Specialist procurement consulting for software companies buying, renewing, or reviewing OEM agreements. Vendor-side experience, applied on the buyer side, before you sign something you'll be living with for the next three to five years.
OEM software agreements look like ordinary vendor contracts on the cover page. They behave nothing like them. Pricing is tied to your deployment, your redistribution rights, your end-user terms, and your growth trajectory. The renewal mechanics are designed to compound vendor revenue across multi-year terms. Most procurement teams will negotiate one or two OEM agreements in their career. The vendor's team has negotiated hundreds.
OEM contracts embed in your product. Pricing scales with deployment, redistribution rights, and end-user license scope. Standard per-seat procurement logic doesn't model the real cost.
Your procurement team is doing this for the first or second time. The vendor's team has run this play hundreds of times. That experience gap costs real money across the full term.
Auto-renewal windows, escalator clauses, and minimum commit floors are built so the vendor's leverage compounds at every renewal cycle. Most buyers don't notice until the third or fourth year.
Pricing addenda, order forms, and exhibit schedules carry the provisions that matter most commercially. Standard procurement review focuses on the master agreement and misses where the real exposure sits.
Engagements are flat-fee and scoped to where you are in the cycle. No retainers required for first engagements. No long onboarding. Pick the entry point that matches your situation.
Send the contract. Receive a written commercial breakdown of every flagged provision, prioritized by dollar impact. Built for buyers who want a fast read before signing or renewing without committing to a full advisory engagement.
See Red Flag Review →Full renewal engagement: agreement audit, leverage build, counter-position development, and negotiation execution through to close. Performance fee tied to documented savings, so the incentive is aligned with your outcome.
See renewal pricing →End-to-end advisory for buyers acquiring a new OEM product: vendor selection, commercial structure analysis, gotcha identification, negotiation strategy, and final commercial review before signature.
See acquisition pricing →Every engagement is scoped differently, but the outcomes cluster around the same value drivers. Across vendor selection, new acquisitions, and renewals, this is what buyers actually walk away with.
Four stages, regardless of which entry point you start at. The depth varies. The structure does not.
I start with your dependency on the vendor, your realistic alternatives, and your timeline. Leverage gets built before the first vendor conversation, not during it.
Auto-renewals, escalators, audit rights, deployment restrictions, redistribution scope. I read the commercial terms the way someone who wrote them would.
A clear, prioritized strategy based on what the vendor will flex on and what they won't. Specific asks, specific fallback positions, no wasted negotiating capital.
I manage the back-and-forth so your team stays on the business. The goal is a deal your company can live with for the full term, not a one-week win.
OEM procurement consulting is for software companies, ISVs, and enterprise buyers with OEM exposure. Specifically:
You don't know what you don't know. The vendor does. Engage before pricing conversations start.
The number doesn't feel right or you've been auto-renewing for years. There's almost always room to restructure.
Multiple OEM options on the shortlist. Commercial structure varies more than feature parity. Choose with full information.
New to the company or new to the file. Understand what you signed before you own the outcome of it.
If you're acquiring a new OEM product, renewing an existing agreement, or trying to understand what you already signed, an early conversation almost always changes the outcome.