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Max Life Insurance

Thanks to Snow Software, we’ve been able to identify many licenses that we had already procured, which we could reuse for other services from our software vendors. When you consider that we have thousands of licenses, this quickly adds up to a significant cost saving.
Suhail Ghai, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Max Life Insurance
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Max Life Insurance unlocks software license savings to boost growth with Snow Software.

Company Profile

Challenges and Opportunities

Compared with many other nations, consumers in India represent a very high-growth insurance market. The global COVID-19 pandemic seems to have played a significant galvanizing role, as more people seek insurance policies to safeguard their health, property and businesses.

For leading insurers like Max Life, the opportunities to help more citizens and businesses across India prompted the company
to increase its support for new policies. To release budget that could be directed to developing new insurance policies, Max Life looked for operational savings across its organization.

With more than 15,000 employees at Max Life, cloud services, IT infrastructure and software licenses contribute to a large proportion of the company’s annual spend, making it a natural target for cost reduction initiatives.

Suhail Ghai, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Max Life Insurance, outlines the challenge:

“As a large organization we rely on a wide variety of software and services to support our daily operations, encompassing everything from Microsoft 365 and Zoom, to server virtualization technologies, and our Oracle databases. Each software and cloud service comes with varying license types and unique terms of service. With tens of thousands of users in our software estate, keeping track of each license agreement was a complex and time-consuming task.”

Suhail Ghai, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Max Life Insurance

Software asset managers at Max Life tracked the license lifecycle for all procured software using spreadsheets. This cumbersome, manual approach was labor-intensive and prone to human error. As vendors changed from device-based to user-based licensing, Max Life struggled to map current usage and often overbought new subscriptions — exactly the kind of expense the company wanted to avoid.

Ghai continues: “A clear and detailed picture of our software investment and the licenses associated with those was important to ensure compliance with the terms of services set by original equipment manufacturers. Besides, it was vital to optimize our spend on new licenses and mitigate time-consuming manual work in software audits essential for compliance.”

The Snow Solution

Max Life formed a working group of its major stakeholders, including teams from hardware asset management, software asset management, end-user computing, datacenter management, risk management, and security and audit.

Ghai explains, “After reviewing a variety of asset management software, we all agreed that Snow Software offered the most user-friendly and feature-rich solution. Max Life was truly impressed with the level of insight Snow provided into our license portfolio, giving a complete view of our software, cloud and hardware assets, along with the associated license agreements and application usage metrics.”

He continues, “Additionally, we deployed the Snow inventory solution, which makes auditing the licenses and governing all assets fast, simple and efficient. We also deployed the Oracle management offering from Snow, included as part of Spend Optimizer for Datacenter. These Snow solutions greatly enhanced the transparency of our software license agreements.”

Max Life enlisted the support of Silver Leaf Solutions, an IT consultancy specializing in software licensing and spend optimization advisory services. Working with Silver Leaf Solutions, Max Life integrated Snow with its existing solutions, including IBM License Metric Tool, VMware, Hyper-V, Microsoft Office 365, and Zoom.

Silver Leaf Solutions provides a proactive managed service, the top 50 high-value vendors that MaxLife uses, monitored in near real-time. In addition, Silver Leaf Solutions reports regularly on a total of 700 software publishers, with around 300 contracts covering nearly 3,000 products.

Abhishek Sharma, Director & Global SAM Practice Lead at Silver Leaf Solutions, comments, “Working with MaxLife and Snow Software, we were able to complete deployment and deliver our first managed service results within just 90 days. This is a remarkable achievement, and other vendor solutions take considerably greater time and effort. With Snow solutions we can offer very fast return on investment, as well as great data accuracy and clarity.”

Impact and Results

Six months down the line, Snow solutions have enabled Max Life to achieve significant license savings across the extended enterprise. The managed service from Silver Leaf Solutions provides almost instant visibility into software usage and licensing for the top 50 vendors, enabling Max Life to maintain a current, accurate view of its spend and compliance at all times.

“Thanks to the agent-based Snow software, Max Life
can now gain visibility into software licensing in near real-time, and we are not dependent on publishers’ proprietary tools. For example, we have identified many licenses that we had already procured but not utilized.
We can now re-use for other services from our software vendors,” explains Ghai. “When you consider that we have thousands of licenses, this quickly adds up to a significant cost saving.”

The managed service from Silver Leaf Solutions uses data from the Snow solutions to automate software asset management reporting. Max Life can identify who is using which software products, compare against its own security listings, and — if necessary — block unapproved solutions. By eliminating manual processes and relying on the Silver Leaf Solutions managed service, Max Life has switched from annual to quarterly internal software audits, without increasing resource costs – greatly strengthening the company’s compliance posture.

He adds: “Gaining near-real-time visibility on which software assets are deployed, where they are provisioned, and who in Max Life is using them, means that we are much better positioned to ensure compliance with our license agreements, and to reduce the financial and reputational risk to our business.”

In addition, by strengthening its compliance posture with Snow Software, Max Life has also secured ISO certification for the smooth running of its IT systems and processes.

Ghai concludes:

“Snow Software is a real game-changer, and with the new data accuracy Max Life is much better placed to keep track of our software licenses, making sure that we purchase only the software packages that we need. The managed service from Silver Leaf Solutions helps us maximize the benefits of the Snow solutions, helping to optimize software spend. Ultimately, we will reinvest the savings into growing our operations, to help us grow the business to bring fair, affordable insurance policies to more consumers in India.”

Suhail Ghai, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Max Life Insurance