, helping the organization get a better handle on its Oracle SaaS estate.
In addition to translating Oracle’s raw data into easy-to-digest business insights, this dashboard provides an up-to-date view of all Oracle SaaS permissions across the organization’s infrastructure, making it possible to identify and mitigate over-provisioning.
With these granular insights, the company expects achieve approximately $3.3 million in cost avoidance at its next software contract renewal.
The Challenge
Over recent years, this multi-billion-dollar organization has gradually moved its Oracle applications—starting with the ERP applications—to the cloud; a strategy that has helped the company become nimbler and more innovative. However, this migration meant the company required a different approach to manage its deployments, as it was becoming more challenging to optimize its Oracle SaaS estate.
While Oracle does send the organization raw data about its SaaS deployments each month, this information is very Oracle SaaS expert oriented. Though it does detail the functionality of the software deployed, it does not make it clear if and how it is being consumed. To compound the challenge, Oracle SaaS deployments may automatically grant more permissions than are necessary for the specific functionalities required for the SaaS application to operate. Consequently, the company was concerned that its employees had access to more Oracle SaaS functionality than they needed. As a result, there was a risk that the company would have to pay for more software licenses than it used at the time of its next contract renewal.
The monthly reports provided by Oracle are also hard for internal stakeholders to decipher. The company—spearheaded by a new SAM manager—recognized it needed a mechanism for translating this raw data into intelligent insights and actionable intelligence that could be used to educate different lines of business, application owners, and senior executives about its consumption in their Oracle SaaS estate. With more intelligence at its fingertips, the company would be better positioned to ensure its assets were managed in the most cost-effective way.
The Solution
Anglepoint—the utilities company’s SAM partner of choice since 2021—was brought on board to help address these challenges.
To provide more clarity into the organization’s Oracle SaaS usage, Anglepoint’s first task was to build an interactive Oracle SaaS dashboard, aggregating and enriching the raw data from the software publisher’s own reports with usage-based data collected by Anglepoint’s team of Oracle experts. This single-pane of glass view enables business leaders and application owners to see the commercial impact of their Oracle deployments, identifying instances of over-consumption, overspend and non-compliance. In addition, it places the organization in a position of strength to secure favorable terms during future contract negotiations.
Rolled out in early 2024, this custom dashboard also provides the software asset managemet team with a real-time view of all individual user permissions granted across its Oracle SaaS estate. This allows the team to align permissions with job roles and business divisions, so they can right-size the access users have to the functionality they require to do their jobs.
Insights derived from this custom dashboard should ensure the company avoids $3.3 million in Oracle Cloud licensing costs at its next renewal.
Results
- Instant commercial insights: With Anglepoint’s custom dashboard, business leaders can instantly understand the commercial impact of their Oracle Cloud deployments.
- Proactive decision making: The company can now use actionable intelligence to use as drive better decisions around its Oracle SaaS consumption.
- Greater transparency: The new dashboard allows the organization to see how Oracle SaaS applications are consumed, and by whom.
- Improved optimization: Ability to match Oracle SaaS permissions with job role and department.
- More strategic SAM programs: The software asset management program provides a blueprint for other optimization projects within the organization.
- Stronger negotiations: With insights from the new Oracle SaaS dashboard, the organization is in a better position to negotiate favorable contract terms.
- Cost avoidance: The company has a potential to avoid $3.3 million at its next contract renewal.
With real-time visibility into Oracle SaaS permissions, this utility provider gained precise control over access, eliminated waste, and positioned itself for smarter contract negotiations—leading to $3.3M in cost avoidance.