Our six-person advisory team brings deep commercial experience from inside Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, and Salesforce. We left to build a practice that enterprise buyers could actually trust.
James spent 22 years in senior commercial leadership at Oracle Corporation and Microsoft, holding roles including Vice President of Commercial Operations EMEA at Oracle and Senior Director of Enterprise Agreements at Microsoft's Global Licensing division. During his tenure, he designed and executed the commercial frameworks — including the Oracle ULA programme structure, strategic pricing models, and enterprise renewal playbooks — that continue to govern billions of dollars in annual enterprise software spend.
In 2014, James co-founded Atonement Licensing with a single conviction: that the knowledge asymmetry between software vendors and their enterprise customers was fundamentally unjust, and that the expertise he had accumulated should be redeployed on the buyer's side of the table. He has personally led or overseen more than 200 enterprise licensing engagements since, delivering confirmed savings of over $800M.
Victoria built her career at the two hyperscalers that have come to dominate enterprise cloud adoption. She served as Director of Enterprise Sales Strategy at Amazon Web Services, where she developed the Enterprise Discount Programme framework and managed commercial relationships with AWS's largest 50 global accounts. She subsequently joined Google Cloud as Head of Commercial Strategy for EMEA, overseeing a $1.4B annual enterprise portfolio.
Victoria joined Atonement Licensing in 2017, recognising that the commercial complexity of cloud contracting — committed-use agreements, consumption commitments, reserved instances, egress economics — had created a new category of buyer vulnerability that no advisory firm was equipped to address. She built our cloud and AI practice from the ground up and now leads all hyperscaler negotiations and AI vendor advisory work.
Marcus Webb spent 15 years designing and executing the audit programmes that Oracle and SAP use to identify and monetise licensing non-compliance at enterprise accounts. As a Senior Principal at Oracle License Management Services, he led the technical and commercial process for audits with assessed values of over $250M. At SAP, he served as a Global Licensing Expert, specialising in indirect access and digital access framework negotiations.
Marcus joined Atonement Licensing in 2016 to deploy his encyclopaedic knowledge of audit methodology, measurement techniques, and settlement patterns exclusively in defence of buyers. In every audit engagement he has led since, he has achieved a reduction of vendor claims — and has never allowed a client to pay a full audit claim. His knowledge of how Oracle counts processor metrics, what SAP considers a digital access trigger, and where both companies have structural weaknesses in their compliance arguments is unrivalled in the advisory market.
Anna Lindström built a 17-year career across Microsoft and SAP in Northern Europe, where she held positions including Regional Vice President of Enterprise Accounts at Microsoft Nordic and Head of SAP Commercial, Nordics and Baltic States. Operating across the distinct regulatory and procurement landscapes of Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany, she developed an expertise in cross-border licensing structures that few advisors in the market can match.
Anna joined Atonement Licensing in 2018 to lead our European practice from our Stockholm office. She specialises in GDPR-aligned contract structures, public sector licensing frameworks (including OJEU-compliant procurement), and the multi-currency commercial structures that complicate European enterprise negotiations. She also leads our relationships with European regulatory bodies on licensing transparency initiatives.
David Okonkwo is one of the most experienced software audit specialists in the global advisory market. He served as Lead Auditor at Oracle License Management Services, where he directed complex technical audits of Oracle Database, Middleware, and Java deployments at multinational enterprise accounts. He subsequently joined IBM's Software Asset Management practice as a Principal, advising IBM on Passport Advantage compliance strategies and managing the commercial resolution of multi-million dollar licence disputes.
David joined Atonement Licensing in 2019 to head our audit defence capability. He brings an unparalleled understanding of how Oracle constructs its audit data requests, where technical measurement methodologies can be legitimately challenged, and how settlement negotiations at both Oracle and IBM are structured at internal approval levels. In 150+ audit defences, he has consistently achieved reductions of 50% or greater against initial vendor claims.
Sarah Mitchell spent a decade at the epicentre of SaaS commercial strategy. As Strategic Accounts Director at Salesforce, she managed renewal and expansion commercial negotiations with enterprise accounts including a $180M global CRM estate. She subsequently held the role of Senior Commercial Manager at ServiceNow, where she oversaw ITSM and HRSD renewal programmes across EMEA financial services accounts.
Sarah joined Atonement Licensing in 2020, recognising that the SaaS renewal market had become one of the least transparent and most buyer-disadvantaged commercial environments in enterprise technology. Vendors had perfected the use of automatic renewal clauses, shelfware accumulation, and bundling strategies to inflate annual spend with minimal pushback. She built our SaaS optimisation practice to systematically dismantle those tactics, and has delivered an average saving of 34% on Salesforce renewals across 80+ engagements.
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