A Concorde Solution for Linklaters

“When we embarked on this project, with compliance and financial risk mitigation our key aims, we knew that cost savings may also be a result. We didn’t however envisage the extent to which Concorde Solutions would streamline our IT assets. Ultimately we’ve achieved savings of more than £600K over a 3 year period”

Will Hitchcock, Head of Global Application Systems


The Starting Point – Global Compliance

Linklaters has built a global reputation for unsurpassed quality, and are regularly invited to tender for high-profile corporate projects where their reputation is of paramount importance. Linklaters has long had an interest in software standards and corporate governance initiatives to support in-depth tendering processes, and were keen to achieve FAST certification as a globally recognised endorsement of excellence.

Software Asset Management is a key aspect of maintaining corporate governance and software standards. Linklaters determined that to achieve these exacting standards, it was necessary to implement a software asset management process to ensure software compliance, identify unnecessary application costs, mitigate risk and align asset management processes for future growth.

Orhan Moye, the IT security manager with original responsibility for license management, describes the enormity of the task: “Each software company has different rules and regulations, and with more than 700 applications used by 6,500 staff across the world, simply establishing software and hardware assets can be a mission, let alone identifying users.” With this in mind, and tight timescales to meet, Linklaters decided to outsource a large part of its asset management activity to achieve their goals. “Concorde Solutions were able to offer an end-to-end solution, providing a structured programme with clear objectives and processes to follow” explains Moye.

Harnessing IT Asset Management for Business Advantage

In order to bring long term cost advantages, it was first important to deliver an overall picture of software and hardware assets on Linklaters networks, enabling rationalisation of these assets prior to implementing software compliance. The following three-phase programme was delivered:

1 Electronic Audit of the company’s 6,500 laptops and desktop PCs and servers, world-wide. This delivered a comprehensive asset register and identified all known hardware globally. The Citrix environment was also monitored for application usage.

2 Comprehensive global Data Analysis of all software applications. This identified software duplications, shortfalls, and under usage of software applications. When reconciled this provided substantial financial mitigation and P&L savings of £100’s of 000’s per year.

3 Implementation of an Ongoing SAM Compliance strategy. This phase ensured Linklaters was harnessing its new-found asset management knowledge to deliver future business advantage.

Through reducing software support and maintenance costs and eliminating excess software license requirements, Linklaters achieved immediate savings in excess of £300k and financial mitigation in excess of £600K.

Mitigating Risk and Planning for Future Growth

In delivering this project for Linklaters, Concorde Solutions enabled software and hardware rationalisation, achieved total software compliance and provided a complete and accurate database of IT Asset Information.

Ensuring that this comprehensive new knowledge acquired stayed current, and future risk of non-compliance was eradicated, was a high priority for the law firm. Concorde Solutions’ implementation of Software Organiser and an automated data integration tool addressed this issue. As an automated auditing platform, the tools and processes assure future compliance, enable appropriate purchase, deployment, upgrade and removal of software assets, and provide full monitoring of usage on all applications preventing the purchase of unnecessary software.

In addition to the huge savings that Linklaters will realise every year, the law firm has successfully aligned their IT asset management processes to grow with their business.