By Chris Hughes
Once upon a time, there was a license manager named Sally who needed to determine her organization’s software license compliance position. She opened up her enterprise Software License Optimization solution.
First, Sally set up her solution to automatically import inventory data from her configuration management system on a periodic basis. A normalized list of installed applications and their install counts was automatically generated by processing the data with an extensive Application Recognition Library.
Second, Sally’s Software License Optimization solution imported purchase orders from her purchasing system. A list of software licenses and their entitlement counts was automatically generated by utilizing a comprehensive Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) Library to understand exactly what was purchased and automatically match licenses to installations.
Third, Sally’s Software License Optimization solution applied vendor specific license entitlements—known as Product Use Rights, using the built-in Product Use Rights Library and the detailed use rights for each license and application were automatically populated in the asset management repository.
Finally, Sally pressed a button and the license consumption for every software license was calculated, generating her organization’s optimized license position. The reduction in license consumption saved her company millions of dollars in software true-up and contract renewal costs.
Does this sound like a fairy tale? It doesn’t have to.
Library content that captures software asset details (e.g. inventory “fingerprints” and software product part numbers) and licensing knowledge (license models and product use rights) is one of the foundations of Software License Optimization. It is the difference between overwhelmingly manual and highly automated processes, and can dramatically shorten the time to value of a Software Asset Management (SAM) and License Optimization project.
At Flexera Software, our attitude is that (Library) Content is King. We’ve invested over 60 person-years of effort into researching and building the most comprehensive content libraries in the world so that you don’t have to. Our libraries provide application recognition for over 120,000 applications, software product details for nearly 600,000 software SKUs, and detailed Product Use Rights for a range of major software vendors (Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, Symantec, etc.)
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Learn more by reading our white paper: Moving up the Software License Optimization Maturity Curve to Drive Business Value.