Red Hat Licensing

Optimize your Red Hat environment

Red Hat’s enterprise level offering of Linux support services and cloud computing makes it a staple in most IT organizations. However, the licensing elements are often misunderstood resulting in suboptimal spend. At ITAA we offer a range of Red Hat licensing services to help address this.

Get Red Hat licensing support

Key Services

Red Hat Contract Review
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:
- License restrictions beyond the license metric and quantities that need to be adhered to.
- 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.
Red Hat Effective License Position (ELP)
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.
Red Hat Audit Support
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:
- Challenging any “worst-case” assumptions made by the auditor to ensure that license requirement calculations are based on realistic assumptions.
- 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.
Red Hat Renewal Support
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:
- Providing technical support to calculate the current requirements and requirements for any future projects in order to right size your estate.
- Whether to consider multi year subscriptions or remain on an annual subscription basis.

Key benefits of our Red Hat licensing service

Understand your license usage

Nobody wants to pay for too many licenses. Regular assessment from our experts will ensure that you don’t have too many, or too few. We’ll identify optimization opportunities, resulting in a potential reduction of your annual fees.

Limit risk & financial consequences

Our independent advice ensures that you do not pay too much for your actual usage, and any non-compliance is reduced as much as possible.

Fully independent advice

Our advice is all 100% independent of any software providers, meaning that we can quickly assess and subsequently minimize the damage of any hidden non-compliance, all without biases. Get to the bottom of what you owe – if anything.

See the results for yourself

We work with a variety of Red Hat customers, across a wide range of industries and specialisms.

By relying on our vast experience, our clients achieve tangible cost savings and real results. Here are a few examples of work we have completed:

Professional Services

We supported an SMB in re-structuring their Subscription renewal, rightsizing the volumes and reducing previous annual costs by approximately 20%.

Finance

We performed an in-depth review of an extensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment with a mix of VMware virtualized environment and physical servers. Our client, a major financial institution, sought to reduce their license requirements to help meet the business’ aggressive budget targets. This was achieved through identifying opportunities for VM rightsizing, DRS VM-Host affinity rules and corrections to CMDB records (which previously caused various inflations).

Finance

We assisted a 60k seat organization with their JBoss renewal, modelling various scenarios in line with the company’s strategy to consolidate their Java Application Server solutions. The modelling we supplied helped the business identify the best route to both achieve the optimal renewal and determine the long-term targets for the consolidation project.

Red Hat Licensing

Optimize your Red Hat environment

Key Services

Red Hat Contract Review

Red Hat Effective License Position (ELP)

Red Hat Audit Support

Red Hat Renewal Support

Key benefits of our Red Hat licensing service

Understand your license usage

Limit risk & financial consequences

Fully independent advice

See the results for yourself

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Expert Red Hat contract support