Software Asset Management (SAM) From Certero

Software Asset Management from Certero provides complete visibility into your business’ software landscape, giving you absolute control over license management and software governance.

Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions allow you to take control of your business’ entire software landscape throughout its lifecycle. This includes the management, deployment, license compliance, usage, optimization and disposal of software – whether it’s deployed on premises, consumed as SaaS or cloud based software.

SAM solutions identify any causes for concern across your software estate that require responsive action. For example, SAM discovery tools will discover and identify all installed software and whether the software you have deployed is compliant with your software purchases. That means that your business can maintain control over legal and financial licensing risks, limit unnecessary expenditure and make cost savings. It can also ensure that software is deployed efficiently. In the bigger picture, this allows your business to consolidate licensing data and improve future licensing strategy.

Trying to anticipate when a vendor audit letter will arrive is difficult. You know it will happen at some point, so you should always be prepared! Plus, software vendors are reducing how long you have to respond to audit requests. Therefore, maintaining continuous compliance is rapidly becoming the only way to effectively manage software costs and audit risks.

By implementing a comprehensive SAM solution, you’ll be ahead of the game and able to provide software vendors with the information they need – without the disruption of working through an audit. And, because you’re already informed and in control, you can spend time actively reducing your software costs, not just defending against vendor audit requests.

Under an audit, if you have deployed software that you are not entitled to deploy, your business could face some serious repercussions. Firstly there is usually significant, (often unbudgeted) cost implications. It’s extremely easy to have software deployed in error. Often, this software is not even being used to deliver any value, yet it must be paid for.

Secondly, software audits can cause damage to your businesses reputation, especially if an audit results in a messy legal battle.

Each software product you deploy across your IT estate will have its own contractual terms, conditions and timescales to manage. It is important to understand these contracts and how they fit into your wider software strategy ahead of your big renewals. Being compliant with your licensing and knowing your Effective License Position (ELP) puts you in a position of strength. 

As your business evolves through a merger, acquisition or divestiture, it is essential that valuable business assets are accounted for. This governance process should also include IT assets and software licenses.

Having a solid SAM solution in place helps to prevent wandering into any costly software licensing risks. A merger or acquisition could easily cause a licensing issue and for this reason, the software vendors target businesses with audits at these disruptive times. Therefore, having a SAM solution in place can reduce risks and costs by gaining a clear understanding ahead of a deal being made.

Ensuring that all your primary ‘Tier 1’ software is secure and without any vulnerabilities is a tricky task in itself. Next, consider all the Tier 2&3 software that is not in use, or is used infrequently.

Should your business be unaware of any software, you will not be able to identify it or patch it against any potential security vulnerabilities. This is why having an enterprise class SAM solution in place is essential. It will actively discover, identify and maintain a live inventory of all the software deployed across your entire business.

From desktops to mobile devices, the licensing on end-user devices needs managing. This is usually done on a per-user or per-device licensing metric and would be covered by our Certero for Enterprise SAM solution.

Managing Datacenter software vendors is a lot more complex and expensive than those within general end-user environments. They often require dedicated license management solutions, purposefully designed to address the unique challenges. For this reason we have solutions to manage the biggest datacenter vendors. These are Certero for IBM, Certero for SAP Applications and Certero for Oracle.

Software Asset Management also extends to Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS subscriptions bring an end to the risk of software audits, but create more wastage than the on-premises world. Reviewing your SaaS subscriptions should be included within your SAM process as almost 50% of SaaS applications go unused. This is cost that can be removed easily, using Certero for SaaS.