$2.8M over-deployment cut.

Cognos and Maximo are licensed largely on user metrics, and that is exactly where over-deployment claims are easiest to overstate. IBM counted every account that existed in the directory: leavers who had never been deprovisioned, service accounts, duplicate identities, and roles that carried no real entitlement requirement. On Cognos the count made no distinction between an administrator and a consumer. The headline claim reached $2.8M on accounts, not on use.

The $2.8M over-deployment claim was removed. Once the population was reduced to genuine, active, correctly typed users, the gap between deployment and entitlement closed almost entirely. The reconciliation method, not a discount, did the work: every name struck from the count was struck with evidence. The enterprise carried the cleaned baseline forward into its license governance so the next true up started from a defensible number.