$3.1M penalty avoided.

The bank had licensed its IBM estate on sub-capacity terms for years, paying for the virtual cores running the software rather than the full physical hosts. The whole position rested on ILMT running continuously and reporting quarterly. During the audit, IBM found that several ILMT agents had been offline and that the deployment had drifted out of the supported configuration. Under the rules, a broken or missing agent voids the sub-capacity claim for that period and IBM defaults to full capacity charging on every core in the host.

Applied across the bank's larger hosts and reached back across the lookback, full capacity would have turned a managed licensing cost into a $3.1M penalty.

The $3.1M penalty never landed. Most of the exposure dissolved once the eligible periods were proven, because full capacity only ever applied to the narrow windows where agents were actually down, not to the whole lookback. The remediation plan, agreed as part of the settlement, restored sub-capacity rights cleanly and gave the bank a defensible posture for the next cycle rather than a repeat of the same gap.