Large Retail Group and Commercial Bank Each Win Prestigious "SAMS Award 2021”

The Metro retail group and Helaba commercial bank were honored for their outstanding achievements in the company-wide implementation of software asset and license management strategies. During this year's SAMS DACH event, the we.CONECT group presented Metro and Helaba with the prestigious SAMS Award. Helaba was also honored with the Jury Special Mention Award.

The SAM@Helaba project started in mid-2018 with the goal of introducing holistic software asset management (SAM) based on the PROSA concept of Processes, Roles, Organization, System, and Awareness. Software is no longer procured exclusively via the classic software purchasing process, since many products, goods and services already include software.

In the course of the project, the Helaba purchasing department was able to expand the existing SAM structures and integrate processes and organization into the product group purchases. The USU Software Asset Management solution was successfully introduced, and awareness of SAM was substantially increased. As a result of the new SAM orientation, the transparency of software licenses was improved and significant cost savings or cost avoidance were realized.

"I am very pleased that the SAM@Helaba project has also been judged a success by an external jury of experts," said Dr. Sebastian Fass from Helaba.

For the Metro project, challenges for the SAM managers included: complete transparency over the decentralized IT infrastructure, risk assessment at any time, compliance for the most important software vendors, and cost-optimized software deployment across all Metro companies in more than 30 countries.

As a basis for successful SAM, the first task by Metro was to achieve maximum data quality. With inventory technology from USU partner Raynet and processing support in USU Software Asset Management, the company succeeded in consolidating the data and automating more than 60 reports. This guarantees the reduction of legal and financial risks and software costs. For example, Metro is able to immediately identify unused licenses on the more than 80,000 clients and always adjust the portfolio.

"We congratulate our customers on their exceptional project success, which the prestigious awards also reflect. The two strategic projects show the important value of SAM and demonstrate innovative solutions that should interest other companies," said Olaf Diehl, Director of SAM Product Management at USU.