By Laura Noonan
In many companies, more than one third of total IT spend goes toward software licenses. Software is a huge investment, so it’s no wonder that IT executives are looking for effective ways to optimize software license usage and minimize software spend. Consequently, an important goal within IT is to establish a comprehensive Software License Optimization process that aggregates, normalizes and reconciles software inventory, purchase order, usage data, license entitlement, product use rights and other information from enterprise business systems and determines an accurate license position. This enables the staff to maintain continuous license compliance and a state of software audit readiness in addition to reducing ongoing costs for software.
Your enterprise app store can be an integral part of your overall Software License Optimization program by helping you eliminate the waste that occurs when software that is installed on user machines sits idle. The software may be unused because the user has changed jobs. Or, it may be that the user needed the application for a particular project and, once the project was done, never used it again.
The good news is that an enterprise app store with the right feature set can help you track down unused software and then reclaim the associated licenses. The benefit: you spend less on software because you don’t buy additional licenses unless all the software you own is actually being used. Two features in particular are instrumental in helping you do this: License reharvesting and software leasing.
Let’s start with license reharvesting. Here’s how this feature helps you achieve substantial savings with respect to licensing costs:
- License reharvesting leverages installation and usage data to automatically identify software that is deployed but unused. Usually the organization will specify a period of time, such as 90 days, whereby, if the software is unused during that period, it is a candidate for reharvesting.
- You want to ensure your app store includes the ability to conduct automated email campaigns, so you can engage users in the reclamation process by sending them an email message that offers the option of keeping an application or surrendering it.
- If the users opt to surrender the application, the app store then triggers a de-install of the application through your software deployment tool. The software license management tool will detect the removal of the software at the next inventory collection and should be able to automatically add the license back to the available pool.
- Effective license reharvesting campaigns track user responses for you and provide full visibility into results, including how many users did and did not respond, the percentage of users who opted to keep or surrender the software and the users' justification for keeping software.
Now let’s look at software leasing. Leasing is particularly useful in project-based environments where application needs change as employees move from one project to another as well as in environments in which contractors are brought in to perform specific functions for a period of time. Here are some of the ways leasing helps you keep license costs in check:
- Leasing gives users access to an app for a limited period of time, after which the license is reclaimed automatically unless the user extends the lease.
- An effective leasing capability gives you the flexibility to set a maximum lease time and a default lease time based on the needs of your business.
- When a lease is about to expire, it’s important to have an automatic notification capability so users aren’t caught off guard and they can extend the lease if necessary.
As you can see, license reharvesting and software leasing options give you a real edge in optimizing usage and spend by reclaiming unused licenses so you can assign them to users who need them. Some companies report that they were able to recoup the acquisition cost of their app store solution within six months simply by using the license reclamation capability.
Read the next blog in the App Store Essentials series, “Connecting Your App Store to IT Service Management Systems,” to find out how integrating your app store with IT service management systems such as BMC Remedy, ServiceNow and Microsoft Service Manager brings the app store into your service management processes to ensure that software delivery complies with corporate policies and external regulations.
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To learn more about software license optimization, please view our on-demand webinar: Go Beyond
Traditional Software Asset Management with Software License Optimization