71% off a WebSphere audit claim.

The manufacturer ran WebSphere Application Server and Db2 across a virtualized estate that had grown through three hardware refreshes without anyone revisiting the licensing math. When the audit notice arrived, IBM had already drafted a position that read the estate at full capacity, counting every physical core in each host rather than the cores actually allocated to the IBM software.

Two assumptions drove the number. First, the PVU per core values applied to the newer processors were higher than the correct table entries. Second, IBM treated the sub-capacity claim as void because the ILMT reports had gaps during a server migration window. Together those two assumptions inflated the opening claim into eight figures.

The claim came down by 71%. The largest single recovery came from the PVU correction, where the right per core values cut the processor count materially before any sub-capacity argument was even made. Reinstating sub-capacity for the periods with valid ILMT data removed the rest. The migration window, which IBM had used to void the whole claim, was contained to the weeks it actually covered rather than the years IBM had reached for.

Because the renewal terms were negotiated inside the settlement rather than after it, the manufacturer left the audit with a known forward cost and a corrected ILMT posture, not just a one time reduction.