During the cost-cutting drive at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Cortese met with various business unit leaders to determine what software contracts were in place and how effectively software was being used. "I was pretty blown away by what I discovered," he says.

For instance, during Cortese's evaluation, the company received a $125,000 maintenance bill from a provider of workflow management software. With a little digging, he found that the system was no longer in use. "If we hadn't asked about it, the maintenance bill just would have gone through," he says.

6. Put Maintenance Under a Microscope.

Vendors hate to discount maintenance, largely because it's so profitable. For instance, 85% of the revenue Oracle derived from software maintenance in fiscal 2008 was pure profit and represented 76% of the company's total profit, according to the company's 2008 10-K report.

If a customer signs an enterprise software deal worth tens of millions of dollars, it might have the leverage to demand discounted maintenance rates, says Wang, but generally, it's an area that vendors don't want to haggle over. "Maintenance is the last thing [vendors] want to discount," he says.