Adobe Audits Are Stopping – What Happens to SAM?

In 2016, two things happened close enough together that people started drawing a conclusion from them.

Adobe was reported to be ending licence audits in Europe, following similar decisions in the Americas and Asia-Pacific the previous November, retaining audit and compliance programmes only in selected Asia-Pacific markets. Around the same time, Microsoft retired the software asset management competency it had offered to partners.

Adobe had until then been among the more active auditing publishers. Two significant vendors appearing to step back at once was read by some as a signal: if the publishers themselves are moving to subscription licensing delivered from the cloud, and non-compliance becomes structurally difficult, what is software asset management for?

It is a fair question. The answer is that it changes shape rather than disappearing — and that the part which remains is the part that costs more.

The premise, and where it is wrong

The argument for winding down SAM went roughly like this. Subscription software is provisioned centrally. You cannot install more of it than you have bought. The publisher meters it for you. Compliance is therefore handled by the delivery model, and a discipline built around proving compliance has nothing left to prove.

Every step of that is broadly true, and the conclusion still does not follow, because compliance was never the only thing at stake. It was simply the thing with an auditor attached to it, which made it the thing that got attention.

Remove the auditor and the other exposure is still there. You are still paying for software. You are now paying for it every month, automatically, whether or not anyone opens it.

Three reasons the discipline gets more important, not less

Overspend

This is the big one, and it was the prediction the original article got right.

Organisations buy more subscriptions than they need, deliberately. Nobody wants to be the person who blocked a designer from working because a Creative Cloud seat was not available, so seats are bought with headroom. Then someone changes role, or leaves, and nothing reclaims the seat. The renewal arrives, the quantity is copied forward, and the headroom becomes permanent.

There is no compliance event to catch this. There is no audit letter. The money simply leaves every month and nobody is accountable for the difference between what was bought and what is used.

46% of SaaS licences go unused — the average organisation uses 54% of what it pays for.

In 2016 the answer to this was “run a SAM programme that monitors usage”, which was correct but vague. It is now specific. CerteroX SaaS Management detects unused licences at thirty or more days of zero usage, and gives you actions against them rather than a report about them: reclaim, reassign, downgrade tier, archive, remind or dismiss. App Rationalization finds overlapping applications ranked by recoverable saving, which is the other half of subscription waste — not seats nobody uses, but three products doing the same job because three teams each bought one.

Renewals are tracked with days-to-renewal shown alongside utilisation rate, so the conversation about quantity happens before the quantity is auto-renewed rather than after. Forty-seven connectors pull authoritative user and licence lists straight from the vendor, so the usage picture does not depend on anyone self-reporting.

And where a subscription is licensed by an agreement rather than a seat count, Adobe is one of six publishers with a dedicated licence engine in CerteroX SAM, alongside Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP and Salesforce.

Support and entitlement still have to be managed

Subscription does not mean the entitlement paperwork stops mattering. Moving workloads to the cloud can depend on maintenance being current — Software Assurance being the obvious example — and letting it lapse quietly is an easy way to find out that a licence you thought was portable is not.

That is entitlement management, not audit defence, and it is exactly what a SAM function is for. CerteroX SAM holds licences, transactions, agreements, maintenance, suppliers and publishers together, with subscription flags and expiry tracking, so a lapse is something you see coming rather than something you discover at the point of use.

Not everything went to the cloud

Despite a decade of predictions, it did not, and it was never going to. Unless your entire organisation works from a phone, there are desktops and laptops, and they run software that has to be inventoried, licensed and kept in support.

CerteroX ITAM covers six operating system families with a native agent — Windows, macOS, Linux, IBM AIX, HP-UX and Oracle Solaris — because the machines that carry the highest licence value are frequently not the ones on people’s desks.

The dimension the original could not see

The 2016 article treated cloud as a place software was moving to. It is now also a cost centre in its own right, with its own waste, and it dwarfs the licensing questions that came before it.

29% of cloud spend is wasted, up for the first time in five years. That waste has nothing to do with licences or compliance. It is stopped-but-not-deallocated instances, obsolete snapshot chains, volumes detached and forgotten, and reserved capacity nobody bought.

CerteroX Cloud Management runs twenty-six named, individually tunable checks across twelve cloud and data platforms for exactly this, with per-check thresholds and exclusions so the engine fits the environment instead of complaining about it. Certero’s average cloud cost saving across environments under management is 38%.

The pattern is the same one this article described in 2016. Spend moves somewhere the old control did not reach; the old control is declared obsolete; the spend grows unsupervised until somebody looks at it.

So what happens to SAM?

If your software asset management programme exists only to survive audits, then yes — a publisher stepping back genuinely does reduce your need for it, and you should expect that need to keep shrinking.

If it exists to know what you own, what you use and what you should stop paying for, then a publisher stepping back changes nothing, and the move to subscription makes it more valuable, because the waste is now recurring rather than one-off.

Do not ease off because the audit risk fell. The audit was never the expensive part.

To see subscription spend set against metered usage, title by title, book a demo.