A $14M renewal, rebuilt to $4.9M.

A global manufacturer faced a ULA renewal quoted at $14M. We rebaselined the estate, exposed double-counted environments, and rebuilt the deal around what was actually deployed.

65%
reduction against Oracle's opening renewal quote
$9.1M
total cost avoided over the renewal term
9 wks
from kickoff to signed renewal
The situation

A renewal quote with no independent basis.

The client, a manufacturer operating across four continents, had grown its Oracle estate through a decade of acquisitions. As the ULA approached renewal, Oracle proposed a $14M, three-year extension anchored to a deployment figure the client had no way to verify.

Internally, the licensing team suspected the number was inflated but lacked the evidence to push back. The renewal date was four months out.

The problem

Our baseline confirmed it. The figure underpinning the quote double-counted disaster-recovery environments and treated several soft-partitioned clusters as fully licensed. Roughly a fifth of the "deployment" did not require licensing at all under the contract terms.

Root cause

The renewal was priced on infrastructure inventory, not on contractual licensing obligation. Nobody had reconciled the two, so the vendor's number stood unchallenged.

What we did

  • Rebaselined the estate independently, separating licensable deployment from infrastructure noise.
  • Documented the DR and partitioning positions with contract-grade evidence for each environment.
  • Modeled three paths, renew as quoted, renew on a corrected basis, and certify out, with hard numbers for each.
  • Led the negotiation alongside the client's team, anchoring every point to the reconciled position.

The outcome

With a defensible position on the table, the conversation changed. The renewal was rebuilt around verified deployment and closed at $4.9M, a 65% reduction, with cleaner terms and a documented baseline the client now controls.

In the client's words

"We went into the room with evidence instead of anxiety. For the first time, we were negotiating from our numbers, not theirs."

VP, IT Asset Management


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