Case Study
Financial institution’s enriched SAM data pays strategic business dividends
At a Glance
Northern Trust at a glance
Northern Trust, a leading financial institution, wanted to design their IT program so that it would work collaboratively with the company’s business decision makers. They chose the Flexera One suite of ITAM and FinOps solutions that delivered enriched SAM data to achieve their strategic alignment goals.
The Challenge
Needed better IT visibility for greater business alignment
Northern Trust was searching for a SAM solution that could provide better visibility into their IT ecosystem, with a focus on software license compliance, increased visibility into technical debt, identification of license optimization savings, desktop software releases, recovery management based on license inventory, support, end of service/end of life and cloud financials.
The Flexera One suite of ITAM
and FinOps solutions provides reliable server
and end-point data that’s easily married with other key datapoints
The Solution
Establish a collaborative strategic partnership
Through a SAM reporting program with one of their software vendors, Northern Trust partnered with Anglepoint, who introduced the company to Flexera to solve the challenges. Northern Trust’s relationship with Flexera quickly evolved into a collaborative strategic partnership, focusing on measurable business outcomes to align with their executive goals.
The Flexera One suite of ITAM and FinOps solutions provides reliable server and end-point data that’s easily married with other key data points such as entitlements, deployments and financials needed to make data-driven decisions.
Northern Trust and Flexera work together to enable what’s been called the Collaborative Quartet—a data model that exists from the sharing of data between the four areas, including IT asset management, IT service management, IT financial management and procure-to-pay. This data sharing enriches all four disciplines.
The Collaborative Quartet creates a pool of consistent, reliable data from the golden sources of each discipline. By working together and sharing the data needed to fill in each other’s gaps, decision makers are empowered.
Northern Trust had also observed that as software publishers move away from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, audits are used to convince customers to accept the new model, leading to an adversarial relationship. To counteract, Northern Trust uses Flexera-discovered license inventory data for IBM sub-capacity licensing and to manage other software publishers so they can provide an effective license position they know is accurate and trustworthy. Compliance is maintained and publishers like IBM gain future product sales without the contention of an audit or damaged relationship.
With business adapters sharing data between the tools that drive the engine of these four disciplines, each set of stakeholders is assured the data they’re using is accurate and consistent across business units.
Jeffrey West Senior Vice President, Technology Business Management Northern Trust
The results
Core SAM needs met, IT business connectors strengthened
Northern Trust’s ITAM program vision goes beyond classic on-premises needs. With Flexera SaaS Manager, they identified opportunities for cost savings, mitigated potential risks, and created an environment where their software licenses are actively managed, regularly reviewed and analyzed.
As their program matures, so does their cloud strategy. Flexera support and engineering teams work closely with Northern Trust to ensure the transition remains smooth, and that Flexera One is meeting their core SAM needs and continues to perfect business connectors to their ITSM and ITFM tools.
Northern Trust continues their journey with the Collaborative Quartet, maturing their related practices and advancing their software publisher management with the help of Flexera.
The logical next step in our maturity is to increase cloud visibility. Through implementing the Flexera One cloud modules, we are adopting a FinOps discipline into our overall practice.
Jeffrey West Senior Vice President, Technology Business Management Northern Trust