At a glance
The Dutch Police in the Netherlands has about 65,000 employees. They have ten regional units, a central unit and a Police Services Center. With so many distributed environments, keeping track of licenses is extremely important, and as a government agency, paying only for what they use and maintaining high-quality data are imperative. Their IT asset management (ITAM) is mostly on- premises, although they plan to explore more opportunities in the cloud. A Flexera customer for the past decade, the Dutch Police have saved time, frustration and millions of euros.
The Challenge
Consolidation leads to technology confusion
As a government agency, the Dutch Police must be extremely organized and vigilant when it comes to their spending. While other organizations may tap into their profits to pay for overages or miscalculated budget items, any extra costs the Dutch Police incurs come out of taxpayer money.
The Dutch Police had experienced a large consolidation of police posts, going from 27 to seven information and communication technology environments. This caused confusion around technology use and added tight deadlines for installation and automation of a software asset management (SAM) solution.
The IT team struggled to monitor SAM licenses and needed a solution that could simplify management of distributed environments.
Flexera sees a problem and helps solve [it]. That is what is of great value for us.
John Haenen, Software asset consultant Dutch Police
The Solution
Gaining trustworthy IT data
The Dutch Police needed trustworthy data, knowing data’s impact on business operations is only as strong as its quality.
The organization chose Flexera ITAM, which proved to be more mature than competing tools. According to John Haenen, Dutch Police software consultant, “Flexera refreshes itself constantly, so our data is far superior.”
Audit coordinators, software owners, management and risk teams, and the Security Operations Center are groups inside the Dutch Police most reliant on Flexera ITAM data.
Flexera provided a support team to meet the organization’s timeline, streamlining the installation and upkeep.
In one instance, an audit ended with compliments from a large vendor as well as the accounting firm involved. The Dutch Police paid zero true-up costs.
Since implementing Flexera ITAM, the Dutch Police have had no audit issues with any vendors. Haenen says, “Our strength is that we know what we have, what we are using and what licenses we have. That is all because of Flexera.”
Ten years ago, we had five to six audits a year. Now we have zero to one because they talk amongst each other and they know they will never find anything wrong with our data. And we can prove it.
John Haenen, Software asset consultant Dutch Police
The Result
Multi-millions of euros saved and costs avoided
The Dutch Police experienced many changes after implementing Flexera ITAM. Before, they could see the software but didn’t have visibility into licenses. Now, both the budget and the procurement process for software licenses are centrally managed. For larger projects, they’re able to closely monitor license usage, cost and metrics. They’re also able to keep a close eye on licenses as server usage changes. As for ITAM implementation, Haenen says, “These process changes are why our journey took four to five years, because there is so much to change and invest in your people, education and environment. You can’t do it in a year because there are so many different aspects of SAM.”
As far as the financial impact of working with Flexera, the organization has saved multi-millions of euros through ITAM and cost avoidance.
In the future, the Dutch police will look to Flexera for help measuring and monitoring both their private and public cloud spend.
