Crayon's Software Asset Management (SAM) Manged Services have been one of the few external partnerships that actually reduced our licensing chaos instead of adding to it. They helped us move from reactive "true-up panic" and surprise audits to a more predictable, data driven way of managing software spend and compliance. Day to day, working with Crayon feels like having an extended SAM team that keeps an eye on our state while we focus on projects. Once they connected to our key environments and normalized the data, we finally had a single view of what was installed, what was actually being used and how that lined up with out contracts, instead of juggling conflicting internal spreadsheets. The biggest change was in conversations with finance and procurement: instead of arguing about whether we were over or under licensed, we had concrete numbers, scenarios and recommendations to work from, which made budget planning and renewals far less painful. Our main problem was a mix of under-usage and accidental over-licsensing old projects left with active subscriptions, legacy on-prem licenses never reclaimed, and cloud/SaaS growth that no one was tracking centrally. Crayon's managed services team helped us clean up the install base, identify unused or underused licenses and align entitlements with real demand which led to tangible savings during renewals and true-ups.

The services from SoftwareOne are fairly good. They manage our cloud environment comprised of Azure and Microsoft 365. Although there are several reports we can get regarding our cloud and software usage and licenses, it is something we need to retrieve. There is no proactivity on their behalf to improve our licensing or reduce costs. They only do that upon request. On their defense, they answer very fast to requests.