You are Verónica Castelar-Drago, managing director of Caldorra Industrial Services. At 09:14 on Tuesday 13 October 2026 your largest customer put its contract out to tender and invited a rival listed 40% below you. At 15:00 the group CFO wants to know what your platform is really worth to that customer, and which number you will stand behind.
The situation
Caldorra Industrial Services (PIS) is the software arm of Caldorra, a US$14 billion energy group. Its Sentinela Suite watches process safety and equipment at refineries, petrochemical plants, mines and pipelines, most of them in Latin America: US$272 million of annual recurring revenue (ARR) from 312 sites. For twelve years Sentinela has listed about 22% above the next-best established platform. You set that price in 2014, and Andrés Calderón, now group CFO, approved it because the evidence cleared his bar.
Xalteca, a Mexican state-owned oil company, runs Sentinela on 16 sites: US$38 million of ARR, 14% of PIS. Its contract expires on 31 March 2027 and is worth about US$167 million in net present value (NPV) over five years at Caldorra's 9.4% cost of capital. This morning's letter weights price at no less than 35% and, for the first time, invites Vaudrey's new Plantara, which lists about 40% below Sentinela, and close to 50% when financed together with Vaudrey's hardware. Your head of sales, Manuel Echeverría-Solís, knows the number behind the letter: Xalteca's procurement director has to show 15% cost compression. Bids are due in six weeks.
Your head of product, Iván Reigosa-Bernal, has spent two months on the value evidence: what Sentinela is worth to Xalteca over Plantara, not what it costs. It has four drivers: measured operating value (unplanned downtime down 2.3 points across the sixteen sites, against 1.4 in Vaudrey's published cases), compliance value, the integration Xalteca has already paid for, and the cost of switching. The total runs from US$117 million to US$166 million NPV, with a central estimate of US$141 million. The pieces do not rest on the same footing: the downtime figure comes from telemetry; the fine-reduction part of compliance value, from four major incidents avoided in eight years.
Calderón will test whatever figure you bring, line by line. And your team will carry it through the rest of the day.