Getting Started with Redress Compliance: Your Guide to Independent Software Advisory

Who We Are

Redress Compliance is an independent enterprise software licensing advisory firm. We work exclusively on the buyer side, providing licensing assessments, renewal negotiation support, and audit defence for enterprise organisations across every major software vendor — Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Broadcom/VMware, AWS, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, Workday, and Cisco.

We were founded by Fredrik Filipsson and Morten Andersen, both of whom bring more than twenty years of enterprise software licensing experience from advisory, vendor, and client-side roles. The firm is Gartner recognised and has completed over 500 client engagements covering more than $2.1 billion in software spend under advisory.

The defining principle of everything we do is structural independence. We take no vendor referral fees, reseller commissions, or any form of remuneration from software vendors. We are not resellers. We are not system integrators with vendor partnerships to protect. Our only commercial relationship is with our clients, and our only objective is to improve their commercial position with their software vendors.

This independence is not merely a compliance formality. It means every recommendation we make is grounded in what is commercially optimal for the client — not in what maintains a vendor relationship, meets a reseller quota, or generates a referral commission. In a market where many advisory firms have commercial ties to the vendors they advise on, structural independence is both rare and genuinely valuable.

The Problem We Solve

Enterprise software vendors — Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM, and their peers — invest heavily in the commercial capabilities of their account teams. Those teams are trained in their own licensing models, have access to deep data on customer usage and contractual exposure, and are incentivised to maximise the revenue extracted from each renewal. They negotiate with your organisation every three to five years. They do this every day.

Most enterprise procurement and IT leadership teams, however capable, are generalists who engage with any given software vendor infrequently and without access to the transaction benchmark data that would allow them to evaluate vendor pricing proposals against real market comparables. The result is a structural asymmetry that consistently favours the vendor — in commercial terms, in audit outcomes, and in renewal economics.

Independent advisory from Redress Compliance exists to rebalance this asymmetry. We bring vendor-specific expertise, real transaction benchmark data covering comparable organisations and deal sizes, and negotiation experience from hundreds of engagements to every client relationship. The question is not whether independent advisory creates value — it consistently does, typically delivering a return on advisory fees of ten to thirty times the engagement cost in direct savings and risk reduction. The question is whether your organisation captures that value on your next renewal.

What We Do

Licence Assessments and Compliance Reviews

A licence assessment is an independent review of your software estate's compliance position with one or more vendors. It involves analysis of your existing licence entitlements against your actual deployment scope, identification of compliance gaps (under-licensing) and shelfware (over-licensing), and quantification of the financial exposure or savings opportunity each finding represents.

Licence assessments are the foundation of informed software commercial management. Without an accurate, independently verified compliance position, it is impossible to prepare effectively for vendor audits, to right-size renewal commitments, or to make defensible procurement decisions. Most organisations find that their actual compliance position — when assessed independently — differs materially from what their internal records suggest.

Renewal Negotiation Advisory

Renewal negotiation advisory is our most frequently engaged service. It involves independent preparation and support for major software contract renewals with Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Broadcom/VMware, and other enterprise vendors. This includes pre-renewal assessment of the existing estate, benchmarking of current pricing against our transaction database, development of a negotiation strategy including leverage identification and sequencing, and active support throughout the negotiation itself.

The commercial value of renewal negotiation advisory is generated primarily through three mechanisms: access to real transaction benchmarks that demonstrate where the organisation is above market, identification of shelfware and compliance findings that create legitimate grounds for scope reduction, and the negotiation experience to deploy these findings effectively within the dynamics of a major vendor commercial discussion.

Typical savings from well-executed renewal advisory range from fifteen to forty percent of the vendor's initial renewal proposal, depending on the vendor, the size of the estate, the lead time available before renewal, and the quality of the compliance data available. The savings materialise as reduced committed spend, improved commercial terms, or both.

Vendor Audit Defence

Vendor audit defence advisory is engaged when an organisation receives a formal audit request from a software vendor. This service covers the full audit lifecycle from initial response through to settlement — advising on scope and methodology, providing independent analysis of deployment data, challenging vendor audit findings where they overstate the compliance liability, and supporting settlement negotiations.

Vendor audit findings routinely overstate the actual compliance liability by thirty to sixty percent. The overstatement arises from vendor-favourable assumptions in audit methodology, aggressive interpretation of contractual language, and the inclusion of commercial claims that go beyond the strict compliance position. Independent advisory reduces the final settlement by challenging each material element of the audit finding and replacing vendor assumptions with independently supportable calculations.

Ongoing Advisory: Vendor Shield

Vendor Shield is Redress Compliance's continuous advisory programme, providing ongoing independent governance of your enterprise software estate across all major vendors. It covers proactive compliance monitoring, renewal planning and preparation, vendor intelligence and market intelligence, and on-demand advisory support for commercial decisions as they arise throughout the year.

Vendor Shield is designed for organisations with complex, multi-vendor software estates where major renewals occur frequently across multiple vendors, and where the cost of operating without continuous commercial governance is high. It replaces the pattern of reactive advisory — engaging support only when a renewal or audit arrives — with proactive governance that captures significantly more value over time.

Which Vendors We Cover

Redress Compliance has dedicated vendor practices covering all eleven major enterprise software categories. Each practice is staffed by advisors with deep, specific expertise in the vendor's licensing model, audit processes, and commercial dynamics — not generalists who cover multiple vendors without the depth that each relationship requires.

Our Oracle practice covers Database, Middleware, Applications, Java, and Cloud — including Oracle's complex virtualisation licensing rules, ULA management, and the Java licensing changes that have affected hundreds of thousands of organisations since 2023. Our Microsoft practice covers M365, Azure, Enterprise Agreements, and Copilot. Our SAP practice covers ECC to S/4HANA migrations, user classification, Digital Access, and renewal negotiations. Our IBM practice covers all IBM software including middleware, analytics, cloud, and the sub-capacity ILMT compliance requirements that are central to IBM licensing economics. Our Broadcom practice covers the VMware subscription transition, perpetual licence retirement, and migration alternative evaluation. Our cloud practices cover AWS, Google Cloud, and multi-cloud spend optimisation including data egress management, Reserved Instance strategy, and enterprise discount programme negotiations.

What to Expect in a First Engagement

A typical first engagement with Redress Compliance follows a consistent structure that balances speed of insight with rigour of analysis.

Step 1: Discovery Call (30–60 minutes)

We begin with a confidential introductory call to understand your situation — the vendor relationship in question, the immediate commercial trigger (renewal, audit, strategic review), the timeline available, and the key questions you need answered. This call is free and carries no obligation. Its purpose is to establish whether Redress Compliance's expertise is a good match for your situation and to give you an initial sense of the commercial opportunity or risk exposure we would focus on.

Step 2: Scoping and Proposal

Following the discovery call, we prepare a scoping document that outlines the specific activities we would undertake, the data and access we would need from your side, the timeline, and the commercial arrangement. Most of our engagements are structured on a fixed fee basis, so you have certainty on cost from the outset. For larger, multi-vendor programmes, we may also offer success fee arrangements where a portion of the advisory fee is contingent on achieving defined commercial savings.

Step 3: Assessment and Analysis

Once engaged, we conduct the agreed assessment activities. For a licence assessment, this involves reviewing your contract documentation, licence entitlement records, and deployment data. For a renewal negotiation, it involves analysing the estate and developing the negotiation strategy. For an audit defence, it involves reviewing the audit request, vendor findings, and your deployment data to develop an independent analysis of the compliance position. We work from your data and documents — we do not run scanning tools or access your systems directly.

Step 4: Delivery and Action

We deliver findings in a format appropriate to the engagement — a written assessment report, a negotiation strategy document, an audit defence analysis, or an ongoing advisory relationship structure. For negotiation engagements, delivery includes active support through the vendor discussions until conclusion. We measure our success by the commercial outcomes achieved for clients, not by the volume of deliverable documentation produced.

Why Clients Choose Redress Compliance

Clients engage Redress Compliance for several consistent reasons that distinguish us from the broader market of software advisory services.

Structural independence is the most frequently cited reason. The absence of vendor commercial relationships means that every recommendation reflects our honest assessment of what is commercially optimal for the client — without the conflicts of interest that affect many organisations in the software advisory space.

Vendor-specific depth is the second most consistent reason. Enterprise software licensing is not a generic discipline. The knowledge required to manage an Oracle database audit is categorically different from what is needed to navigate a SAP S/4HANA transition negotiation or an IBM ELA renewal with PVU-to-VPC implications. Clients choose Redress Compliance because we have that depth, vendor by vendor, in every major enterprise software category.

Transaction benchmark data is the third key differentiator. Our database of real client transactions across all major vendors and deal sizes allows us to demonstrate, with evidence, where our clients are above market and what improved terms look like in practice. Vendor pricing proposals are anchored to list rates. Informed negotiation uses real market data to move away from those anchors.

Getting Started: Next Steps

If you have a specific vendor renewal or audit driving your interest in advisory support, the fastest route to value is a confidential introductory call. You can request a call through our contact page or the online booking form. The call typically takes thirty minutes and will give you a clear sense of the commercial opportunity in your specific situation.

If you are at an earlier stage — exploring advisory for the first time, building a business case for independent advisory support, or wanting to understand how we have helped comparable organisations — our case studies library covers 154 client engagements across all major vendors and industry sectors. Our white papers library provides over 160 independent research publications on enterprise software licensing topics. Both are freely available without registration.

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