Most SQL Server estates are over-licensed.
Not by a little. We've taken more than NZ$50 million off our clients' licensing bills, and we're still finding it. A licensing audit checks every instance you run: edition, cores, Software Assurance, and what each one actually does. Then it finds the licences you're paying for and don't need.
That's pretty impressive.Ray, CEO
A prioritised plan with a dollar figure against every change. Biggest wins first. It usually pays for itself on the first finding.
Six things decide your SQL bill.
We go instance by instance and check each one. The biggest single lever is almost always edition.
Edition
Enterprise costs roughly four times Standard, per core. If the workload never touches an Enterprise feature, you are paying four times over for nothing.
Cores
Physical core counts, the four-core-per-processor minimum, and how your VM density changes the maths.
Software Assurance
Licence mobility, failover rights, pay-as-you-go. You either use the benefits you pay for, or you leave them on the table.
Passive & DR replicas
Some need a licence, some do not — it depends on your SA. People get this wrong in both directions.
Virtualisation
Per VM or per host. Live Migration and vMotion quietly spread licences across hosts when nobody is watching.
Idle servers
Dev, test, decommissioned boxes, old replicas. Still licensed, still on your bill, nobody using them. The fastest money back.
Read-only, start to finish. A few days to a week.
We look at configuration and usage metadata only. We change nothing on your servers, so there is no production impact.
We inventory every instance, edition and core count. For most sites it is the first accurate list anyone has had.
We map the features actually in use against the edition that requires them.
We reconcile that against your Microsoft licensing and Software Assurance.
We model the cheapest compliant setup: edition changes, consolidation, the SA calls.
You get a prioritised plan with a dollar figure against each change. Biggest wins first.