SNOW CASE STUDY

KINGFISHER SLASHES COSTS OF DIVERSE GLOBAL IT ESTATE WITH SNOW SOFTWAREEXECUTIVE SUMMARYA company built through international acquisition, Kingfisher plc has a huge, diverse and complicated IT estate, even by multina-

tional standards. What started out as a straightforward decision to use Snow’s Software Asset Management to ensure compliance

has led to a string of unintended benefits. Snow Software’s solution has grown from a tool to keep on the right side of software

contracts to a means to demonstrate the value of Kingfisher’s IT estate, cut the costs of understanding and managing both soft-

ware and hardware, allow the company to get the best from what it has – and bring to bear serious buying power in the future.

“With some vendors, we’re talking about savings of $80-160,000, others you’re into a few million in savings”

BACKGROUNDKingfisher is a global DIY giant with businesses in the UK, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, China, Hong Kong and elsewhere. B&Q

and Castorama are two of the company’s most established brands, and the group has acquired businesses in many corners of the

globe. One result of this is an incredibly diverse IT environment. In 2007, the company decided to combine the IT departments of

Castorama and B&Q together to form a Kingfisher IT Services (KITS). While not all IT functions across the group are performed by

KITS today, the intention is to build relationships with all of the Group’s far-flung businesses. “We have a very large, complex and

mixed IT environment,” says Andrew Hill, IT Asset Manager at Kingfisher IT Services.

Kingfisher has 80,000 employees, 30,000 desktop computers, and 5,000 servers – the latter a mix of platforms from a variety of

manufacturers. Having grown by acquisition, there’s a lot of different hardware and software performing the same function in

different operating companies. This sort of unplanned variety can cause all kinds of problems – and simply applying the same

hardware and software to every Kingfisher business is prohibitively expensive, too complex and would fail to take into account

the needs of different businesses in wildly different locations. While a common system might for example, sound like an excellent

idea, the reality is much more complex and full of nuance; one vendor’s package might suit some businesses, but not others. Not

all software platforms on the market contain the necessary tools for employers around the globe. Local funding for specific IT

projects is not consistent, and priorities vary naturally according to location. Because of this, homogenising the Group’s IT across

all locations quickly is too expensive and complex an exercise, and one which may not deliver value for all of the different locations

and businesses Kingfisher owns. The long term goal is to move from a Local to a more Common and Shared approach.

“We split the deployment into three regions – Asia, Europe and Russia, and the UK, auditing over 32,000 assets in the process. It is sometimes difficult to apply local regulatory requirements to asset management, but this was a straightforward process with Snow, and the software has paid for itself tenfold.”

SOLUTIONApproached by a major software vendor to review its licenses, KITS decided to adopt the same software asset management soft-

ware worldwide. The single package would replace multiple different systems in place at different operating companies. Kingfisher

used an integrator, Softcat, to search the market for the right tool for the job.

Softcat was armed with two requirements; KITS needed a tool to conduct the necessary audit, but it also needed to use that tool

as a proof of concept to give a single view of all software assets across the Group.

CHALLENGESThe initial project, involving an audit of Kingfisher’s IT estate, took a year and included evaluating Snow’s and competitor’s products,

discussing the audit with the many different teams worldwide, and getting information on vendor licenses from each operating

company. The tool was rolled out on a country-by-country basis. Because each organisation already had its own tools from a

variety of vendors in place, integration took time. KITS had to take an unconventional approach to deployment – it had to build a

bespoke deployment model to fit the wide variety of environments at the different operating companies. It took the decision to

standardise on Snow’s own inventory agent, replacing several different inventory tools used at different businesses it acquired.

“Kingfisher has a very intricate network, which made rolling out the hardest part of this project,” says Matt Ward, Software Asset

Management manager at Softcat. “We split the deployment into three regions – Asia, Europe and Russia, and the UK, auditing over

32,000 assets in the process. It is sometimes difficult to apply local regulatory requirements to asset management, but this was a

straightforward process with Snow, and the software has paid for itself tenfold.”

BENEFITSLicensing compliance might be the immediate focus for anyone looking at asset management. Yet there are a number of other

benefits that KITS used to its advantage – both in terms of improving service and persuading Kingfisher staff of the benefits of

Snow Software’s product and IT Asset Management.

“It was important to quickly engage the business with workshops, awareness and training sessions looking at what Snow could do,”

says Hill. One use for Snow’s platform is to gather information on computing hardware in use at remote locations. Snow was able

to discover hardware profiles within minutes, instead of over a period of weeks.

“When I first started, a small hardware refresh project would cost $24,000 to identify and validate on each site,” says Hill. “The

review looked for old hardware we needed to upgrade. Using Snow, I can now do this job in ten minutes at no extra cost to the

business.”

Unsurprisingly, this led to many more requests from within the organisation – and not just from KITS itself.

“We can usually get teams an answer very quickly – even a very complex query. Often, it’s a case of people coming to us to say ‘I

can only think of Snow to solve this particular problem,’ and usually, we can solve it in hours or minutes,” says Hill.

Centralising both license management into SNOW Software’s asset management solution and purchasing with a single LAR has

created many beneficial opportunities for Kingfisher, including clearer contracts and cost efficiencies through economies of scale.

“Filtering our vendors and going for a more common solution means we don’t have to worry about some of them –and we have

better buying power, because we have common agreements,” says Hill. “We now have common agreements in place with vendors

including Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, IBM and VMware.”

Cost savings are an immediate consideration, and by concentrating purchasing into enterprise agreements – rather than, in some

cases, literally buying standard copies of productivity software from a local reseller – savings to tens and hundreds of thousands of

dollars have been realised with a number of vendors.

“I can think of seven vendors straight away where we have saved a significant amount of money. With some vendors, we’re talking

about savings of $80-160,000, others you’re into a few million in savings,” says Hill. “We are now getting into more enterprise

agreements, which are based on the visibility and knowledge that we have thanks to Snow.”

Hill is now involved in vendor negotiations, as well as contracts, and can turn around simple audit requests in a fraction of the

time. In some cases, the team has found that they possess more information than the vendor, putting Kingfisher in a much stron-

ger bargaining position.

“Having the information to hand very quickly is a key thing. It can be about cost avoidance as much as cost saving – eliminating

some of the hard manual labour from ensuring compliance,” says Hill. That said, further benefits that have no connection to asset

management have come to light since Snow Software arrived. B&Q, a Kingfisher company, distributes a lot of its internal com-

munications information to retail stores via compact disc to get around serious bandwidth constraints. Around 25 CDs of data

were distributed each month to around 350 stores – a number that had constantly grown. The cost and time involved in printing

thousands of CDs a month was becoming significant – and the simple answer was to move to DVDs. But how many stores had

computers with installed – and working – DVD drives? “Within half an hour, we had produced a report showing which stores had

one or more computers with DVD drives attached to them,” explains Hill. “This allowed us to understand costs and support the

business quickly and easily”.

“There are lots of other areas like that, where we’ve answered questions that typically begin with ‘I don’t know whether you can, but

can you tell us this?’ – generally, we can - using either the license manager tool or inventory, or a combination of the two. We can

look at things speculatively, answer ‘What if?’ questions,” says Hill. Snow’s solution has allowed KITS to reduce a number of mainte-

nance and support contracts – and also allows it to understand how cost effective suppliers are.

“With many sectors feeling the pinch in the current economic climate, it is encouraging to see Kingfisher and other companies in

the retail sector investing in Snow Software’s SAM tools,” says Marlon Oliver, Sales Director for Snow Software in the UK. “Kingfisher

IT Services has been very proactive in using Snow to deliver cost savings – and optimised IT – to its parent organisation.”

Snow Software’s asset management solution has been used as a first step on the way to solving what can only be described as

a wicked problem – understanding, managing and optimising an enormously diverse IT environment spread across dozens of

operating companies and dozens of countries. Making sure your software licensing is compliant is one part of the benefit – truly

understanding the hardware and software that makes up an organisation’s IT suite, and employing that information to dramatic

effect to reduce costs, identify opportunity and get the best from one’s resources is the real application.