Engagement 02
Estate Rationalization Review
Find the duplicated spend before the renewal, not after it.
The situation
Tool sprawl is rarely a purchasing failure. It accumulates one defensible decision at a time: a platform team buys SCA, an application team buys SAST, an acquisition arrives with its own, and a cloud provider bundles a third into a license you were already paying for. Each was right on the day it was signed.
What nobody owns is the overlap. By the time somebody asks for a number, the only people who can answer are the vendors whose renewal depends on the answer.
This is you if
- You are running tools whose coverage you believe overlaps, and nobody can prove by how much.
- A major security contract renews in the next two quarters and you have no independent read on it.
- Someone has asked you to cut the security budget by a number rather than by a rationale.
How it runs
- Week 1
Inventory what you own
Every security tool in the estate, including the ones bundled into licenses nobody counted and the entitlements you already hold without having switched them on.
- Week 2
Map coverage, not features
Each tool scored against the capabilities we model, so overlap is measured on what the tools do rather than on the feature grids their vendors publish.
- Week 3
Price what it really costs
License, operator time, integration and enablement, per tool. Then the consolidation options, each carrying what it would cost to execute and not only what it would save.
What you are left holding
- Capability coverage of every tool you own, mapped against the 236 we model
- What genuinely overlaps, what is shelfware, and what a consolidation would actually cost to execute
- Total cost including the operator time the license never mentions
- A defensible recommendation, including where it is to keep paying for what you have
What we need from you
- Your security tooling contracts and renewal dates, including entitlements bundled into larger licenses.
- Seat counts, and actual usage wherever you have it.
- Forty-five minutes with the day-to-day operator of each tool.
A fixed fee that assumes nothing about access is a guess. This is the list that keeps the price the price.
What this is not
- Not a procurement negotiation. We do not sit in your renewal, and we take nothing from any vendor.
- Not a rip-and-replace recommendation by default. On a real estate the answer is sometimes to keep what you have and switch on what you already bought.
What we can already show
On the SAST program we model, personnel outruns license on every option — Checkmarx 331k against 200k.
Why people call about this one
Nobody can defend the tool spend
Fifteen to thirty overlapping tools with tangled licensing, in a year when every line is being questioned. The easiest security sale in a flat budget is the one that removes spend.
On the SAST program we model, the license is 34% to 41% of what the tool actually costs
The shape of it
- Shape
- Three weeks, fixed fee
- Usually funded by
- CFO · CISO
- Often leads to
- Toolchain Rationalization