The challenge
NHS South West London ICB looks after 6,000 devices and 6,000 users on behalf of residents across six London boroughs. Software assets were tracked by hand. That made the licensing position slow to assemble and impossible to trust, and Microsoft was the hardest part of it. Several environments had to be reconciled before anyone could answer a simple entitlement question, so compliance risk went unquantified and costs stayed higher than they needed to be. Progress towards a dependable software asset management practice was reactive rather than planned.
Before Certero, we had limited visibility and control over our software assets. Our biggest challenge was understanding our license compliance position, particularly with Microsoft.
— Reece Emson, ITAM Asset/PSL Manager, NHS South West London
What went in
Network discovery first, then CerteroX ITAM and CerteroX SAM, with CerteroX SaaS Management connected to Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud. Certero hosts the platform, so the ICB carries no infrastructure for it.
Onboarding was run as joint work rather than a handover. Data quality problems were fixed at source instead of being worked around, and asset information was normalised across every environment so one record meant one thing everywhere. On that footing the team produced an Effective Licence Position for Microsoft — the first time the ICB could see its exposure as a figure and act on it.
What came of it
Value arrived early. The Effective Licence Position exposed potential compliance costs of roughly £100,000, and all of it was mitigated through data-led analysis and hands-on guidance. Money that would have gone to a licensing correction stayed inside the ICB, and what remained afterwards was a working governance model rather than a one-off clean-up.
Through Certero’s support, we mitigated potential compliance costs of around £100k related to Microsoft licensing. Additionally we accelerated our SAM maturity by several years, which translates into significant operational and financial benefits.
— Reece Emson, ITAM Asset/PSL Manager, NHS South West London
Business benefits
- Full visibility and control over software assets
- SAM maturity reached years ahead of schedule
- Avoidance of £100k in potential Microsoft compliance costs
- Automated, accurate reporting for informed decision-making
- Stronger governance and reduced operational risk
- A continuing partnership with expert SAM guidance
Where the ICB is now
Fragmented manual tracking has gone. Licensing, hardware and the two SaaS applications that matter most are read from one set of records, reported automatically and reviewed with people who do this for a living. The ICB got several years of maturity in a fraction of the time, removed a six-figure risk, and now runs software asset management as a routine part of its governance rather than a project it has to restart each year.