Energy Supermajor
A global Energy supermajor streamlined its fragmented digital portfolio, tackling rising costs and lost expertise head-on. With Open iT’s harvesting capabilities, advanced reporting, and expert support, they optimized software usage, eliminated waste, and transformed cost management into a strategic advantage.
Drilling Down on Digital Inefficiencies with License Optimization & Harvesting
Highlights
- Industry-leading subsurface modeling software: $2-3M annual savings on licenses (costs reduced from $12M to $9.5M) and 75% improvement in license utilization (from 75% idle to 75% active).
- Specialized geological modeling software: 50% cost reduction, saving $2M.
- Industry-standard drilling engineering software: $600K saved, further reductions expected.
- Expanded monitoring beyond geoscience to reservoir engineering, well operations, and petrophysics.
- Introduced license harvesting—reclaiming idle licenses and increasing efficiency.
- Anonymized reporting was implemented to comply with internal privacy policies.
- Future-proofing software management with additional optimizations planned for cloud-based applications.
Company and Business Overview
A leading Energy supermajor with over 100,000 employees and $200 billion in revenue operates a very large digital product portfolio, spanning exploration, reservoir engineering, production, and Well operations. Their specialized software suite includes industry-leading tools for subsurface modeling, well operations, geophysical interpretation, and advanced reservoir modeling, supporting end-to-end operations from subsurface analysis to production management.
The company runs its internal cloud-based infrastructure, ensuring secure and seamless access to its integrated toolset across global locations. This setup proved invaluable during the pandemic, allowing operations to continue without disruption.
Business Challenges
The company then faced escalating software costs and inefficiencies due to a fragmented and unmonitored software portfolio. Ownership of digital applications was spread across multiple teams, and there had been no systematic review of license usage for some time.
Key challenges included:
- $50 M+ product portfolio was tracked using outdated spreadsheets.
- Lack of centralized software management, which led to overspending.
- Complex approval processes that required extensive manual efforts.
Recognizing the need for change, the company assembled a dedicated business analytics team to modernize software asset management and optimize licensing costs.
Whitepapers
Cost Allocation and IT Chargeback
The most efficient way to create more accountability and awareness of how IT resources are used is to implement a chargeback system.
Software Usage Monitoring and Optimization
Learn how usage monitoring in an E&P IT environment can be beneficial for many stakeholders.
Rising Use of Subscription and Pay-per-Use Software Licensing Models
Have a meaningful software usage metrics and tools to evaluate and plan appropriately prior to making new licensing decisions.
Take a Guided Tour
Get answers with a one-on-one walk-through.
Schedule a live demo today. We’ll show you how your business can benefit from an efficient software asset management program with Open iT usage metering tools.
Latest Blogs
Software License Tracking: Curbing Camping and Hoarding with Granular Visibility
Continuous access to engineering and design applications such as MATLAB, Ansys, or AutoCAD often dictates whether projects advance efficiently or encounter costly delays. Yet without effective software license tracking, licenses remain finite, expensive, and frequently tied up in ways that reduce overall availability. A significant factor is camping and hoarding behavior, where users hold onto
SOLIDWORKS Software Licensing Models: Network or Named User?
For engineering-driven industries such as automotive, where design cycles are compressed and global collaboration is the norm, the choice of software licensing models has direct implications for productivity, cost control, and long-term scalability. SOLIDWORKS offers both seat-based (concurrent/floating/network) and named user entitlements, each with benefits and constraints. The challenge lies not in understanding their mechanics,
Open iT: Unlocking Software Value at Mexico Oil & Gas Summit 2025
Oil & Gas companies in Latin America are under growing pressure to improve efficiency while keeping technology costs under control. Specialized engineering and geoscience applications, vital for exploration and production, often carry high licensing costs. Without visibility into actual usage, many organizations risk overspending, under-utilizing assets, and missing opportunities to optimize resources. Against this backdrop,
Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to receive the latest news and updates.