“Open season to help save on IT spending” The Sunday Business Post covers Dublin software firm Openplain

As a freelance public relations adviser I often dread opening the papers on a Sunday morning. Over the years many a restful Sunday has been ruined by coverage of client that wasn’t quite to their disliking, even due to the minutest detail. However, there has been equally as many Sunday’s where I have been pepped up by good coverage for clients.

Thankfully yesterday was the latter. As well as a mention in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post  for Anthony Joyce & Co in my previous post  my client Openplain, the Dublin software company, received more deserved recognition in a great feature on them in the People In Business section, which focuses on Irish businesses that have a unique angle. In this case Openplain are the only Irish company that make software that companies can use to get a holistic view of their IT costs, thus allowing them to save a good chunk of cash on software licenses and programmes that they don’t use. This is an all too familiar occurrence in Ireland at the moment where companies weighed down by their Celtic Tiger Hangover with too many costs weighing them down from the boom.

One of these major costs are IT, with companies paying for too much software that they don’t use, which can be a very expensive mistake to make. On average Openplain can IT software costs for companies by 25%; back in Novemember they estimated that a medium sized company of 100 employees could cut €42,00 per year in software costs alone: http://www.republicpr.ie/2009/11/24/save-fortune-electricity-costs/

Yesterday’s featured focused on the good work that award-winning entrepreneurs Jon Mulligan and Damien O’Brien are doing helping Irish financial services companies cut their IT software costs. Here is a link to the article http://www.thepost.ie/peopleinbusiness/open-season-to-help-save-on-it-spending-48635.html which has also been pasted in below.

The Sunday Business Post: Open season to help save on IT spending
18 April 2010 By Dick O’Brien

As Irish businesses struggle to cope with the continuing weak economic environment, the focus for many is on cutting costs in a bid to maintain their margins.

It is a prime market for any company promising to help clients to save money. One of them, Dublin-based software firm Openplain, said it had experienced strong growth over the past 12 months.

According to Jon Mulligan, managing director of Openplain, the company specialises in analysing customers’ IT expenditure and identifying areas in which they can make savings. One of the company’s main products is Office metrics, which looks at an organisation’s entire business process, from the initiation of transactions, through back office processes and on to how a product or service is delivered.

‘‘Managers know how many transactions are being completed every day, and how long they are taking,” said Mulligan.

‘‘They can compare agents or teams, and identify inefficient work practices. That can be as simple as identifying excessive personal web browsing or discovering training requirements.”

Openplain was founded by Mulligan and technical director Damien O’Brien in 2006. The pair are both software industry veterans, having previously worked together at Baltimore Technologies.

In 2008,Openplain won the Inter Trade Ireland All-Island Seedcorn Business competition, which it followed later that year by winning first prize in the Docklands Innovation Park awards. Backers of the company include the AIB Seed Capital Fund, a number of private BES investors and Enterprise Ireland.

Mulligan said Openplain’s main focus at present was its Licence metrics software.

Managing software licences is a headache for most businesses, involving issues such as ensuring that money isn’t being spent needlessly on software which isn’t used, and avoiding penalties for running unlicensed software.

Licence metrics monitors a firm’s software usage in order to identify any licensing issues or under-utilisation. ‘‘We’ve just completed a project with a company in the financial services sector which we rolled out to 1,000 desktops,” said Mulligan.

‘‘It found that it had Microsoft Project on 450 computers, but in the previous three months it had only been used by 80 people. The company was paying subscriptions and maintenance on those subscriptions which were totally unnecessary. Another example is that it had 200 copies of Adobe Acrobat, but only had 45 people using it.”

There are about 80,000 users of Openplain’s system worldwide. Some of those are using a pared-down, free version of the software, and the challenge for the company is to persuade them to upgrade to the paid version.

‘‘Recently, through our own direct sales activity, we have been picking up a number of larger Irish clients,” said Mulligan.

‘‘They are mainly in financial services, but we would serve all markets, especially anyone doing a lot of back office processing.”

He said Open plain was already profitable and was on track to achieve a fourfold or fivefold increase in turnover this year.

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Companies can save thousands in software costs, says Openplain

It turns out that most companies are wasting thousands on software licenses that they don’t need for programmes they don’t use. In the current economic climate this is madness.  This research comes from software provider Openplain Limited (disclosure: yes they are a client) who have found that by monitoring a company’s software usage they can save them an average of 25-30% in software costs.

Openplain are an award winning software company, that is backed by Enterprise Ireland, who have been on a bit of a one company crusade recently to encourage businesses to cut their costs; in December they published data outlining that am average medium sized business can save €20,000 per year in electricity costs alone,  just by getting their employees to turn their computers off when they leave the office . Twenty grand wasted on leccy by absentminded staff is just insanity and that’s before you think about the amount of carbon being pumped into the ether to make energy for this pointless waste.

Anyway back to the software issue, it is due to two things, firstly the way the software industry is policed, and secondly, the way companies manage their IT usage. Software Licenses are important issues for providers, it ensures that companies are not pirating software and is a big earner. Recently as large providers have lost market share to open-source software they have been policing their software very strictly, so companies have reacted somewhat kneejerkingly (btw this isn’t a real word) and bought more licenses than they need. It can also be a hangover from mergers and aquisitions with needless overlaps left in the business. Our esteemed friends across the pond in the US even have a reward scheme for people who report the illegal use of software by companies.

In terms of the second issues it comes down to the business not being aware of how they use their IT. Businesses are changing all the time and so is technology so it can be difficult for companies to keep up. This problem can easily solved using LicenseMetrics, a service recently launched Openplain , which allows organisations greater insight into their use of software and locates overlaps in how applications are used by staff.  It can also determine the most efficient use of software licenses in order eliminate waste and reduce unnecessary spending.

While traditional Software Asset Management systems (sorry for the jargon) simply report what software is installed throughout an organisation, LicenseMetrics can immediately identify whether that software is being used or not. According to Openplain almost every organisation – from SMEs to multinational conglomerates – will have accumulated unnecessary licences for redundant and under-used applications. These licences add little or no value to a business – and more often than not are a silent drain on finances.

For anyone that wants more details on LicenseMetrics I posted a full press release here:

http://www.irishpressreleases.ie/2010/01/22/irish-companies-can-save-thousands-on-software-costs-says-openplain/

On average whenever Openplain have monitored software use in their clients businesses, without fail they have been able highlight where the the company being studied can cut their software costs by 25-30%. This is a huge amount that can be achieved very easily. Typically this process takes a couple of months of analysing the company with all the workplace analytics done off-site by Openplain.

I’m sure many people reading this would happily take a 25% cut in software costs but if you combine this with turning off your computers that’s a helluva (this isn’t a real word either) lot of dosh – so turn off and wise up people.

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