How Auto Renewals can catch you Off Guard
We were speaking to one of our partner consultancies the other day, who informed us of a client they are working with who were planning to move away from their very expensive, incumbent software Tool. The client was rather shocked to receive a sales email 89 days prior to renewal stating that they had auto renewed at 90 days and offering them the opportunity to purchase additional seats/artefacts. They have had to delay their plans for migrating off the current tool and face another year of an exorbitant bill.
The moral of the story here is that all organisations need not only to be monitoring which of their applications are on auto renew, but also actively manage the notice periods.
How Essential can Help
Essential allows you to do this in its Supplier License Management view. The view has two tabs, the second tab “Contract Renewal Outlook” provides an easy-to-use view of applications and technology products, by supplier, with the contract renewal date, the cancellation date and the review period date. Using this will avoid mistaken renewals from occurring.
Essential Supplier License Management View
‘Suppliers’, provides an overview of all applications and technology products supplied by each vendor, including details like renewal dates, renewal types (e.g., auto-renewal), number of seats, and cost per product. One of our clients uses this as a starting point for Procurement to identify other products already in use within the company that could serve similar needs, and to facilitate discussions with product owners with the aim of reducing cost.
More Way Essential Can Help!!
In case you have not heard of Essential, it is an Enterprise Architecture Management Tool that was built by architects for architects (EAS was originally an EA Consultancy that was founded in 2000). It has been listed in the visionary quadrant of the Gartner MQ for Enterprise Architecture Tools for the last five years. It provides all the features that would be expected of a top performing EA Tool, but at a considerably lower price. Our unique business model has enabled us to offer it for an annual subscription of just $19,999 per year – for unlimited users and unlimited EA data.
If you are an EA or CIO in a cost-conscious organisation that wants a great EA Management Tool for a reasonable and predictable price, contact us for more information or a demo.