Posti Group Corporation
Deploying the Snow Solution has been a very worthwhile exercise and it’s pretty simple to manage. It’s been great that we could successfully implement Snow so quickly with such a small team. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished by implementing Snow. I feel confident and happy that we have the processes in place so we can know a head of an audit that we are in pretty good shape. With Snow’s automation many repetitive tasks have been removed, and the IT team can spend time on other tasks. My only regret is that I wish we’d done it much earlier!
COMPANY BACKGROUND
Posti Group Corporation is a Finnish postal and logistics services company. Headquartered in Helsinki, the group is active in 10 countries and employs around 20,000 people. The IT department supports 9,000 devices – PCs, laptops and servers across Finland and its operations in Russia, Sweden, Germany and the Baltic countries.
CHALLENGE
Posti has a widely-dispersed infrastructure with software and hardware from different eras. Previously Posti managed all licenses across Posti’s entire estate with mostly manually processes and laborious workflows. An organizational shake-up highlighted the need to automate and reduce reliance on spreadsheets to ensure compliance.
SNOW’S CONTRIBUTION
Snow’s partner Chilit provided Snow as a hosted Software Asset Management (SAM) platform and helped with services. It took Juvi Mustonen, IT Development Manager at Posti just a few months to roll out Snow’s Platform across the organization and ensure that Posti’s licenses are continually optimized using Snow License Manager in combination with Snow Automation Platform.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
- Accurate inventory and discovery across 9,000 devices
- Mitigated security risks through removal of unused legacy applications
- Quick, successful vendor audit defense, using automated reports and centrally gathered data.
SAM HERO
Juvi Mustonen, IT Development Manager at Posti, was tasked with implementing the right SAM processes along with the right technology to automate them and make the processes repeatable and consistent. She feels confident and happy. “We have the processes in place now so we can know in advance of an audit that we are in pretty good shape. Managing licenses and optimizing our software estate is a continuous process, and thanks to the automation Snow provides, many repetitive tasks have been removed, and the IT team can divert its efforts to other tasks.”
SAM HELPS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Posti’s roots go back centuries, but in the past 20 years its business model has been transformed by the advent of digital and the Europe-wide deregulation of postal services. The organization needed a future-proof Software Asset Management solution to manage this change.
The group entered the digital age with mostly manual control over its IT landscape licenses. It had amassed a widely dispersed and fragmented infrastructure with software and hardware from a mishmash of eras ¬– old servers and computers, old licenses and outdated versions alongside more up-to-date software and hardware.
Juvi Mustonen, the IT Development Manager responsible for software licensing, had to keep a lot of balls in the air to juggle this complex estate. License Management had never been a priority at Posti, but an organizational overhaul triggered the need to formalize Software Asset Management and deploy a solution to automate and reduce manual involvement and reliance on spreadsheets.
Mustonen was tasked with implementing a license management process and enlisted Snow’s partner
Chilit to help with Services. The initial task was to set up the right SAM processes and technology to automate them and make these processes repeatable and consistent.
Chilit put Snow as a Service into Posti. “We did our research and used references from Gartner to find the right SAM solution. We also liked the fact that Snow had a local office here in Helsinki,” comments Mustonen. The first task was to mitigate risks with the largest vendors – where the main software budget is spent and ensure compliance.
“We quickly discovered a lot of unused and legacy software that we were keen to remove and mitigate security risks. We also discovered some licenses were completely unaccounted for – it was eyeopening” says Mustonen.
The team has deployed Snow Automation Platform to remove unused and legacy software from users’ desktops as security was also a concern – so the SAM team has set about removing unauthorized apps.
Snow Automation Platform supports different levels of approval, ensuring that the software a user requests is always checked for a license before it is deployed. “We don’t want to needlessly buy more software when we already have unused licenses that can be redeployed.
“Managing licenses and optimizing our software estate is a continuous process, and thanks to Snow, many repetitive tasks have been removed”
Juvi Mustonen, IT Development Manager, Posti
“We’ve also made several productivity time savings. We can run reports for auditors and gather data centrally which has led to decreasing operational costs. We’ve also been able to respond and successfully defend an audit in just the first few months of having Snow.”
LOOKING AHEAD
“We are looking to use Snow for ServiceNow to populate the CMDB with accurate, clean, normalized data and I’m looking forward to having up-to-date, real-time data in our database very soon.
“As for our license optimization ambitions, I can now anticipate the future better and discover what software is really used and needed within the organization. Already we’ve been able to make savings. But now we have full visibility into the software estate, savings through cost avoidance, removing support and maintenance on decommissioned software and reporting accurately for audits will make a huge difference to the bottom line,” says Mustonen.
She adds: “We are establishing Oracle Management Option in our server estate, where Snow gives us the means to assess Oracle software usage and licensing obligations as well as monitor changes that have been made. We’ll be able to avoid human error costing us a fortune in unbudgeted fees as just one small error in managing Oracle licenses could result in hefty back usage and true-up fees.”