UMS vs Crayon.

Crayon is a strong choice when the problem is breadth, not a single negotiation. According to its 2024 annual report, Crayon operated in 46 countries with roughly 4,000 employees and served customers from SMEs to large enterprises, offering software procurement, IT cost management, cloud services, and data and AI solutions. Since July 2025 it is part of SoftwareOne, which reports a combined organization of roughly 13,000 employees across 70+ countries. If you need to buy and manage Microsoft, AWS, or Google licensing globally, migrate workloads, or stand up SAM tooling with a partner that also transacts the licenses, that is exactly what this model is built for.

Crayon also has a genuine optimization practice. Its Software and Cloud Economics segment covers license spend optimization, cloud cost work, and support for clients in vendor audits, and the firm holds top-tier vendor accreditations, including Microsoft's 2024 global Scale Solutions (LSP) Partner of the Year award. For organizations that want optimization advice bundled with an existing procurement relationship, that convenience is real.

An operator model wins when the outcome you need is a number, not a program. UMS is engaged to reduce a specific audit claim, renegotiate a specific renewal, or rescue a specific ServiceNow SAM deployment, and it has done this work for 25+ years across 200+ vendors: outcomes include an audit claim reduced from $35M to $7.5M and an OpenText renewal cut from $2M to $115K. Audit defense in particular benefits from a firm whose only revenue comes from the client's side of the table.

Incentive alignment is the structural difference. A provider that earns most of its gross profit on license resale has a genuine business reason to keep the transaction relationship healthy with vendors. A shared-savings operator is paid only when documented spend goes down, so recommendations, negotiations, and audit positions all point the same direction. UMS has documented $800M+ in savings for New York City area organizations and reports a $1.3B+ company estimate across 2,400+ engagements on this model, estimated across 25 years.

Crayon's economics, per its own investor reporting, rest primarily on software and cloud license sales, direct to end customers and through channel partners, with consulting and optimization services generating fee revenue on top. Clients typically pay for advisory and managed services as scoped engagements or subscriptions, and the resale relationship generates margin on the licenses themselves. There is nothing wrong with this model; it funds the global footprint and tooling clients value.

UMS charges a percentage of documented savings and nothing upfront. If UMS does not reduce your spend or your audit exposure, you owe nothing. This concentrates all engagement risk on UMS and makes the business case arithmetic simple: the fee is always a fraction of money you verifiably kept. The tradeoff is that UMS only takes engagements where a savings outcome is plausible, so it is not a fit for pure procurement, resale, or infrastructure projects.

Ask Crayon: what share of your revenue comes from selling licenses for the vendors you would be advising us on? Who staffs the optimization work, and how is that team measured? How does the SoftwareOne integration affect our account team and tooling? Can you support us in an audit brought by a vendor you resell for, and how do you manage that tension?

Ask UMS: what percentage of documented savings do you charge, and how is documented verified? What happens if you find nothing? Who exactly works our audit or renewal, and what is their vendor-side experience? Ask both firms for references from engagements shaped like yours, with the savings or audit outcome quantified.