Syntegon Technology

Snow Software is an essential asset management tool for us because it helps reduce IT operating costs and minimize business risks. By purposefully streamlining our software license management and consistently reducing expenses, we can devote more resources to developing new, innovative IT services and expanding IT service excellence. We look forward to deepening our partnership with Snow Software and see very good opportunities to leverage further potential to reduce software licensing costs.
Frank Streichert, Vice President IT, Syntegon
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Learn why Syntegon, a world-leading producer of processing and packaging technology for the pharmaceutical and food industries, uses Snow to identify unnecessary and underutilized software licenses.

Overview

Syntegon discovers 6-digit euro amount in software license savings with Snow Software

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Challenges & Opportunities

If you’ve ever received an injection from your doctor, there’s a high chance that the medicine you received was transported in a hermetically sealed and, sterile, Syntegon container. With a presence in over 15 countries and 1,700 patented inventions, Syntegon Technology is a world-leading producer of processing and packaging technology for the pharmaceutical and food industries.

In 2020, Syntegon embarked on an ambitious business transformation project, aiming to cut costs, improve efficiency, and enhance profitability. With over 6,000 employees relying on 6,500 workstations, 3,000 mobile devices, and 700 servers, software licenses form a substantial proportion of their annual spend.

Ulrich Koch, License Manager at Syntegon, explains, “As well as enterprise applications from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP®, we also use a great deal of specialist engineering software, including EPLAN, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Wonderware and much more. Each application comes with its own unique license agreement and terms of service, which makes managing our license portfolio and ensuring compliance with usage terms a tremendously complex task.”

Ulrich Koch continues, “With a savings target of middle-6-digit euro amount in mind, we looked for the best way to consolidate all of our asset management activities into a single platform, to help our IT teams to work even more productively, optimize our software licenses, and increase license compliance.”

Solution

To find the right asset management solutions for its needs, Syntegon selected solutions from two vendors and tested them both in proof-of-concept exercises. Snow Software came out as the clear winner — outperforming on every front.

“During the proof of concept, we discovered that Snow would enable us to monitor at least 95 percent of our installed applications, whereas the other vendor would only cover 40 percent,” explains Koch.

He adds: “Based on the excellent performance of Snow and the fact that it could help us to manage our entire license portfolio, not just enterprise application licenses, selecting Snow Software was a natural choice.” To ensure best practices and maximize the benefits of Snow solutions, Syntegon engaged Snow premier partner SoftwareONE to host Snow and manage their SaaS, datacenter and end user computing environments.

“Thanks to SoftwareONE we achieved rapid, seamless and cost-effective deployment of Snow products,” says Stefan Elling, director of IT Controlling. “In fact, we were able to get up and running without any issues, and it only required one member from our IT team to help configure the system—freeing the rest of the team to work on value-added tasks.”

Impact & Results

With Snow Software underpinning its asset management activities, Syntegon has dramatically simplified software license management and uncovered huge year-on-year savings.

“With Snow, we reduced our software licensing costs by an upper 6-digits euro figure, which was significantly more than the original 2020 target,” says Stefan Elling.

“By delivering granular insight into our software license portfolio, user types, and the key hardware metrics relevant to our usage agreements, Snow helped us to identify unnecessary and underutilized software licenses.

We are also much better equipped to ensure round-the-clock compliance with all our software license agreements with a near real-time view of installed software — making it easy to spot and deactivate unused licenses.” Impressed with its software asset management capabilities, Syntegon decided to launch a proof of concept for Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, an SAP-certified application built to optimize and manage SAP licenses.

Frank Streichert, vice-president IT, concludes: “Snow Software is an essential asset management tool for us because it helps reduce IT operating costs and minimize business risks. By purposefully streamlining our software license management and consistently reducing expenses, we can devote more resources to developing new, innovative IT services and expanding IT service excellence. We look forward to deepening our partnership with Snow Software and see very good opportunities to leverage further potential to reduce software licensing costs.”