Imagine you’re the Chief Financial Officer of a leading telecommunications provider in the DACH region. The current economic climate is challenging. At your weekly management meeting, the mandate is clear, cut costs wherever possible while ensuring departments remain fully operational.
Finding internal efficiencies is notoriously difficult when you lack proper tools. Your first likely scenario is to call every department head into your office and ask them if they are operating at an optimal level without frivolous spending. In order for these department heads to tell you that they have rooms to cut expenses, they first have to admit that their department hasn’t been performing at an optimal level for months or years. This can feel like an attack on their leadership, which incentivizes optimistic answers rather than honest ones. After those meetings, you may conclude that no department can cut costs. Chances are, you lack the visibility to determine whether one department is overspending while another is under-resourced. In today’s blog, we’ll focus on obvious yet often mismanaged expenses: laptops and SaaS applications.
The $250,000 guessing game
According to a Gartner report, “Inflation and supply chain challenges have resulted in device costs increasing up to 20% since the start of 2021.” Let’s keep it simple and say a computer is $500 and you have 500 employees. If you go by the old method in which you arbitrarily pick a lifespan of 3 or 4 years and you do a mass overhaul, that will cost your company $250,000. Some of the computers are working fine, some have failed in the first 2 years but you told that employee to stay patient because the big date for a new computer is 3 or 4 years. This is outdated because your employees are not using the computer to the same degree. An engineer’s laptop will degrade much faster than a marketing specialist. With the right tool, you can see the health of each individual device so instead of a large and expensive refresh for the entire company, you replace when it meets the criteria set by you.
Aternity Smart Device Refresh
Riverbed Aternity shifts your strategy from a rigid schedule to a data-driven one. By capturing real-time health telemetry across your entire hardware fleet, Aternity identifies exactly which devices are struggling and which can be safely retained. Using the Smart Device Refresh dashboard, your organization can define specific refresh policies that align with your unique set of criteria, such as monitoring the battery degradation or CPU throttling. Instead of a mass overhaul, amasol help you build a dashboard that flags only the batteries hitting a critical threshold. This precision means your employees feel supported because their tools are fixed when they actually fail, while your company avoids unnecessary capital waste. The result? A leaner budget and a more productive and satisfied workforce.
Once Aternity is implemented into your company by amasol, those difficult and data-less negotiations with department heads become a thing of the past. You no longer have to rely on anecdotal “requests” for new hardware, you have objective data to prove whether a device is performing optimally, regardless of its age.
This proactive approach buys you significant time and political capital. Because Aternity identifies a failing device before department heads hear about it from their employees, amasol can set up automated workflows that trigger a ticket in your ITSM tool such as ServiceNow immediately. Imagine a scenario where the replacement hardware is already authorized by the IT team and all you have to do is give the final authorization.
This earns you immense goodwill across the organization. It transforms the finance department’s reputation. You are no longer the person who says no to spending, you are now the leader who ensures the tools actually work before the work is interrupted.
While amasol handles the technical heavy lifting such as implementation, optimization, and ongoing support, you are free to focus on the bigger picture and take credit for the newfound operational efficiency.
To ensure the human element isn’t lost, Aternity correlates this technical data with User Sentiment Surveys. This provides a complete Digital Employee Experience (DEX) score by matching hard metrics such as crash rates, slow to load certain applications with direct feedback from the user. This contextualized insight allows you, the CFO, to prioritize spending where it will have the highest impact on both the balance sheet and employee morale.
Targeted Software License Renewal
The $250,000 guessing game is tangible while SaaS expenditure is harder to keep track of because its all in the cloud. According to Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report, “33% of cloud spending was wasted due to under-used licenses.” For a telecommunication provider, this 33% waste represents a massive opportunity to cut the spending while keeping the operation the same.
Telecommunications companies utilize thousands of licenses from specialized engineering tools to CRM tools to the standard productivity suites such as Microsoft 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud. The problem is that most companies pay for these licenses based on provisioning (how many people have the software) rather than utilization (how many people actually use it). When you ask a department head to cut software costs, they fear losing the tool their team “might” need. Without data, you are forced to pay for “Zombies Licenses” just to avoid a potential drop in productivity.
Real usage vs Background noise
amasol helps you identify users who haven’t opened an expensive application in 30, 60, or 90 days, highlighting exactly where SaaS spending is being wasted. Aternity even tracks which specific features are being used, allowing you to downgrade tiers without impacting work. For example, if your marketing team is only using features available in a standard version of a software you are paying for the pro version, Aternity will flag this opportunity on your platform.
To make the business case even clearer, Aternity calculates your total potential savings in real-time. You no longer have to wonder what if, you can see the potential amount of savings before you trigger the process of getting rid of a license. This data-driven approach turns the hard to quantify “SaaS Black Box” into a transparent, manageable line item, giving you the leverage needed for your next major vendor negotiation.
Riverbed Aternity in action
Many hospitals have been using Aternity to improve their patients’ experience. here is a good example, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust.
Why amasol is the strategic partner you need
Riverbed Aternity is a powerhouse of data but in a high-stakes telecommunications environment, you don’t need raw data, you need actionable insights. Your IT team is already stretched too thin, the last thing they need is a steep learning curve for a new platform. This is where amasol’s 25+ years of experience in the DACH region becomes your greatest asset.
Zero learning curves and maximum impact
We don’t simply sell the software and leave. We listen to your unique business objectives and configure the platform to speak two languages simultaneously.
• For your IT team: We provide the deep technical telemetry they need such as CPU throttling and application latency, everything they need to see to keep everything functioning.
• For you (The CFO): We translate the data into numbers that matter to the financial side of the organization such as potential savings, asset health, and ROI.
Expertise that delivers peace of mind
With amasol’s expertise and over 25 years of experience, you unlock the full potential of Riverbed Aternity without the learning curve. amasol has a team of certified experts who will guide you through every step from implementation to configuration to ongoing optimization. Our specialists:
• Understand Aternity’s architecture, integrations, and best practices.
• Optimize the platform to align with your KPIs and maximize ROI.
• Train your teams with hands-on sessions and tailored documentation.
• Automate remediation and reporting to save time and reduce manual effort.
amasol & BizOps
At amasol, we understand that budgets are tight and every technology investment must deliver measurable value. That’s why we embrace BizOps, short for Business Operations. A mindset that connects IT performance directly to business outcomes. amasol believes in:
• Aligning technology decisions with measurable business results.
• Bridging the gap between IT operations and financial KPIs.
• Confirming that all IT investments deliver value.
If you want to learn more about IT asset cost reduction, Contact us today for an initial non-obligatory first contact and see how amasol could help your company become proactive rather than reactive.
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