At a recent KPMG session in the UK, senior executives responsible for software asset management (SAM) programs at major corporations were asked what they felt were the most important ingredients for a successful program. Their top two? An accurate inventory of all software deployed
throughout the estate and people with deep expertise in software licensing. Let’s examine these.
1. Accurate software inventory– when I first heard this I was skeptical as this sounded pretty tactical. But, on further thought, this makes sense. It’s oxygen. Without this, you have
nothing to work with. You have to have an accurate understanding of what you have purchased, deployed and are using throughout your enterprise as a foundation. This starts with an accurate inventory. Unfortunately, many companies struggle with this because they don’t have the right tools to gather this information. It sounds straightforward, but it’s incredibly
challenging to get accurate inventory across multiple platforms (Windows, UNIX, Linux, MAC) and virtual environments.
We’ve worked hard to provide our customers the tools to be best-in-class in their ability to produce an accurate inventory of their hardware and software estate. We deliver a variety of ways to discover your hardware and software assets using existing infrastructure systems or our own discovery and inventory technology. Our solution comes with a built-in library of over 110,000 application titles (what we call an application recognition library), so we can take the discovered inventory data from your computers and turn that into an accurate software inventory. (This application recognition library continues to grow and includes Windows, UNIX and Linux titles). Augmenting this approach is full support for ISO 19770-2 tags and a built-in interface to submit discovered but unrecognized applications to us for inclusion in the application recognition library.
We also have over 440,000 software product SKUs in a separate SKU library to automate the processing of purchase order data into our system. Linkage between the application recognition library and the SKU library helps automate the 'purchased versus installed' license reconciliation process to determine your software license position and enable you to maintain license compliance.
2. People with software licensing expertise– software license management is complex, and getting more complex every day. A single vendor may have varying licensing models and software product use rights for each product. Then factor in the number of vendors and applications you have, across the number of desktops and servers, plus all of the new deployment options including cloud, virtualization and mobile, and you quickly have an incredibly complex set of issues to manage. It’s one thing to have all of the data around these issues (and most don’t), but then who has the knowledge to effectively use that data to make informed decisions that deliver the desired business outcomes? Most companies don’t have that licensing expertise. We do. And, we deliver it to our customers in a variety of ways.
First, we’ve productized years of software licensing expertise in our Software License Optimization solution. For instance, we have a library that productizes knowledge around product use rights – rights that are typically buried in contracts and not fully understood – but are essential to determining an accurate license position for each product. We have built-in What-if simulation that understands what you have and what rights you have for using an application and helps you see the financial impact of any proposed changes in your IT environment (see this other recent blog on What-If Analysis). We also have a team of experts that can help your staff achieve the business outcomes you desire by leveraging our expertise and experience in software license management and optimization. (Learn more about our SAM and Software License Optimization Consulting Services here).
I think the KPMG session was right on in terms of what it takes to succeed. These clearly aren’t the only two issues, but they sure are high on the list. Like many things, software asset management is a combination of people-process-tools, but the right tools can help with the people and process by delivering the information, analysis and expertise to help you drive the desired business outcomes.
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Learn more about establishing or improving your software asset management and license optimization program by viewing our on-demand webinar series.