Synergy emerged immediately

About the client

COBIS is a US-based multinational banking software company established in 1953. Serving customers in North and South America, COBIS partners with financial institutions to identify technological needs and banking trends and develops sophisticated financial software to meet those needs. Their software is designed to adapt to market demands quickly and to help customers prepare for the future of banking.

The challenge

COBIS has established a substantial customer base across South America including banks in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina. Now, new market expansion was planned in Mexico and North America. Success in the new markets required substantial support from the COBIS IT team. They had moved from a server-based service to a SaaS-based cloud software service offering that created new levels of flexibility while lowering customer costs. However, continuing service quality and availability had become even more essential to engage and support new clients while maintaining the satisfaction of existing clients. In sum, Cobis, faced key challenges:

• Market expansion plans
• Essential IT service requirements
• SaaS support
• Software license and spend management
• Client satisfaction

Essential to service quality and cost control, software assets required careful management throughout company and customer locations. Controlling the use of third-party software was critical to the creation of the most efficient and accurate cost and service distribution delivery for all. However, after attempting to maintain asset control using internal staff expertise and simple tools, expectations for software asset management were not being met.

The solution

The COBIS IT team set out to find a comprehensive solution that would control and measure all software assets in use. They wanted a single tool that would provide a window to monitor and understand where software assets were assigned to a specific partner and how they were being used. This was explicitly intended to track and manage software renewals with minimal effort while adding value to daily business transactions. It was designed to identify software that was not generating value because it was not being used. And efficient software use was an expense metric tracked by the COBIS executive team. After evaluating Flexera as an on-premises solution, COBIS also examined SoftwareOne’s SAMSimple. As a Managed Service offering, SAMSimple was a more appealing investment. It avoids the high cost of a server-based solution while providing flexibility to expand or contract licenses as business requirements dictated. “SAMSimple’s flexibility caught our attention because it lets us grow together with services precisely tailored to customer requirements,” said Casa. In addition to SAMSimple, COBIS discovered PyraCloud, a SoftwareOne platform that manages and optimizes software on-premises and in the cloud. PyraCloud provides insight into software spend as well as trends to effectively procure software titles while reducing risk.