Software license optimization for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, VMware, and SaaS estates. Right-size entitlements, eliminate waste, and improve vendor leverage.
License waste is rarely a single bad purchasing decision. It is usually the result of drift: inherited SKUs, weak offboarding, low usage visibility, fragmented ownership, and vendor contracts that were never revisited with hard data. Without cleanup, that drift turns into recurring overspend and weaker negotiating posture.
Most organizations discover license waste only when a renewal gets expensive or an audit gets uncomfortable. By that point, the estate is already carrying years of over-assignment, weak reclamation, inherited products, and unclear entitlement history. UMS helps teams rebuild the license picture across major publishers, determine what the business truly needs, and convert that view into savings, negotiation leverage, and lower compliance risk.
We review how major software products are assigned and used so you can remove needless spend without disrupting the business.
A cleaner entitlement and usage picture gives procurement and finance a stronger starting point before the next quote arrives.
License cleanup reduces the gap between what is deployed, what is owned, and what can be defended when a publisher asks questions.
We help build the reclamation, review, and ownership rhythms needed to stop waste from reappearing after the first savings pass.
We review allocations, entitlements, renewal timing, and known pain points across the publishers that matter most.
We identify obvious waste, gray-area assignments, and audit-sensitive gaps so the team can prioritize the work with the highest commercial impact.
We turn the findings into practical actions for renewals, contract discussions, reclamation, and ongoing license governance.
Across multiple Microsoft reconciliation cycles, UMS helped a regional consumer finance lender reconcile deployment and entitlement data, surface hidden SQL and Office exposure, and turn annual true-up work into a repeatable operating process.
UMS reconciled a regional insurance carrier's Microsoft entitlements and deployments, showed its on-prem SQL Server, Windows Server, and System Center estate could stay on perpetual rights without new renewal purchases if versions stayed flat, and created a transfer-plus-downsize plan for the Microsoft 365 subscription stack.
Multiple mayors, multiple administrations — one constant partner delivering results. UMS has managed NYC's enterprise software portfolio across 80+ agencies for over 25 years, driving $800M+ in cumulative savings through centralized licensing, vendor negotiations, and audit defense. Recently signed a 6-year renewal — their longest commitment yet.
Software asset management is the broader operating model. Software license optimization is a sharper commercial workstream focused on rightsizing, renewal leverage, and spend reduction across the products that matter most.
No. A tool can help, but many organizations already have enough data to find meaningful waste. The missing piece is often analysis, prioritization, and execution.
Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, VMware, and multi-vendor SaaS estates are common starting points because the renewal and compliance stakes tend to be high.
Ideally before a renewal or audit pressure event, but license optimization is also useful when costs are rising and the internal team lacks a clean picture of what is actually needed.
ISO/IEC 19770-1 treats IT asset management as a management-system discipline, which supports approaching license optimization as repeatable operating work rather than one-off cleanup.
ISO/IEC 19770-1CIS Control 2 emphasizes software inventory and control as an ongoing operational requirement, reinforcing that rightsizing depends on discipline around visibility and governance.
CIS Control 2Book a free 30-minute consultation. We'll show you exactly where your savings are — no obligation, no upfront cost.
