With its roots in the UK, Cushman & Wakefield is a global force in commercial property, providing expertise to clients with assets in many sectors. Today, the company has 400 offices across 70 countries and a team of more than 51,000 people. Now, thanks to expertise from Bytes, the company has tackled licensing risks head-on and saved £380,000 in planned costs.

In 2014, Cushman & Wakefield purchased Snow Software as a software asset management (SAM) solution. Although Snow was deployed globally across the desktop estate, the company struggled to use it effectively. Over time, the software was becoming little more than an inventory tool — and its ROI was being questioned. However, a pressing need arose in the shape of a global Microsoft True-Up, which would evaluate qualified licenses. Cushman & Wakefield knew there was a lack of clarity around the status of its global server environment, which carried risk and complexity.

Cushman & Wakefield needed a Snow partner it could trust — someone with leading Microsoft expertise, but independent of its incumbent Microsoft reseller. Fortunately, the staff in the EMEA region had worked with Bytes and SNOW previously. They were keen to recommend the company as the ideal Platinum Snow Partner and licensing specialist. Working against a tight timeframe, the Bytes team helped Cushman & Wakefield to deploy a new Snow platform in Italy. Next, the team reassigned Snow licensing from EMEA desktops to global servers, thereby avoiding the additional cost of new licenses for a solution that was under review. Then, by using Snow as the workspace and exploiting its full features, Bytes performed a Microsoft compliance review of the global server estate.

The True-up advice provided by Bytes has led to the mitigation of risk and has saved £380,000 in licensing costs. As a direct result of the project's success, Bytes has been enlisted by Cushman & Wakefield to provide a 12-month managed service for Microsoft licensing across the global server environment. This will provide outstanding control, visibility and further improvements — as well as serving as a best-practice template to be replicated across other vendors and the IT environment as part of a wider plan to implement a global SAM strategy.