Tegel is a household name in New Zealand: established in 1961, it has been putting chicken on Kiwi tables ever since. With more than 50% market share for chicken sales in New Zealand, you’ve almost certainly bought Tegel chicken at the supermarket or eaten it from KFC or Pita Pit.
Tegel employs more than 2,300 people in New Zealand and to manage its cloud services and software licensing for more than 900 users, Tegel uses a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. With its existing three-year agreement due to expire in March 2025, and prices having risen, the Tegel team needed to consider how to get the most out of a new agreement.
While Tegel was very happy with its Microsoft licensing overall, it faced some challenges in accurately measuring and tracking individual licenses.
“We were struggling with, ‘How do we find out what licenses we have and how they’re being used?’” explains Jason Mathewson, GM - Information Systems at Tegel.
“We’d tried to do this ourselves by talking to our end-users, but that didn’t work very well. We put out an RFP to see what else was out there.”
Among respondents to the RFP, Datacom stood out by being the only one to offer a tool that would measure Tegel’s license use.
“Instead of having my team go out with third parties to interview people and work it out, the software made it so much easier,” says Mathewson. “Yes, it came with a cost. But it was a game changer – it gave us the information in a way that was easy to consume and made so much sense to us.”
In addition to providing the right tool for the job, Datacom provided consultancy services that supported Tegel to get the best deal from Microsoft. The Datacom team worked on Tegel’s behalf to negotiate with Microsoft, minimising the cost increase as much as possible.
“It felt very much as though Datacom was on our side, and together we went back two or three times to negotiate with Microsoft,” says Leon Celliers, Tegel’s IS & Business Transformation Manager.
“Datacom always put options on the table, provided recommendations, and when we had a question, they always had an answer.”
The team at Tegel was facing a 35% cost increase for their licensing, but set a goal to cut that down by half. Datacom delivered on this, limiting the price rise to 17% through more accurate license allocation and negotiating with Microsoft.
“We told Datacom what we hoped to save, and they showed us a simple graph of where we were and how to reach the target,” says Celliers. “The software was a great enabler, providing a 50% saving per license – it would have been impossible to do that via a manual audit.”
Datacom was “quite ingenious in how they reconstituted licenses for us,” says Mathewson. “They gave us good advice on licensing that we wouldn’t have known about, like pack discounts. They were very, very good at delivering on our wishes and with their advice we were confident that we couldn’t do any better on the price.”
“By working closely with the Tegel team to understand their needs, we’ve been able to deliver tangible benefits and savings,” says Datacom’s General Manager for PSG, Amato Funaki. “That is the focus for our PSG team – we start by understanding our customers and what they need, and then we figure out how to support them to get the most from their tech and to implement solutions that work for their people and their business.”
Despite having only three months to map its licenses, pick solutions and negotiate with Microsoft, Tegel and Datacom managed to stay on time and on budget. Part of that was thanks to the Tegel team’s straightforward and determined approach, says Amy Jackson, Strategic Licensing Lead at Datacom.
“The team at Tegel was a breath of fresh air. They were open and honest about what they wanted to achieve. They also really committed to their deadline – it was right before Christmas, but they put the people and resources onto the job to make sure they met the tight timeframe. Their openness and commitment helped us achieve an enormous return on investment.”
With its new Enterprise Agreement now in place, Tegel is working on developing more workflow-orientated processes, and upskilling its team in the wider Microsoft 365 suite. It also has two more licensing agreements coming up for renewal, so it’s working with Datacom to optimise those, too.
The Tegel IT team has a considerable number of projects on the go at any one time, as the business thrives and grows. Luckily, its engagement with Datacom has been reducing stress, rather than adding to it.
“I’ve been through a number of these types of projects,” Mathewson says. “You don’t look forward to it. But Datacom made the process easy and enjoyable – which I didn’t expect. We really enjoyed the engagement.”
Datacom's PSG team can provide tailored business software licensing to help companies achieve savings and efficiency. To optimise your software licensing, the team can help you track existing license use within your business and determine what you need.
