Red Hat agreements are often highly customizable in larger organizations, resulting in each agreement being unique. The intricacies of these bespoke agreements can be critical in minimizing annual license costs.

Through our Red Hat contract review service, we will provide:

• A clear baseline of current license entitlement.
• A breakdown of unique clauses and their impact to your licensing.
• Potential consolidation opportunities or risks from conflicting support levels.
• License restrictions beyond the license metric and quantities that need to be adhered to.

To fully understand your compliance with Red Hat and minimize subscription costs, it is necessary to periodically review the estate. Through our Red Hat ELP service, we will help you understand your environment by guiding you through the data collection process and providing an in-depth report detailing:

• The license consumption of your estate.
• Any potential issues relating to inconsistent support levels.
• Identified opportunities for estate optimization (e.g., potentially ring fencing some VMware clusters, vCPU reductions of unnecessarily large VMs).

Combined with an in-depth contract review, you will receive a comprehensive ELP detailing the various risks and opportunities in line with publisher audit methods.

While Red Hat’s licensing models may not be the most complex in comparison to most of IBM’s portfolio, the lack of an exact data collection methodology often results in assumptions from ambiguities that are likely to inflate the final position.

Our service supports clients through Red Hat audits by:

• Validating any findings and claims made.
• Clarifying and managing the data provisions to limit the amount of ambiguity in the data set, thus reducing the amount of “worst case assumptions” being made.
• Challenging any “worst-case” assumptions made by the auditor to ensure that license requirement calculations are based on realistic assumptions.

Unfortunately, due to the comparatively low costs of Red Hat subscriptions, optimizing renewals is often deprioritized. However, this can be a missed opportunity as most modern environments have the potential to reduce annual subscription costs by 10-20% without any excessive administrative overhead.

Through our ELP service and additional interviews to determine the future plans, we are able to provide comprehensive guidance on your renewal strategy:

• Whether to consider multi year subscriptions or remain on an annual subscription basis.
• Providing technical support to calculate the current requirements and requirements for any future projects in order to right size your estate.