ITAM industry news roundup – July 2020
There is always something happening somewhere and keeping track of it all can be, to say the least, difficult! Our ITAM industry news round ups aim to cover some of the important and interesting developments you may have missed, to help keep you informed and up-to-date. This ITAM industry news roundup for July 2020 features some very interesting acquisitions, as well as Oracle and IBM.
SoftwareOne acquires B-lay
B-lay, the Netherlands based SAM advisory company, has been acquired by reseller SoftwareOne to:
“further strengthen SoftwareONE’s market-leading Software Lifecycle Management (SLM) and SAM practice in Europe, adding significant know-how and delivery capabilities”.
Richard Spithoven, well known to many of you for his Oracle presentations at ITAM Review conferences will, alongside his fellow B-lay managing partners – Mark van Wolferen and Heidy Goyens – lead the SAP and Oracle SLM practice at SoftwareOne.
While the acquisition is clearly a great testament to the work that B-lay have been doing, and will be a boost to SoftwareOne and their capabilities, it is one less independent voice in the industry. Watch out for Richard on an upcoming ITAM Review podcast to learn more.
Further Reading
Crayon acquires Navicle
Hot on the heels of SoftwareOne’s acquisition of B-lay, fellow reseller Crayon announced they have acquired Australian based Oracle experts, Navicle. They will combine “Crayon’s expertise in cloud economics and cost optimization” and Navicle’s strengths in “in Oracle on-premise and cloud license optimization” for their global customers.
It’s interesting that 2 Oracle specialists have been acquired so close together – just coincidental timing or perhaps driven by the fact that Oracle’s revenue figures haven’t been outstanding recently?
Further Reading
Cornwall council overpay Oracle
Cornwall (the sticky out bit at the bottom left of England) council appear to have been over-paying Oracle while migrating to their Cloud ERP solution. The project ran from November 2017 to April 2020 and during this time the council was paying for the total number of eventual users – which led to an overspend of £2,082,347.30. According to the council “this is standard practice”; however, the councillor who uncovered the overspend asked four questions of his colleagues:
- How many licences did we purchase in 2017?
- How many are we purchasing now?
- Whether there were any unused licences at any time?
- What the financial value of those unused licences were?
Who’s at fault?
While the councillors are, rightly, concerned about the council’s “poor procurement controls”, is this once again an example of a vendor being predatory and seeking to make additional revenue from organisations who simply don’t know any better? If there were a software industry ombudsman, this certainly feels like a case they’d take a look at.
Wasted spend is always a shame but particularly in the public sector, where the taxpayer money given to the vendor may instead have helped local communities with infrastructure, resources, and support.
Further Reading
Local paper article
The Register article
IBM buy RPA company
IBM have acquired a Brazilian RPA (Robotic Process Automation) company to embed RPA across their product range – with a particular focus on improving “business processes” and “managing IT operations.
Coming just a couple of months after Microsoft acquired Softomotive, this is a further example that the move to RPA is accelerating across the industry. Both understanding how RPA will impact your estate but also how it will improve your ITAM function and give you time for more strategic operations will be key over the coming years.
Further Reading
Related articles:
About Rich Gibbons
A Northerner renowned for his shirts, Rich is a big Hip-Hop head, and loves travel, football in general (specifically MUFC), baseball, Marvel, and reading as many books as possible. Finding ways to combine all of these with ITAM & software licensing is always fun!
Connect with Rich on Twitter or LinkedIn.