Industry & Manufacturing · Upper Mid-Market

Hundreds of licenses retired through IT visibility

Starting point

An industrial mid-market company — over 2,000 employees, around €2 billion in revenue. For years, software had been procured decentrally: by departments, business units, individual employees. No one had a view of the estate: how many servers actually ran, which licenses were paid for multiple times in parallel, which applications had long fallen out of use. The result was a classic IT brownfield with continuously growing costs and no levers for control.

What we did

We built an automated capture pipeline that reads installed applications from every endpoint, consolidates them in a central data layer, and exposes them through a simple frontend. The inventory updates continuously — without manual upkeep. On that data foundation, we worked with IT to drive the consolidation and shutdown decisions.

Results

€240–480k

annual savings on recurring costs

Hundreds

software licenses consolidated

Estate-wide

automated endpoint capture

Continuous

inventory updates without manual upkeep

What we learned

IT brownfields cost mid-market companies five figures every month — usually invisible inside maintenance and license items no one questions any more. Visibility is the first lever. It is also the precondition for any serious AI strategy: without a clean data layer over your own IT estate, every AI conversation stays on the surface.

This is the summary. How we approached it methodologically — which architectural decisions we made, what we discarded and which patterns can be transferred to other contexts — we discuss in a personal conversation.

Not because we want to sell you something. But because this depth is what our clients engage us for — and it does not belong on the open internet.