Vendor Management-as-a-Service
Why VMaaS?
Work smarter: Identify your high-value vendors and invest in vendor management efforts where they will deliver the best return.
Get more value: Vendor-client relationships should be mutually beneficial. We help you overturn the power imbalance and negotiate favourable commercial terms.
Streamline and scale: Maximise efficiency by establishing your vendor standard upfront, rather than per engagement, and standardising terms and conditions across vendors.
Access skills: Most organisations don’t have the time, resources, or inclination to stay on top of changing vendor T&Cs, processes, and offerings. With VMaaS, you can tap into specific vendor skill sets across multiple vendors.
Why now?
Rising vendor audits: 52% of organisations have been audited more than twice in the past 18 months. VMaaS keeps you in a continuous state of licensing optimisation, compliance, and audit readiness.
Get ahead of the renewal cycle: Don’t just accept the standard vendor uplift. Plan ahead and use renewal time as an opportunity to renegotiate based on actual software usage so you never pay for more than you need.
Stop vendor lock-in: Strong vendor management practices help you minimise vendor lock-in and remain open to best-of-breed software vendors as you build out your digital transformation roadmap.
Why Invictus Partners?
Proven results: We’ve saved our clients more than $1 billion in enterprise software costs since 2014. The vendors won’t tell you if you’re paying too much, but we will.
Extensive experience: We have deep knowledge of each vendor’s unique licensing models, contractual nuances, sales processes, and negotiation strategies.
Flexible service models: We can provide resources to support an in-house vendor management function or manage your vendors for you as a service.
Vendor-agnostic: As objective advisors that do not resell, audit or implement software, we act only in your best interests.
Software vendor management best practices across the entire vendor management lifecycle.
Most organisations use software solutions from a variety of vendors, ranging from the big global players like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM to niche suppliers that address specific business requirements. This results in a complex multi-vendor ecosystem and a matrix of usage data, reporting, and integration requirements that are difficult to manage.
With Invictus Partners Vendor Management-as-a-Service (VMaaS), your organisation can establish a common approach to sourcing strategy and management of vendor relationships and maintain a single point of control over active and planned vendor contracts and services.
We help you move from transactional to value-based partnerships with your vendors. No more focusing on short-term gains and marginal cost savings, ad-hoc licence reviews, reactive audit defense, and last-minute renewal preparation.
With VMaaS, your organisation has:
- An understanding of spend distribution and business value
- A defined contract lifecycle management system and renewals calendar
- Scorecards to monitor performance and keep vendors accountable
- A process for quick identification and resolution of vendor issues
- Open communication and balanced partnerships with vendors.
Reduce the cost and complexity of managing multiple software vendors by outsourcing vendor management.
Your organisation has made large investments in enterprise software, and these investments need to be protected. Even if you have good Software Asset Management practices in place, each vendor has its own ways of selling, licensing, auditing, and negotiating that you need to be able to adapt to. And with that, each vendor brings its unique set of challenges, such as compliance tools and reporting requirements, changes in metrics and use rights, and restrictions buried deep in legacy contracts.
These vendor-specific challenges require vendor-specific expertise. Some enterprises have employees who have come from the vendor side, but effective vendor management requires these specific vendor skill sets across multiple vendors. With Invictus Partners, your organisation gets on-demand access to vendor-specific expertise, experience, and knowledge that you don’t (and aren’t expected to) have internally. We are your software vendor “brains trust” that you can tap into at any time.
Our team can help you as much or as little as you want – Invictus Partners VMaaS is adaptable to your organisation’s needs. We can be your representative and take over communications with vendors as a fully managed outsourced service, or we can support you in designing and implementing an in-house vendor management organisation as a hybrid model or with resource augmentation.
“Invictus Partners conducted a review of software contracts across IBM,
Oracle, Microsoft, Red Hat, HCL Tech, and SAP and identified where the
organisation could derive efficiencies from modifying licence arrangements
with several vendors.” NSW Land Registry Services.
Chat to an expert
Our Software Vendor Management Managed Services
We provide expert licence management and advisory across all software vendors, and at any point along your software journey. Our Vendor Management Services are available as separate engagements or as an end-to-end service.
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Vendor Evaluation & Selection Support
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Vendor Contract Management
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Vendor Relationship Management
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Vendor Performance Management
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Vendor Risk Management
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Vendor Evaluation & Selection Support
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Vendor Contract Management
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Vendor Relationship Management
4
Vendor Performance Management
5
Vendor Risk Management
Software Vendor Evaluation & Selection Support
Choosing an enterprise software provider is a time-consuming process, and there’s a lot of money at stake. Your organisation needs a tried and tested process for selecting the most appropriate vendors. Invictus Partners can facilitate this for you.
We help you go to market, research and identify suitable vendors, develop RFx documentation, evaluate responses, and negotiate the best deal. We can also adapt this process to help you select suitable partners, such as system integrators.
Invictus Partners puts you in the driver’s seat with data-based insights into your current and future needs. Our team deep-dives into vendor proposals to help you make informed decisions based on optimal licence, entitlement, and compliance terms, not just price.
Our Software Vendor Selection process:
Make better purchasing decisions with software procurement best practices
want to be confident that you’re sourcing and deploying the right increments of software in the right areas? Invictus Partners helps you control and optimise software procurement by reviewing and consolidating all of the different purchasing arrangements across your vendors.
We support your procurement and category management teams to execute licensing purchases effectively, from defining purchasing requirements, and associated definitions of use through to reviewing order forms for risk and accuracy before signing.
Software Vendor Contract Management
Invictus Partners can ensure your organisation is contracting on the best-value licensing models and arrangements, covering everything from the right number of users through to the relevant processor requirements for your organisation, while complying with vendors’ usage terms and conditions.
This involves:
- Regularly negotiating contracts to ensure a documented and consistent understanding of mutual expectations between the vendor and client.
- Managing the contracts and renewal dates, the level of demand for the products and/or services provided, and the cost accrued.
- Reviewing software renewal options and provide advice on licence or entitlement model changes for the vendors that may be of benefit.
Renewals and contract lifecycle management for software vendors.
Organisations need to understand the various licensing, subscriptions, offerings, and pricing changes that occur throughout a software agreement’s duration. Invictus Partners can help you stay on top of the contract lifecycle by identifying where licences can be cancelled or repurposed, optimising support and maintenance agreements and providing trustworthy data to create accurate demand forecasts.
Our team can map out your contract lifecycles according to expiry, renewal and self-report dates, and help you document and maintain a consolidated renewal strategy for each vendor. We work with you on reviewing software usage against renewal quantities to identify if renewals should be actioned as is or if the agreement needs to be amended based on current usage and future demand.
Software Vendor Relationship Management
Invictus Partners is in the business of creating equity in vendor-client relationships. Many organisations feel like they get pushed around by the big software guys, but we empower our clients to stand their ground with vendors and get their needs met.
Our team can help you build and maintain strong relationships with your vendors, whilst ensuring your organisation gets the best deals, terms, and service. This involves regular communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and clear alignment of objectives to ensure that the relationship is productive and mutually beneficial.
Software Vendor Performance Management
Organisations are required to use the software in line with the contracted entitlements, and you need to make sure your vendors are holding up their end of the bargain. Invictus Partners can help you keep your vendors accountable by monitoring their performance against contractual terms and service Level Agreements (SLAs).
Our team works with you to develop and maintain cross-service provider standards and procedures and establish metrics and criteria based on vendor and service types. We track performance via a scorecard system, providing your organisation with continuous evaluation and objective comparison across your vendors.
IT Vendor Risk Management
Managing third-party vendors involves significant risk, including the risk of vendor failure, data breaches, and non-compliance with regulatory requirements. Invictus Partners works with you to establish clear standards with your vendors around security and compliance, service delivery, and performance. We then conduct periodical risk assessments of your software vendors to ensure they are meeting these requirements.
We help you manage risk associated with vendor relationships by establishing contingency plans, diversifying your vendor portfolio, and having clear exit strategies in place.
Prioritisation is key to managing vendor relationships effectively.
Not all software vendors are equal. Some are more important to your organisation than others and should be managed as such. Typically, about 80% of an organisation’s software spend comes from 20% of the vendors they use. Spend distribution is a good place to start when deciding which vendors to prioritise, but there are other factors to consider, such as the criticality of the software to your business operations.
Invictus Partners can provide VMaaS for some or all of your vendors, depending on your organisation’s needs. Often we will start with a client’s business-critical vendors and ramp up support for other vendors as their capability expands and their software portfolio grows. Our team can help you identify your high-value vendors, and make sure you invest your vendor management efforts where they will deliver the best return.
The Invictus Partners difference: Vendor Management & Governance Services
Invictus Partners’ role is to advocate for the best interest of our clients by delivering neutral and independent vendor-specific management and advisory services, providing impartial facts and informed insights. We have dedicated practices for major software vendors such as Oracle and SAP, as well as experienced specialists across many other vendors. We have a detailed understanding of each of the main software vendors’ licensing policies, terms, processes, and usage patterns, as well as extensive experience supporting our clients in both the commercial, higher education, and public sector across ANZ, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Americas through licence audits, licence optimisation, migration to Third-Party Support and cloud engagements.
Invictus Partners works with our clients to challenge the brand machines geared to dominate enterprise software decisions and empowers our clients with more choice and freedom. We tell our clients what the software vendors may not. We give our clients the power to enter vendor discussions with knowledge and confidence and help them choose the path for optimal business, cost, and compliance outcomes instead of the path for optimal vendor revenue outcomes.
Talk to a Vendor Management expert
Download our Licence Management Services datasheet
Download our Licence Management Services datasheet
Case Study
NSW Land Registry Services reduces costs and streamlines vendor portfolio with Invictus Partners
Got questions about Invictus Partners Software Vendor Management Services?
*Gartner, “Top 10 Gotchas When Licensing Oracle Software and SaaS,” March 2023.