① About
Mainframe Licensing Experts is an independent advisory for mainframe software licensing. We defend audits and negotiate renewals across IBM, Broadcom (CA), BMC, Rocket Software, Software AG, Compuware (BMC), and Syncsort (Precisely). We work for buyers only.
Your vendors negotiate mainframe agreements every week. You face them once every three years. We close that gap.
Mainframe Licensing Experts was established in 2019 to do one thing: put real licensing expertise on the buyer side of mainframe software negotiations. The publishers who sell into the mainframe estate run disciplined, well staffed commercial machines. Most enterprises meet that machine with a procurement generalist and a renewal date. The result is predictable, and it is priced into every uplift letter the industry sends.
We sit on your side only. We are paid by clients, never by vendors, and we are not affiliated with IBM, Broadcom, BMC, Rocket Software, Software AG, or Precisely. That independence is structural, not rhetorical: it is what lets us challenge an audit methodology, recalculate a finding, or recommend walking away from a product line without any conflict in the room.
The work concentrates on two disciplines, mainframe audit defense and license negotiation, supported by renewal advisory, cost optimization, contract review, and MSU optimization. Everything we know about one publisher's tactics compounds across the others, because the playbooks rhyme: capacity baselines that ratchet, bundles that hide shelfware, and clocks that always favor the vendor.
Mainframe spend negotiated
Engagements delivered
Typical renewal reduction
Mobilization on audit notice
Two founders, one focus: forty years between them on the licensing, contracts, and capacity decisions that sit behind every mainframe renewal — now on your side of the table.
Co-Founder & Principal Advisor
Fredrik has spent twenty years in enterprise IT and the mainframe world, working across the licensing, contracts, and capacity decisions that sit behind every major renewal. He co-founded Mainframe Licensing Experts to put that experience where it is scarce: on the buyer side of the table. He writes here on audit defense, renewal strategy, and the pricing mechanics buyers meet across IBM, Broadcom (CA), BMC, and the rest of the field.
Co-Founder & Principal Advisor
Morten brings twenty years of enterprise IT and mainframe experience, built around the contracts, capacity metrics, and vendor negotiations that decide what an estate actually pays. He co-founded Mainframe Licensing Experts to give buyers the same depth their publishers bring to every deal. His writing covers license negotiation, cost optimization, and the measurement detail — MSU, MIPS, R4HA, SCRT — that moves invoices.
Full portfolio inventory: every product, every contract, MIPS or MSU per product, term expiry per agreement. Most estates have never seen their own position on one page. This is where leverage starts.
Actual consumption against contracted capacity, with SCRT and R4HA data validated independently. Vendor reported numbers are the vendor's case; reconciled numbers are yours.
Alternative evaluation, metric transition options, timing, and the credible walk away, built before the vendor controls the clock. Leverage that arrives in the final quarter is theater; leverage built early moves numbers.
The renewal or settlement locked with caps, consumption protections, and exit rights. A good close protects the next term, not just this one.
⑤ The Mainframe Licensing Brief
Renewal patterns, audit activity, and pricing model changes across the seven publishers, written for the people who sign the agreements.