Wondering what the impact is of a pandemic on the license count or even what amount of money did I spend this year and did I get the value ?
Having worked in the past and still today with traditional software packages in the cloud and on premise, we're pushed to forecast the number of licenses at the start of the new contract for usually a longer period of time (1-3-5 years).
We all know that this is virtually impossible as we have no idea what will happen - look at our current situation, there is no way that anybody would have predicted COVID-19 a couple of years or even months ago and the financial impact it would have to most organisations.
Keeping track of the real consumption on a monthly bases is key to stay in control of your license spend.
In the graph below, you'll find a real case of license consumption and spend over 1 fiscal year for different parts of the organisation (cross the world). You will notice that some parts of the organisation are continuously increasing license count as they are expanding the use cross their departments (ESM), while other parts are fluctuating due to seasonal activities, slower than predicted adoption (cultural) or simply because they are not yet finding the correct balance between their as-is and to-be situation, resulting in a much longer time needed to grow to the correct maturity level.
Within the traditional context it would be extremely difficult to consider all these variables upfront and forecast correctly the amount of budget you would need.
With a next generation cloud platform the choice is yours. There is no need to predict the future or consider all these variables. The choice is yours, you decide how fast you want to grow the use of the platform or how long it will take to get to the optimal situation.
