Trustmarque helps global firm save thousands

VAR simplifies IT infrastructure and licensing for Bodycote after previous supplier failed to deliver

Trustmarque is celebrating helping a customer shave more than £400,000 off its IT spend after winning a global contract to simplify its infrastructure.

Under the terms of the deal, Trustmarque used its commercial benchmarking service to formulate a long-term licensing strategy for thermal processing services firm Bodycote plc, which resulted in immediate cost savings, resource efficiency gains and improved licensing visibility.

Bodycote has more than 170 facilities in 27 countries but as it grew through acquisition, it failed to integrate IT systems, resulting in a fragmented environment. It decided to implement a global standardisation programme to simplify its systems across the board from the server environment to its desktops and laptops.

Garry Joiner, group IT services director at Bodycote, said: “Plant managers would go out and buy the cheapest hardware and software from local suppliers and there was simply no consistency. When we looked into it we found we were running half a dozen different operating systems across various regions and we had a number of different licensing agreements.

“Our goal was to put in place one cost-effective solution in order to better manage the IT environment. As our Microsoft Agreement for the UK was coming to an end, we needed to get a solution in place quickly. We decided to have two Microsoft Enterprise Agreements with the option to consolidate to one by including the North America business unit in 2012.”

Initially Bodycote had signed up a different IT supplier, but felt progress was too slow and turned to Trustmarque.

Joiner added: “Trustmarque achieved in two weeks what our previous supplier failed to achieve in over eight months. [Trustmarque] really helped fight our corner with Microsoft. We started with a cost of £1.86m but they helped us get this down to £1.63m and then negotiated further commercial concessions on top of that. In addition, by speculating a further 100 users at the beginning of the agreement we were able to benefit from additional discounts. As a result our costs reduced to £1.45m from the original £1.86m – saving us £411,000.”