Global biopharma leader ensures compliance and significant savings with SHI's ITAM services

SHI's IT Asset Management services helped a biopharma giant achieve significant cost savings, optimize their cloud strategy, and maintain Microsoft compliance.

Challenge:

As a longstanding customer of SHI's ITAM services, the biopharmaceutical company has completed several service extensions, with the current one extending our partnership until August 2026. Recognizing the consistent value and outcomes delivered by SHI, the company entrusted our team with the critical task of maintaining continuous compliance in their Microsoft environment.

Solution:

SHI enabled steadfast compliance support for Microsoft by leveraging our consultative expertise in licensing, ensuring risks are minimized and environments remain optimized. Our ITAM services included:

• Coordinating all resources and tools by utilizing project management methodologies.
• Combining SHI and customer tool outputs to maximize the opportunity for accuracy and actionable insights.
• Implementing effective risk mitigation and cost management associated with potential audits and procurement activities, ensuring the customer’s peace of mind and security.

Outcome:

Following $548K in cost savings and mitigated risks achieved in 2023, SHI's service achieved a further $1.66M in 2024, representing a 949% return on the service cost invested.

A significant portion of this came from SHI’s recommendation to reconsider their cloud strategy to take advantage of moving some of the infrastructure from Amazon Web Services to Azure and utilizing the Azure hybrid-use license benefits (AHUB), which was initiated in 2024. The customer took this opportunity to re-architect the SQL clusters, and through the continuous analysis from SHI, we identified a further optimization opportunity to use technology to restrict the movement of the SQL databases to only limited nodes within the cluster. This not only vastly reduced the architectural design of each cluster, but the customer estimated that it has probably saved them 3-4 months in resource work for subsequent clusters by enabling them to speed up their project program by building two in parallel instead of one at a time. The license requirements are also significantly reduced, providing a direct cost saving at their next true-up.

Another significant ITAM process change was instigated based on SHI’s continual analysis of their environment, and now the relevant compliance teams are automatically notified when installations of Visual Basic Community editions are installed in their environment, enabling immediate action to be taken to remove them, and educate the teams involved on what the install needs to be based on the intended use case.

Our customer is also an active participant in our Customer Advisory Board, where they positively contribute to the sessions, as well as learn from the collaboration with, and showcasing of other customers’ service successes and challenges experienced.