Software Licence Optimisation (SLO)

Gartner defines vendors under the SAM umbrella in two categories: IT Asset Management (ITAM) or Software Licence Optimisation (SLO). The ITAM vendors have solutions capable of Discovery and Inventory but with no licence management capabilities. Whereas the SLO vendors are prepped for today's challenges, Licence Management to help you maximise and optimise value from your software investments.

Today the business imperative is controlling and optimising what you have, to guarantee a "buy only what you need" approach and ensure you use only what you have.

We would advise organisations with an ITAM solution to ask "Is my tool capable of handling licence management?"

• Can I store licence documents? Can I link purchases to deployments? Are my deployments reported in line with the licence requirements (i.e. If software is licensed by CPU does my tool report the number of CPUs or the fact that the software is installed)

Certero is a specialist in Software Licence Optimisation (SLO) with the tools and people needed to help you ensure licence management and compliance every day of the year.

Top Recommendations:

• Ensure that the inventory data is accurate and sources are reliable.The success of the software licence optimisation tool is premised on this data.

• If there is an existing ITAM repository tool or configuration management database (CMDB) in place, ensure that out-of-the-box integrations are available with the software licence optimisation tool.

• Select a software licence optimisation tool based upon its ability to support licensing models across the software portfolio, not just the vendors that are problems today.

Software Licence Optimisation (SLO) Benefits: 

• Outsource support contracts to make sure your organisation knows what needs to be included in agreement, assets and software 

• Take control of vendor management and contract renewals 

• Harvest unused or unnecessary licenses and dynamically report on who is using what software, when, for how long and on which device 

• Ensure software is only used in line with the T’s and C’s i.e. only used on named devices or by named users  

• Creation and distribution of licence pools across the business 

• Understand software product use rights i.e. 2nd use, development, test and training rights