Connect
Updated on December 8, 2025
Have you ever sat in a vendor negotiation meeting and felt like you were bringing a knife to a gunfight? If you are relying on gut feelings or vague promises of “better service next time,” you probably were. In the high-stakes world of enterprise software and service agreements, data is your only real leverage. Without it, you are essentially writing a blank check.
Vendor Managers often struggle because they lack objective, real-time visibility into how a product is actually performing. They know what the contract says should happen, but they often don’t know what is happening. This disconnect makes it nearly impossible to enforce Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or negotiate better terms during renewals.
To flip the script, IT needs to step up as a strategic partner. By providing three specific, quantified data points, uptime, actual usage, and security compliance, IT can arm Vendor Managers with the ammunition they need to drive down costs and demand accountability.
1. Real-World Uptime and Availability Logs
Vendors love to promise “99.99% uptime,” but how often do they actually deliver it? More importantly, how do you prove it when they don’t? relying on the vendor’s own status page is like asking a student to grade their own exam.
IT must provide independent verification of service availability. This shouldn’t just be a general sense of “the system felt slow last Tuesday.” You need hard logs.
What to provide:
- Downtime duration and frequency: Specific timestamps of outages.
- Impact analysis: How many users were affected and for how long.
- Performance degradation metrics: Times when the system was technically “up” but functionally unusable due to latency.
When a Vendor Manager walks into a renewal discussion with a report showing that the 99.9% SLA was breached four times in the last quarter, the conversation changes immediately. It shifts from “we’d like a discount” to “you owe us service credits per the contract terms.” This data turns a request into a requirement.
2. Granular Usage Rates (The “Shelfware” Detector)
One of the biggest sources of wasted IT spend is paying for licenses that nobody uses. We call this “shelfware.” It sits on the digital shelf, costing money every month, providing zero value.
Vendor Managers often lack the tools to see who is logging in and how often. They might renew 500 seats because “that’s what we’ve always had,” not realizing that only 320 employees have logged in during the last 90 days.
What to provide:
- Active user counts: The number of distinct users who have authenticated within the last 30, 60, and 90 days.
- Feature utilization: Data on whether premium features (that cost extra) are actually being used.
- Last login dates: A list of users who haven’t accessed the system in over six months.
With this data, your Vendor Manager can confidently cut seat counts or downgrade license tiers. If you can prove that you are paying for the “Enterprise” tier but only using “Pro” features, you have a clear path to significant cost savings.
3. Security Compliance Gaps
Security is rarely just a “nice to have” in modern contracts; it is a requirement. Most agreements include stipulations about how data is handled, patch management timelines, and security control adherence. If a vendor is failing here, they are not just failing you technically—they are putting your organization at risk.
IT needs to monitor and document compliance failures rigorously. A vendor might claim they are SOC 2 compliant, but if your logs show repeated failed security checks or unpatched vulnerabilities on their provided appliances, you have a serious problem, and serious leverage.
What to provide:
- Failed security checks: Logs showing unauthorized access attempts or configuration failures.
- Patch latency: Evidence of delays in applying critical security updates.
- Support response times: Metrics on how long it took the vendor to respond to and resolve security incidents.
If a vendor is failing to meet their security obligations, you have grounds to demand remediation at their expense, or potentially terminate the contract without penalty. This data transforms security from a technical burden into a powerful negotiation asset.
How to Get This Data
Collecting this information manually is tedious and prone to error. You need a centralized system that logs these events automatically across your entire IT estate.
JumpCloud’s Directory Insights and System Insights provide comprehensive logging and data access that make this easy. These tools allow you to audit who accessed what resource and when, track system health, and monitor compliance status across your fleet. Instead of scrambling for spreadsheets the week before a contract renewal, you can generate detailed reports instantly.
Don’t let your organization negotiate in the dark. Start gathering these three data points today, and turn your next vendor meeting into a victory.
