Most consulting firms charge before savings are realized. UMS ties its economics to documented savings instead. That difference changes how work gets prioritized, staffed, and executed.
The key distinction is ownership after the analysis. UMS is built for follow-through: usage cleanup, renewal leverage, audit response, and savings validation.
Shared savings for eligible projects, plus fixed-fee and staffing options
Hourly or project-based fees regardless of outcome
$0. Zero financial risk
Fees typically begin before savings are realized
Our revenue is tied to your savings
Revenue tied to hours billed, not results delivered
25+ years focused exclusively on software licensing
Often broader consulting scope across many domains
Decades of negotiation data across 200+ vendors
Limited to public pricing and vendor-provided benchmarks
60-90 days to first verified savings
Recommendations may precede implementation and realized savings
Ongoing partnership. We keep finding savings
Often structured around a scoped project or advisory phase
Full software estate: licensing, contracts, cloud, telecom, M&A
Narrow scope, often single-vendor focus
Our team spent years on the publisher side, writing the playbooks that vendors use to extract maximum payment from enterprises. We know every tactic, every loophole, every pressure point. Then we switched sides.
Now we use that insider knowledge to defend clients, structure renewals, and find savings that sit between IT, procurement, finance, legal, and vendor teams. The public proof base includes $800M+ saved for the City of New York and case studies across Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, ServiceNow, and cloud optimization.
Useful for strategy, transformation, and board-level analysis. UMS is built for a narrower job: turning software and vendor data into documented savings, stronger renewal positions, and defensible audit outcomes.
Useful when you need a scoped SAM advisory project. UMS is the better fit when the work must turn into savings, audit defense, renewal leverage, or managed execution.
You bought the engine. Now you need the driver. Platforms generate data. We turn that data into negotiated savings, defensible audit positions, and a repeatable operating cadence.
The economic structure that has earned UMS 25+ years of operator-firm credibility.
We invest our time, expertise, and resources upfront, at our cost. We analyze your software estate, identify savings opportunities, and execute the optimizations and negotiations.
For eligible shared-savings engagements, you pay nothing until savings are documented and verified. The fee is paid from realized savings under the commercial structure agreed up front. If the engagement does not produce the agreed savings outcome, the shared-savings fee does not apply.
For point-of-pain work like ServiceNow implementation, audit defense, and specialized remediation, UMS can also use fixed-fee or staffing models when that better fits the work.
Full assessment and analysis at our cost. Zero upfront fees.
Documented, verified savings you can see on your P&L.
For eligible work, our fee comes from a pre-agreed share of documented savings. No agreed savings outcome means no shared-savings fee.
Each engagement reduces to ledger rows with their own verified marks. The total at the foot is just typography over a hairline.
Industry sources on why the work has to land in the system, not the deck.
International standards treat IT asset management as a management-system discipline, which is one reason operating ownership matters as much as the platform itself.
SaaS estates are large and getting harder to govern. Okta says the global average number of apps per customer has surpassed 100, while Flexera reports that complete visibility across the technology stack has fallen to 43%.
Audit exposure can be financially material. Flexera's 2025 survey says 45% of respondents estimated more than $1M in software audit spend over the prior three years.
For Microsoft EA customers, annual true-up is a required process with defined submission windows. Renewal preparation becomes time-bound operational work, not a reporting exercise.
The shared-savings structure rewires what gets prioritized, staffed, and finished.
We don't bill hours, so there's no incentive to stretch work, schedule unnecessary meetings, or staff junior consultants on your account.
We recommend only services that generate savings. Every recommendation is tied to a quantifiable outcome, not a revenue target.
Our revenue grows when your savings grow. That makes us long-term partners, not short-term vendors. Our average client relationship is 10+ years.
If our assessment finds nothing, you've lost nothing. We bear the cost of analysis, strategy, and initial engagement, not you.
UMS has been an invaluable partner in managing our software costs - across multiple administrations, multiple agencies, and over $800M in cumulative savings.
When federal budget uncertainty hit, this agency needed immediate cost reduction. UMS analyzed their Microsoft 365 environment and found that over half of G3 cloud subscriptions were unused or misallocated - remnants of a completed contractor project that were never reclaimed. The result: $1.76M in verified savings over two years, delivered in weeks with minimal operational disruption.
30 minutes with a real operator. We'll show you exactly where the savings are. Zero upfront, paid only on results.