What is Software Asset Management & How to Get Started

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!

• Know who and how each business unit buys software licenses
• Define standardized processes and rules for license procurement
• Establish standardized processes for storing licenses and license certificates
  

• Create a central license inventory (if you don’t already have one)
• Move all licensing agreements and software maintenance contracts to the inventory
• Establish an organizational system (responsible people and processes) that allows you to locate licensing documents and information easily
• Learn what your license metrics are to measure the licenses you need
• Appoint a license manager to administer/maintain the your inventory
  

• Use discovery and inventory tools to find out what software is actually installed in your environment
• Normalize software titles to make sure you can match a license to them

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.

• Install discovery tools on all systems, so you don’t miss anything
• Inventory open source systems (like Linux) because while the OS might not need a paid license, it might still be running software that does

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:

• Go back to your license inventory and make sure that your licenses cover all of the ways in which the software is installed and used
• Apply product use rights to get the full value of your licenses and save costs
  

• Look for licensing models that best fit your software usage habits and IT environment
• And keep tracking usage to maintain compliance

While continuously updating:

• Software titles - as users download new software, upgrade programs, or enter the cloud
• The software usage and IT environment data
• The license inventory to track contract milestones, and capture new purchases and changes to licenses like upgrades or downgrades
  

The results of your SAM process and data transparency will allow you to use your licenses more efficiently:

• See where you’re over- and under-licensed. Then reallocate your available licenses to cover your needs, saving you money on new licenses and reducing audit risk.
• Don’t forget maintenance! If you’re not using a license, then don’t forget to cancel the maintenance contract.
• When contract renewals come up, use your SAM insights to negotiate better agreements for your company.