Software Asset Management is the business strategy for reclaiming budget and maximizing savings by actively controlling and automating procurement, usage, and deployment of software licenses.
Wherever you are in the process of implementing Software Asset Management (SAM) in your business, this web page provides information to help you go further, quickly and easily. It will help you develop a vision for SAM at your company, partner with your stakeholders, and untangle the SAM knot for you.
Software is more than just installations – it is the lifeblood of every company. With a Software Asset Management strategy, businesses are empowered to make better software licensing decisions that lower costs.
Get the SAM Program Guide with all the information you need to get started:
Control costs, risks, and complexity with transparency
Get more mileage out of your licenses by knowing what’s in them and how you’re using them
Use SAM insights to lower licensing costs and save time
Licenses are assets that need to be managed. Each license contains specific conditions for how the software product can be installed and used. As a user, your job is to make sure your company is compliant with the terms and conditions of the license agreement.
Compliance is the bedrock of SAM. Software vendors don’t want you to use more software than you licensed. Even though SAM is much bigger than compliance, compliance is where license management becomes an essential part of your business strategy. And it’s the first goal for most companies when starting SAM.
To check whether you are compliant, vendors will perform software compliance audits to see how their software is being used, how it’s configured, and whether your licenses cover all of it. There are two possible outcomes of an audit: either you’re compliant, or you’re not.
Non-compliance can result in unexpected fees, which, if you’re not careful, can cost you big. An audit also disrupts your business and can take months to complete without license management technology to support the process.
Often businesses are over-compliant simply because they have more licenses than they need. They prefer to over-pay upfront to outsmart the audit risk. So, while they aren’t losing a ton of money at once for failing an audit, they are losing it slowly.
It may not hurt at first, but over time being over-licensed costs more than failing an audit. When you fail an audit, you buy just enough licenses to close the gap, and often vendors demand you pay back-maintenance for the licenses too. It’s expensive, but the problem is a one-time cost — that can also be reduced or completely eliminated with SAM strategies.
Companies who over-license to guarantee compliance also pay long-term for maintenance they don’t need. That adds up — and keeps adding up because the problem isn’t fixed.
Make starting a SAM program easy with the SAM Program Guide:
Before you can see whether you’re compliant, you have to know what you have. Discovery, Software Asset Management (SAM), and IT Asset Management (ITAM) are the key pieces of every IT business strategy. Planning for the future means knowing what you have right now.
You need to know what’s installed on your servers, the device relationships around virtualization, and how the installations are configured. Good discovery tools show you exactly what’s installed in your network from clients to servers.
Keep in mind that there’s no single discovery tool that can cover every software vendor. Your best bet is to use best-of-breed tools to find everything you can and get the data you need for a clean and accurate inventory.
Central IT planning is a significant challenge in today’s business environment. Many large companies opt to decentralize, giving individual business units the flexibility they need to stay competitive. And while this is great for the individual business units, it can lead to unnecessary IT expenses. IT Asset Management (ITAM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) are the strategies for handling IT assets and IT services for a business. SAM is key piece of ITAM or ITSM.
Even in a decentralized environment, with the right discovery and SAM solutionin place, central IT can keep software expenses down. By monitoring installations, usage, and configurations, central IT can make important purchasing and license allocation decisions. A SAM solution can make managing even highly decentralized spending decisions easy without sacrificing essential flexibilities.
Because central IT is working in a decentralized business environment, SAM tools must be able to handle this organizational complexity. A highly flexible roles & permissions feature is a must.
Business Unit 1 needs access to a word processing program for 25 of its employees, but before purchasing new licenses for Word, they check in with central IT. Central IT uses its SAM solution to see that Business Unit 2 has 45 licenses for Word, but they are only using 32.
Following an automated process, central IT allocates those 13 unused licenses to BU1, and then purchases the other 12 that they need. By using SAM, central IT has saved the cost of 13 additional licenses and the related maintenance costs. Now, consider the savings for a company with thousands of employees and software products.
Yes! Though many businesses often start their SAM programs too late, when they are facing an audit, or when they realize they are over spending on contracts. We’re here to help you along the way.
Hope for the best, then deal with the rest
A real SAM program can help you take control of your licensing destiny. Don’t hope for the best – make it happen!
Just over pay, and it will be okay
Why throw money out the window when a SAM program can help you add cash back to your balance sheets?
Just count, and count, and audits you’ll surmount
Don’t ignore what you can’t see. Architecture and configuration can have a large influence on your license demand.
Keep communication lines open and be knowledgeable about your software licensing needs
Create more efficient and more reliable SAM processes that benefit IT end-users
Take the surprise out of your next software audit — or avoid it all together
Control costs and vendor negotiations with a clear view of your software estate.
Managing your licenses is the bedrock of good software vendor relationships. For many vendors, you will continue to license these software products for years to come, and your hope is that their products will innovate and provide your business more value.
But that can only happen if you’re in continuous and open dialogue with your vendors . Your feedback gives the vendors a concrete idea of what you need and how they can change both their software and their licensing schemes to meet your business needs.
If you know the terms of your license agreements and how you are using the software, then you’re in a better position to provide useful feedback to your vendors, making it even easier for them to respond to your business and organizational needs.
Rather than spending the talks at the negotiation table to find out about your compliance position, because you have to rely on the vendor to get this information. Get in the driver’s seat with SAM and spend these talks driving value out of your vendor relationship.
SAM is also about ease. Many organizations rely on spreadsheets to track their software licenses. This costly, time-consuming, and error-prone process can leave you at the mercy of your vendors in an audit. Even if your organization is small and uses just a few software products, without a SAM solution, it’s impossible to read all the licenses and apply the product use rights.
And if your organization is larger with many software products and complicated metrics tied to virtualization, then doing SAM with a spreadsheet is futile.
Spreadsheets are unreliable in an audit and cannot be used to develop procurement, allocation, and contract renegotiation strategies. They also cannot automate processes or keep up with a data center architecture than changes daily.
Software vendors aren’t the big bad wolf. They have a contractual right to audit and to ensure compliance. They are trying to protect their business, like you do yours.
If you’re not building with brick, then you’re putting your whole business at risk. This is especially true for vendors like SAP that require customers to do annual self-audits. An audit can come at any time and without warning. It can leave your organization open to significant financial losses and also undermine investor confidence in the health of the business. You want to know in advance whether you’re compliant, and if you’re not, what measures you can take to become compliant before it’s too late.
Relying on spreadsheets is building with straw. A SAM solution can protect you from unexpected audits and minimize your exposure. With just the click of a button, you can have a complete overview of your compliance position. Know whether you’re under-licensed, and check your inventory to see whether you have spare licenses to help ease the pain.
With a SAM solution, you’re always ready for an audit.
Audit Prep GuideBuying and installing software is easier than it’s ever been. There’s no need to involve IT, when you can download and start using the software from the internet immediately. But it can also lead to duplicate license purchasing and untracked expenses.
Use a SAM solution to control your cloud software spend. It gives you transparency for:
In turn, giving you the ability to easily control cloud spend. See how to build an effective Cloud Software Asset Management practice.
Get white paperSoftware vendors use audits to increase revenue. Complicated licensing metrics mean that without smart tools, you’re at risk for an audit. So even when you’re not purchasing new software or increasing your spend with a vendor, audits are a good way to get more money out of the customers.
All the big vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP have a business unit dedicated to performing audits. They are well-staffed and well-prepared. You should be, too.
If your licenses were uncomfortable to sit on all day, you might pay more attention to them. But they’re intangible, and their terms and conditions only have an immediate effect on your business during contract renewals and audits. So they’re easy to forget about.
Licenses are long, complex, and boring. Reading them is time consuming, and might require dual degrees in computer science and the law. Not something most of us have in our back pockets.
The consequence is that most of us don’t know what we’ve licensed. It means that we’re unaware of the limits of our licenses, but more importantly, we have no idea what we’re entitled to do.
A spreadsheet doesn’t know what’s in your licenses either. But the product catalog in a SAM tool does.
Each vendor has its own set of metrics for determining how to measure usage.
Here are just a few of the licensing metrics:Per core, Per device, Per named device, Per user, Per named user, Per processor (CPU count), Per processor value unit
In a complex environment with software products from a range of different vendors, it can be easy to lose track of how usage for each product is determined. This level of complexity cannot be efficiently managed with a spreadsheet.
Depending on the number of devices running the software, how it’s configured, virtualization, and the number of people or applications accessing it, a company’s licensing situation can be overly complex.
The situation is compounded by the fact that a company doesn’t run just one piece of software. A single company might use thousands of different software products, making it nearly impossible to get an overview with spreadsheets of who is using what, how often, and when.
Because cloud-based software isn’t installed on a physical machine in your network, it can be difficult to know which business unit is responsible for the costs. In a large organization, sharing cloud software licensing can help to keep down costs, but without a clear overview of who is using it, when, and how often, business units may end up taking on an unfair portion of the costs, forcing them to allocate budget for resources they don’t use.
To trust your compliance position, you need to trust the data it’s built on. Knowing what kinds of licenses to buy, how many, and with what usage rights requires good data. Without clean, high-quality data, you might end up with agreements that neither meet your business needs nor are the right fit for your environment.
SAM touches a lot of departments from procurement to human resources and various IT disciplines. All these departments need to get behind a single SAM initiative. That means a SAM project manager has to have a talent for herding cats. And for talking to different types of people with different needs and goals. That takes time and dedication to the cause. One thing is for sure, SAM is a team effort!
Our software inventory covers over 1,500 items from more than 100 software publishers. We’ve been able to increase the productivity of the employees in software purchasing by 10%.
Thomas Stange, Head of License Management Department, BITMarck (Healthcare Service Provider)
With a full overview of your environment and your software needs, you know exactly what you’re using and exactly what you need. So you purchase the right licenses from the start, saving you money on maintenance fees, and helping to ensure compliance. In fact, you can reduce your licensing costs up to 30%.
Never sign up for an expensive enterprise agreement again just to cover your bases. Instead, negotiate an agreement tailored exactly to your needs. It will maximize your software resources and keep your costs low.
Organizing your licenses and setting up SAM processes will save you time:
Nothing says effortless like automation. Automating your processes frees you up to concentrate on other things. With alerts and regular reports, you don’t need to spend time watching out for problems and looking for areas to save.
Just to name a few examples a Software Asset Management solution can automate:
When you know what you have and use, you can go beyond compliance. You can compare your licenses. See what license schemes are possible and make the most sense in your environment—while easily keeping an eye on cost.
You can negotiate better agreements that meet your business needs at a killer price.
Or have you wanted to optimize your software portfolio, cleaning up unauthorized products and packaging software for deployment? With SAM you have the data and transparency to do this.
SAM gives you transparency into your current and past software needs. This in turn gives you valuable insights into your software future. It can help you plan in advance on multiple levels from data center architectures to budgets and service-charging. There are strategic benefits for every department in the company.
Make better long-term licensing decisions, cut costs, and develop licensing strategies that make your environment more flexible and agile.
With a full overview of your environment and your software needs, you know exactly what you’re using and exactly what you need. So you purchase the right licenses from the start, saving you money on maintenance fees, and helping to ensure compliance. In fact, you can reduce your licensing costs up to 30%.
Never sign up for an expensive enterprise agreement again just to cover your bases. Instead, negotiate an agreement tailored exactly to your needs. It will maximize your software resources and keep your costs low.
Organizing your licenses and setting up SAM processes will save you time:
Nothing says effortless like automation. Automating your processes frees you up to concentrate on other things. With alerts and regular reports, you don’t need to spend time watching out for problems and looking for areas to save.
Just to name a few examples a Software Asset Management solution can automate:
When you know what you have and use, you can go beyond compliance. You can compare your licenses. See what license schemes are possible and make the most sense in your environment—while easily keeping an eye on cost.
You can negotiate better agreements that meet your business needs at a killer price.
Or have you wanted to optimize your software portfolio, cleaning up unauthorized products and packaging software for deployment? With SAM you have the data and transparency to do this.
SAM gives you transparency into your current and past software needs. This in turn gives you valuable insights into your software future. It can help you plan in advance on multiple levels from data center architectures to budgets and service-charging. There are strategic benefits for every department in the company.
Make better long-term licensing decisions, cut costs, and develop licensing strategies that make your environment more flexible and agile.
When cataloging your software, it can be easy to miss things installed on systems not currently running or not currently hooked up to the network.
Find out when a software title is being used and how it’s installed (or not e.g. cloud), configured, and accessed.
Once you’ve cataloged your entire system and recorded usage data:
While continuously updating:
The results of your SAM process and data transparency will allow you to use your licenses more efficiently: