Seven vendors.
£873k a year.
Halved.
An enterprise organisation was running security and productivity software from seven different vendors at a combined cost of £873k/year. Darktrace, Varonis, Mimecast, Sophos, Nexthink, and others. Each vendor had been brought in to solve a specific problem. Nobody had checked whether the problems still existed, or whether one platform could cover them all.
Relevant if: you’re paying for multiple tools that do overlapping things and you’ve never mapped the full list.
Diagram showing licence stack consolidation from £873,000 per year across 7 vendors to £391,000 per year across 2 vendors on Microsoft E5, saving £481,855 per year over a 3-year phased exit programme.
Seven invoices.
Three doing the
same thing.
“Seven vendors, three doing endpoint security in slightly different ways, none of them aware of the others.”
The licence estate had grown by accumulation. Each vendor solved one problem when it was bought. Over time, capabilities overlapped: three vendors were doing endpoint security in slightly different ways. The contracts were on different renewal cycles. Nobody had a single view of what the organisation was actually paying for, or what each product actually covered.
The total: £873k/year across 7 vendors, with significant overlap. Not because the organisation needed that level of coverage, but because each contract had been signed by a different budget holder who never saw the others.
Map every licence.
Exit on schedule.
Full licence audit: every contract, every vendor, every capability mapped against actual usage. The finding was that Microsoft E5 (which the organisation was already partially paying for) natively covered the capabilities of five of the seven vendors.
The consolidation plan was built around contract expiry dates, not arbitrary timelines, so no vendor was exited early at penalty cost. A 3-year phased exit plan was authored with a per-vendor business case for each transition.
The result was a move from seven vendors at £873k/year to two vendors at £391k/year, with Microsoft E5 activated to fill every capability gap left by the departing tools. No service disruption at any point in the transition.
Full inventory,
every vendor
Complete inventory of all 7 vendors: contract terms, expiry dates, seat counts, and capability mapping. Every line item placed on one view for the first time.
Per-vendor exit,
3-year timeline
Per-vendor exit strategy, capability mapping to M365 E5 native features, and a 3-year phased timeline sequenced against actual contract end dates.
Each exit managed
to contract end
Each vendor exit managed to its natural contract end, M365 E5 features activated to fill gaps as each tool was retired. No service disruption across the full transition programme.
The inventory
is the fix.
The hardest part of this engagement wasn’t the negotiation. It was building the inventory. Once you can see everything on one page: every vendor, every contract, every expiry date, every overlapping capability, the consolidation plan writes itself.
Most organisations never build this view because each contract lives with a different budget holder. The audit brings it all into one picture. That picture is the fix.
Questions raised.
- I only have 3 subscriptions. Is this relevant?
- Yes. The principle scales down. A 15-person business paying for Slack, Microsoft 365, and a separate video conferencing tool has the same kind of overlap. The triage conversation is the right place to check whether a review makes sense.
- Does Orchestrix negotiate directly with vendors?
- The engagement focuses on building the case and the exit plan. The client’s procurement team handles the actual vendor conversations, armed with the audit data and the business case. Orchestrix provides the ammunition, not the negotiation.
- What if we’re locked into long contracts?
- The phased exit plan is built around your actual contract end dates. No vendor is exited early at penalty cost. If a contract has 18 months left, that transition is scheduled for month 18. The savings are phased in as each contract naturally expires.
- Is Microsoft E5 always the answer?
- No. It was the right answer here because the organisation was already partially on Microsoft’s platform. The consolidation target depends on what you already use and what your actual requirements are. The audit determines this; it doesn’t assume M365.
Got a similar mess?
Let’s talk.
If you suspect your licence stack is hiding overlap, or you’ve never mapped the full list in one place, the 15-minute triage is the right first step. Free, no pitch, honest answer on whether an audit makes sense.