How SHI helped a major U.S. county turn software complexity into measurable ROI

For nearly a decade, SHI has helped one of the nation's largest counties transform a fragmented, multi-agency software environment into a well-governed, continuously optimized IT estate.

Challenge:

Our customer, one of the larger and more economically significant counties in the United States, oversees a complex IT environment supporting over five million residents and multiple internal agencies, each with independent budgets and software procurement practices. This decentralized structure created ongoing challenges in managing software compliance, optimizing SaaS usage, and maintaining a secure IT estate. The presence of end-of-life (EOL) software titles also posed operational and security risks, further complicating ITIL functions across the organization. The customer turned to SHI to not only manage their software assets but also to gain a clearer picture of license entitlements, improve governance, and identify cost optimization opportunities.

Solution:

Since 2017, SHI has delivered a Software Asset Management (SAM) Managed Service under the Spend Optimization Services (SOS) team designed to provide reliable, continuously updated software asset management across the customer's Microsoft and Adobe environments. The service aggregates and analyzes software data from both on-prem and cloud environments using SHI's proprietary tools, enhanced by customer input. A critical part of our work involves cleaning and validating that data to ensure accuracy, which is particularly important in a multi-agency environment where data quality and availability vary significantly across departments. We deliver insights through formal quarterly reports and ongoing weekly engagements, covering license reconciliation, risk assessments, and optimization strategies tailored to each agency's unique needs.

The service also includes contract review and entitlement validation, enabling more informed negotiations during renewals. By integrating seamlessly into the customer's ITIL processes and providing granular reporting via SHI's Asset Insights platform, the service delivers full transparency and control over the customer's software ecosystem. Over the course of our third-term renewal, we continued developing custom, agency-level compliance reporting that translated complex technical findings into executive-ready insights, helping leadership move away from aggregate assumptions and focus remediation efforts where licensing and audit risk was actually concentrated.

Outcome:

The impact of SHI's service has been significant and consistent across contract terms. In 2024 alone, the customer realized a 315% return on their investment in the SAM Managed Service. This included the remediation of $190,000 in risk related to CIS and System Center products and $399,000 in cost optimization from addressing underutilized and unassigned Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

Beyond those figures, SHI's compliance analysis identified meaningful exposure in the customer's SQL Server environment. Rather than waiting for an audit to surface the issue, the customer proactively procured the necessary licenses to close the gap — a direct result of having a trusted advisor rather than a reporting vendor. SHI also helped the customer interpret and contextualize Microsoft 365 activity data, supporting more informed conversations around entitlement, utilization, and future optimization. Through ongoing working sessions and education on Adobe and Microsoft licensing models, we improved the customer's internal confidence and decision-making capability around renewals and long-term planning.

One of the customer's key goals — reducing the number of end-of-life software titles — was addressed with a 23% decrease in Adobe titles deployed. The customer entered their third-term renewal with greater clarity, reduced compliance risk, and a stronger understanding of their overall compliance posture. Their Senior IT Asset Manager, a Net Promoter Score advocate and member of SHI's ITAM Customer Advisory Board, praised the team's diligence, attention to detail, and commitment to partnership, underscoring a relationship built on results and trust that now spans nearly a decade.