"It went from a significant to an insignificant cost of the whole operation," Leonard says.

Infocrossing also focused on maintenance costs, because paying 20 percent of list price, as vendors would prefer, "can just kill you," he says.

Leonard's goal is typically to pay 20 percent of the acquisition price, and negotiate clauses that limit price increases related to future acquisition of licenses. Immature IT buyers often make the mistake of focusing only on upfront costs, when future costs for maintenance and additional license acquisitions can turn a seemingly good deal into a bad one, he says.

The process Leonard used to negotiate lower server management costs was replicated across 20 or 30 products in the standardization initiative, making software a significant portion of the cost savings achieved in the whole project.

Infocrossing still uses many IBM and CA products in areas other than server management. Infocrossing ended up paying NetIQ more overall than it did previously, but the cost per-server is "way less," Leonard says. He can't say exactly how much they paid due to a nondisclosure agreement.

"If they don't hamstring you with a nondisclosure agreement, that generally means you didn't get good pricing," Leonard says. "They don't want our pricing available to the general public."

Infocrossing often finds itself on the other side of the table, when its own customers ask for discounts. "Sometimes, we'll say 'absolutely,'" because when Infocrossing's hardware costs go down, it makes sense to pass some savings on to customers, Leonard says.

"If there's not a basis where our costs have gone down, we go back to them and say 'hey, here's what our costs are, there isn't anything that's changed since we did the deal before. It was a good deal then and it's still a good deal now,'" Leonard says.

Leonard says a vendor that is logical and unemotional can typically convince a customer that the price is right, even if the customer has asked for a discount.

"The customers don't know, largely, how much things should cost," he says. "The more confidence they get from us that we know how much things should cost," the more confidence they will have in the pricing.