
Establish your Effective License Position (ELP), negotiate a better contract and protect from audits.
Quest licensing can often be challenging with its numerous licensing metrics and highly manual data collection process.
Matters are not improved when considering the nature of its most prevalent product, Toad, and how easy it is to lose track of deployments even with the most stringent of controls in place.
With Quest’s longstanding presence in the market and an active history of mergers and acquisitions, it is possible for companies to end up with a diverse range of legacy contracts (all with valid terms and conditions) leading to confusion and potential conflicts.
However, often these legacy contracts contain beneficial terms which would be lost if the company were to renew under current terms.
This all creates a difficult situation to navigate. Our consultants will help you to:
• Create a clear baseline of entitlement
• Identify any inconsistencies and unfavorable clauses that need to be renegotiated
• Detail any legacy terms and conditions that should either be preserved or renegotiated, depending on their value to your estate
One of the most difficult parts of managing Quest compliance is accurately determining software deployments and access points.
Many of our clients find themselves in situations where they run multiple Toad deployments, but end up losing visibility of which editions are deployed where, or perhaps they have deployed software on Citrix servers but have not implemented correct controls to limit access. All of these factors lead to potential risk within the estate.
Through our Quest ELP service, we will help you understand your licensing compliance by guiding you through the data collection process:
• Indicating the critical data points for determining license consumption
• Clarifying the intricacies of the various license metrics
• Creating an ELP that details your current compliance against your entitlement
• Identifying potential consolidation opportunities or unnecessary shelfware within the environment
With the acquisition by Francisco Partners and Elliot Management in 2016, Quest’s audit activity has ramped up significantly and in several cases has progressed to court proceedings (e.g. Nike and Fairview Health Services since 2018).
Quest audits can be aggressive, and often result in improbable findings based on impractical, hypothetical worst case scenarios. In such situations, customers are left perplexed as to what is actually happening, with their confusion compounded by a lack of visibility resulting from custom discovery scripts and overwhelming license terminology.
Don’t get overwhelmed. Talk to our Quest consultants today.
Independent expertise, market intelligence, and a focus on agreements that protect you well beyond the signing date.
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.
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.
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.
Book a call with one of our experts today. Fill out the form and we’ll be in touch within 24 hours.