ÖBB relies on license management

A long road—with lasting success: ÖBB builds a strong foundation for company-wide license management.

ÖBB has made great strides in building company-wide software license management. Despite a complex IT landscape and limited access to data, the team created a strong foundation—step by step, both technically and organizationally. Today, license management is well established across the company. It’s a clear success.

Tackling complexity head-on

With a decentralized structure, multiple locations and IT teams, and hundreds of software products using different license models, setting up a uniform license management system was no small task. Manual data entry made things even more difficult—it was time-consuming and prone to error.

ÖBB kicked off the project in 2014 with a clear goal: introduce USU Software Asset Management, even with limited resources and a fragmented system landscape. The team moved fast. IT staff across departments stepped up as license coordinators and application owners, helping drive the rollout forward.

Turning challenges into progress

The project team did true pioneering work—establishing processes and framework conditions, then centrally capturing and preparing Microsoft license data. After a successful pilot phase, they tackled the real challenge: collecting, consolidating and cleaning data across every IT domain.

They overcame technical roadblocks like missing interfaces, Citrix data and host assignments—clearing the path for smart, efficient license management.

The challenges at a glance:

• Establish central software license management throughout the company
• Clearly define roles, responsibilities and standardized processes
• Successfully introduce a SAM system for clients and servers
• Significantly reduce IT procurement costs
• Ensure license compliance even in a diverse IT environment

The goal was clear: Build a centrally managed, tool-supported license management system with a reliable, transparent data foundation to ensure compliance at all times. After a detailed market analysis, ÖBB chose USU—for our proven technology and deep experience.

By mid-2015, the system went live and the first data import into USU Software Asset Management was a success. The team quickly put what they learned into action—starting with license analysis for Adobe and Oracle. Step by step, they expanded compliance to cover these vendors too.

Project goals:

• Build awareness of the value of software license management across the ÖBB Group
• Set up a consistent, group-wide license management process with clear responsibilities
• Ensure license compliance with up-to-date, reliable data on contracts and usage
• Optimize purchasing and contracts through transparency on demand, unused licenses, and bundling opportunities—laying the groundwork for internal cost allocation
• Support faster, smarter decisions with current data and meaningful reports

• Introduction of central license management
• Installation of the test environment with license management for clients
• Collecting and consolidating the heterogeneously distributed data
• Developing interfaces and standard connectors
• Optimization of data quality
• License management for Microsoft products from mid-2015 and for Adobe from 2016
• Successive integration of further manufacturer data (Oracle, IBM, VMWare)