Many officials working for big enterprises catch themselves wondering: What is SAM? Software Asset Management (SAM) is a 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 an efficient Software Asset Management tool, 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 Software Asset Management. 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.
Before you can see whether you’re compliant, you have to know what you have. Discovery, Software Asset Management, 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. Software Asset Management is a key piece of ITAM or ITSM.
Even in a decentralized environment, with the right discovery and SAM solution in 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 Software Asset Management system can make managing even highly decentralized spending decisions easy without sacrificing essential flexibilities.
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 a 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 Software Asset Management, 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.
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 Software Asset Management and spend these talks driving value out of your vendor relationship.
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 paperIf 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, Software Asset Management 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.
Software Asset Management 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.
Software Asset Management 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:
Software Asset Management (SAM) refers to the process of managing and optimizing the software assets of an organization throughout their entire lifecycle, from acquisition to disposal. SAM involves tracking the installation, usage, and licensing of software applications, as well as ensuring that the software is used in compliance with licensing agreements and regulatory requirements.
The goal of SAM is to help organizations maximize the value of their software investments while minimizing the risks and costs associated with software licensing, usage, and management. By maintaining an accurate inventory of software assets and managing them effectively, organizations can reduce the likelihood of over-licensing or under-licensing software, optimize software usage, and avoid costly non-compliance penalties.
SAM also involves ensuring that software is regularly updated and patched, to mitigate the risk of security vulnerabilities and maintain the integrity and availability of the software. Additionally, SAM can help organizations identify areas where they can consolidate or streamline their software assets, to reduce complexity and cost.
Software assets include any software application, program, tool, or system that an organization has acquired and uses to support its operations, such as:
These are just a few examples of the many different types of software assets that organizations may have. It's important for organizations to maintain an accurate inventory of their software assets and manage them effectively to ensure compliance, optimize usage, and reduce costs.
Yes, it is essential to have a strategy in place before implementing a SAM solution. A well-planned strategy helps ensure that the SAM implementation is aligned with the organization's goals and objectives and that the implementation is carried out efficiently and effectively.
Here are some key elements to consider when developing a SAM strategy:
The implementation of a SAM solution can be time-consuming, depending on the complexity of the organization's software environment and the level of detail required for the SAM solution. However, the benefits of implementing a SAM solution usually outweigh the time and resources required to set it up.
The time required for the implementation of a SAM solution depends on several factors, including:
It's important to note that while the initial implementation of a SAM solution may require time and resources, ongoing SAM processes can help streamline software management and reduce costs in the long run. Once the SAM solution is in place, ongoing monitoring and maintenance can be done more efficiently, saving time and resources over time.
The implementation of a SAM tool may require internal resources, depending on the size and complexity of the organization's software environment and the level of detail required for the SAM tool implementation. However, the amount of resources required can vary based on the chosen tool and the extent of the implementation.
Here are some factors to consider when assessing the resources needed for implementing a SAM tool:
It's important to note that while implementing a SAM tool may require internal resources, it can also provide significant benefits to the organization, such as reducing costs and improving compliance. By properly scoping the implementation and identifying the necessary resources, organizations can successfully implement a SAM tool with minimal disruption to their operations.
The cost of a Software Asset Management (SAM) solution can vary depending on several factors, including the size of the organization, the complexity of its software environment, the level of detail required for the SAM solution, and the specific SAM tool or tools selected. However, investing in a SAM solution can ultimately lead to cost savings and improved efficiency in managing software assets.
Here are some factors that can affect the cost of a SAM solution:
While a SAM solution may require an initial investment, it can ultimately lead to significant cost savings by improving software license compliance, reducing the risk of software audits and penalties, optimizing software usage and though spend reduction by +30% for software licenses and cloud subscriptions, and streamlining software management processes. Therefore, it's important for organizations to carefully assess the potential benefits of a SAM solution and weigh them against the cost.
Yes, Software Asset Management (SAM) can have a Return on Investment (ROI) for organizations. The ROI of a SAM solution can vary depending on the size and complexity of the organization's software environment, the level of detail required for the SAM solution, and the specific SAM tool or tools selected. However, investing in a SAM solution can ultimately lead to significant cost savings and efficiency improvements.
Here are some ways that a SAM solution can lead to ROI:
Overall, the ROI of a SAM solution can be significant for organizations that invest in it. By carefully assessing their software environment and needs, and selecting the right SAM tool or tools, organizations can improve software management processes and reduce costs in the long run.
Finding the right Software Asset Management (SAM) vendor can be challenging, as there are many vendors in the market offering various SAM solutions. Here are some steps you can take to help you find the right SAM vendor for your organization:
By following these steps, you can find the right SAM vendor for your organization and ensure that you get a SAM solution that meets your needs and provides value.
Software Asset Management (SAM) is a complex process that requires the involvement of various stakeholders within an organization. Here are some of the typical SAM stakeholders that are involved in SAM initiatives:
Overall, SAM is a cross-functional initiative that requires the involvement of various stakeholders within an organization. By working together, these stakeholders can ensure that the organization's software assets are properly managed and that the organization is compliant with software vendor agreements and licensing requirements.