Have you ever been faced with negotiating a multi-year deal? Maybe you have had a year or two left on your current contract and have received a proposal for a 5 year extension. In total that's a 6 or 7 year contract you are signing. How does the supplier know what your data center will look in 6 or 7 years? They don't. Of course, neither do you. The natural focus is on price, and getting a "good deal". Long after you've forgotten the great price you negotiated, you will have to live with the terms and conditions in the contract. Many clients focus largely on price, and forget that terms & conditions affect the total cost of ownership and are of significant importance. Often, many of the problems clients have with ISVs are the result of the ISV simply executing on a contract freely entered into by both parties several years ago.
You'll never get everything that you want in your negotiations. Decide ahead of time which Ts&Cs are important to you, which are nice to have and which are not important. Concede the unimportant.
Choose your targets. You likely don't have time to negotiate individual Ts&Cs with all your software suppliers. The supplier's track record of fair dealings with you may very well be more important than specific contract terms. After all, your use of the software may outlast the initial contract, and survive renewal after renewal. Even though a supplier may be a large piece of your software expense, if their long term track record with you is good and you have no reason to believe that this will not continue, given mergers and acquisitions, your time is probably better used elsewhere. The objective is not to prevent the supplier from growing their revenue but to link the revenue growth to growth in value received.
Negotiate Ts&Cs before you negotiate price. Ts&Cs define what you are "buying". That has to be agreed upon before you can agree on a price.
Think about the future: of your shop, of your company or organization, of software licensing trends. Focus on the cost of growth, not a reduction in current charges...that's a tough sell to most suppliers.
Can you put Ts&Cs in place to allow growth in unrelated workloads without having to pay more money to a supplier, yet still fairly compensate that supplier for increased value received from their products when their workload grows? If your workloads are roughly divided into separate LPARs, then LPAR pricing would be one possible solution to this question.
A Terms and Conditions (T&C) checklist can be a useful reminder of important items during contract negotiations. Here is a starting point that you can use to develop your own checklist. Sample T&C checklist download