Software Asset Management 

We make no secret of the fact that we work with many software vendors conducting software licensing reviews on their behalf. Vendors trust us to conduct reviews of their most valued customers and expect us to work in a professional, independent manner and to maintain or even enhance their customer relationships.

We deliver thousands of licence compliance and other reviews for software vendors including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP, and EMC every year. At any one time our team is working on over 1,000 reviews globally. We have regular contact with many other vendors including SAP, Adobe and Symantec and receive continual training from them in relation to licensing of their products.

As a result of our work with these vendors we have deep subject matter expertise not only of software licence terms and conditions, but also how vendors sell their software, what systems and data can be made available to assist customers in managing their licences and, possibly most importantly, the common problems which customers face when managing software. A core aspect of this work is the collection of PoE data and reconciling information from multiple sources.

Key benefits of SAM can be summarised as: reduce costs, limit risk and increased efficiency associated with use of software in your business.


Reduce costs through:

 

• Improve licence agreement negotiations
• Avoid over/under purchasing
• Increase volume licensing discounts
• Avoid competing purchases
• Realise full upgrade discounts
• Re-use software disposed with hardware
• Reduce maintenance costs

 

Limit Risk through:

 

• Proactive software licence compliance
• Avoid unmonitored software deployment
• Avoid lost entitlement records
• Realise control

 

Increase efficiency:

 

• Monitor and manage cost savings
• Labour performance improvement
• Hardware improvements
• Reduce help desk time
• Streamline IT procurement and operations

Five reasons why SAM programmes fail
 
Boil the Ocean. Not having a clearly defined scope of what is Software Asset Management, what business areas are included and what constitutes a measurable success.

Tools Project. Approaching Software Asset Management as a tools project and not including business process changes.

Vendor Standards. Creating SAM processes and procedures without taking into account the required vendor standards.

Value. A SAM programme doesn’t happen overnight and failure to show value along the way is certain to be the death of the project. A lot of budgets and projects never see the light of day, or are cut by senior management who do not have all the facts regarding the need, or ultimate results.

Diversity. Software Asset Management requires lots of different business skills, like commercial awareness, technical awareness, HR, contract management, legal awareness on a local as well as international level and of course crucially a thorough understanding of licensing rules. Not taking these this into account will cause your SAM project to fail.

“ Software publisher audits are on the increase and there is greater awareness of this risk. The best defence to this is to routinely perform self-audits. The first one will take a while so it is important to think about automating the process as much as possible during the self-audit process. Detailed licensing knowledge is also key to conducting self-audits in an efficient manner.” David Eastwood