Practice · Software Licensing & SAM
VMware and Broadcom, the Microsoft commercial stack, entitlement reconciliation and audit posture — advised by people who have held licensing compliance and recovered relief from the gap between what you own and what you run.
Why This One Is Different
Licensing has stopped being an administrative step at the end of a purchase. Broadcom ended VMware perpetual licenses outright, collapsed close to a thousand SKUs into a handful of mandatory bundles, moved pricing from per-socket to per-core and set a 72-core minimum purchase floor. Microsoft, Oracle and others have each run their own version of the same play. The contract you signed is not the contract you are renewing.
This is already IQ4hire's most active body of work. The VMware and Broadcom practice — the exposure model, the six-path advisor and fifteen published supplier briefs — exists because the licensing change, not the technology, is what forced the decision.
The discipline underneath it is older and duller: knowing what you actually own against what you are actually running. That is where the $700K in license relief at True Value came from, and it is the same inventory-and-entitlement work Steve Staniszewski used to rectify a licensing position at AVSC and hold compliance at Designed Alloy. Most licensing savings are found before any negotiation starts.
Engagements
| Organization | Category | Scope | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| VMware / BroadcomIQ4hire · 2024–Present | Licensing · Renewal | Perpetual licenses ended, the catalog collapsed into mandatory bundles, pricing moved from per-socket to per-core, and a 72-core minimum purchase floor arrived. IQ4hire models the exposure, maps the six viable paths and shortlists the suppliers behind each. Fifteen supplier briefs published. | 6 Paths Modeled72-core floor |
| Microsoft Commercial StackIQ4hire · 2025–Present | EA · M365 · Azure | Microsoft licensing advisory across the full commercial stack — Azure, M365, Security, Copilot, Power Platform and Dynamics 365 — where entitlement, bundling and true-up exposure rarely match what is actually deployed. | Practice Live |
| True Value CompanyDirector, Enterprise Architecture · 2013–18 | Licensing · Sourcing | Competitive sourcing across Teradata, Adobe Commerce and Experience Cloud, loyalty and GEP procurement cut IT expense $8M a year — and recovered a further $700K in license relief by reconciling entitlement against deployment. | $8M/yr CutPlus $700K license relief |
| AVSCSteve · Director, IT Ops · 2001–05 | SAM · Compliance | Rectified the company’s software licensing position by implementing a licensing inventory process, and negotiated maintenance contracts across every element of the data center. | Position Rectified |
| Designed Alloy ProductsSteve · Director IT · 2008–12 | SAM · Asset Mgmt | Maintained software and licensing compliance and implemented asset management across the manufacturer, alongside reviewing, negotiating and approving every telecom, vendor and service contract. | Compliance Held |
| Adtalem / DeVryGlobal Head, Digital & Shared Services · 2008–12 | ERP Licensing | Led the $130M global ERP selection and the $8M Becker ERP and eCommerce selection, where licensing model and entitlement scope were a material part of the negotiated outcome. | $130M ERP |
Facing a VMware renewal? The VMware Path Advisor models your position in seven questions, and the supplier briefs cover the firms behind each path.
What We Evaluate
The gap in both directions is where the money is. Over-deployment is audit exposure; over-entitlement is spend on shelfware nobody cancelled. Reconciling the two is unglamorous and routinely finds more than the negotiation does.
Per-socket, per-core, per-user, per-named-user, per-ingested-gigabyte. A vendor changing the counting unit is a price rise that never appears as one — the 72-core floor being the clearest current example.
Catalog consolidation moves customers onto suites containing products they neither asked for nor use. We price the bundle against the subset you actually need, so the premium is visible before it is agreed.
An audit arrives when your position is weakest and your records are worst. The work of being able to evidence compliance belongs before the notice, not in the ninety days after it.