IBM Internal compliance review

Infrastructure

Insightful commercial decisions on infrastructure deliver long-lasting business benefit.

The trend towards the cloud is well underway, with many organizations migrating their existing on-prem estate. For many businesses however, there is still a need to balance the new world with legacy.

Whether you are considering on-prem, public or private cloud, taking the time to consider all elements of the procurement lifecycle will help you achieve the best results.

Commercial Stages

  • Requirements and market analysis

    The infrastructure market and its suppliers are changing rapidly.

    Be clear on your requirements, making sure they reflect your organizational strategy, before exploring the supplier market. This will ensure suppliers can respond accurately to your requests.
    We provide market appraisal reports, RFIs, RFPs and evaluation scorecards, depending on what stage you are at in the process.

  • Supplier negotiation

    Before negotiating with a supplier, ensure your team understands your longer-term strategy.
    Typically, a 3-5-year contract period is considered.
    We deliver a concise and targeted approach to contract negotiations, including commercial, legal and solution elements. A negotiation plan is developed across the team to achieve the most sustainable outcome.

  • In-life management

    Having an insight into a supplier’s mindset and behaviours is valuable in managing any commercial and technical relationship.
    Our experience with hardware, cloud and hosting providers has helped us develop a Supplier Management Program, which can both be tailored to specific suppliers or adopted more generally.

  • Review and refresh

    As your infrastructure requirements change or migrate, it is a good idea to review support levels. This can often save you money.
    You may have unknowingly moved to an unnegotiated rate after your agreed fixed period of support expired.
    We can produce cost comparison models and recommend the next best steps.

Key benefits

  • Cost management

    Significant investment is often planned months or years in advance, which sometimes means that suppliers can access commercial information before a project goes to tender.

    Having an aligned internal commercial approach balances your initial investment with ongoing run costs, with the goal to deliver maximum value to the final agreement.

  • Solution delivery

    A defined strategy and roadmap which the whole organization supports provides clear information to the market, which they can respond to with solutions and opportunities.

    The approach you take depends on what stage you are at in the procurement lifecycle, but having a robust and consistent process helps ensure you select the best solution and supplier.

Results

Achieving a substantial commercial benefit from cloud migration

  • Problem

    Our client’s strategy was to migrate a substantial part of their hardware estate to a private cloud, while retaining some element of on-premise infrastructure. We collaborated with the technical teams to establish their exact capacity requirements to take to market as the existing supplier wasn’t a Cloud Service Provider (CSP).

  • Solution

    After a review of the CSP market versus the client’s requirements a supplier was quickly selected. The market leading CSP was able to provide a technically scalable and commercially flexible solution that delivered maximum commercial benefit to the client.

  • Result

    Whilst the client couldn’t benefit from supplier consolidation, they maintained leverage with the incumbent who didn’t want to lose existing business, and with the new CSP who wanted to win the new business. We negotiated revised rates and commercial terms and agreed a competitive agreement with the new CSP. The combined agreements delivered a substantial commercial benefit against the previous expenditure, secured discounts on future capacity and met the flexibility and agility targets of our client’s cloud strategy.