A software asset management plan is four decisions, not a document: what you actually need, what you standardise on, where the entitlement evidence lives, and how software and hardware are mapped to each other.
Software asset management — SAM — is a systematic approach that lets an organisation manage all of its software assets, and the licensing attached to them, at every stage of their lifecycle. It is achieved through an integrated combination of people, process, technology and platform, and it exists to do four things: control cost, optimise utilisation, minimise risk and maintain compliance.
That definition is easy to nod along to and hard to operationalise. A SAM plan is what turns it into work someone can actually do.
An Effective Licence Position (ELP) is where most SAM plans begin, and producing one typically involves establishing a baseline that includes:
More importantly, it puts you in a position to move on from an ELP to an optimised licence position — where the organisation gets the full benefit of the SAM programme, saves money, frees up IT resource and shows a return.
One thing has changed since this was first written, and it changes how you should plan. An ELP used to be a static document: a reconciliation you produced, circulated, and watched go out of date. It does not have to be. CerteroX SAM computes purchased, used, available, required, variance and exposure continuously, so the position is a live number rather than a snapshot with a date on it.
That matters for planning because it moves the ELP from being the output of the SAM programme to being its instrument. You do not plan a reconciliation exercise every year. You plan around a position you can read at any time.
Four steps.
Work out which titles you genuinely require. That means talking to key people in each department to clarify what their teams need in order to do their jobs — not what has accumulated, and not what was bought three renewals ago for a project that ended.
This is the step people skip because it is the only one that involves other departments. It is also the one that determines whether everything downstream is optimising a sensible portfolio or an accidental one.
Usage data makes the conversation shorter and less political. Rather than asking a department head whether they need a title, you can show them who has opened it in the last ninety days. CerteroX SAM meters software usage at file level with first-used and last-used tracking, and reports a percentage-used figure over a rolling ninety-day window.
By standardising and limiting the number of applications and devices your support staff have to deal with, you reduce operational IT costs and free those staff up for strategic work rather than day-to-day repetition.
The saving here is rarely on the licence line. It is in the support hours you no longer spend supporting three tools that do one job, and in the testing and patching you no longer have to do three times.
Having collected your licensing information and established check-in procedures for new software, make sure the benefit of that work is not lost.
The original advice here was to keep licensing documentation and a copy of each software title and version under lock and key, with a limited number of employees holding access. The physical half of that has been overtaken by download portals and subscription entitlement, but the underlying point is sound and still routinely ignored: the evidence is the asset.
What needs protecting now is the entitlement record — agreements, transactions, maintenance terms, purchase orders, invoices, and the publisher statements that prove what you bought. In an audit, an install you cannot produce a purchase for is treated as an install you did not buy, regardless of what actually happened. Hold agreements, transactions, maintenance, suppliers and publishers in one place, with an audit trail across them, and restrict who can change them through role-based access.
Knowing what software is installed on which machines, and where those machines are, is vital — particularly for the support team. The map should show the location of each machine, the user at it, and the software installed on it.
The original version of this step described building that map by hand in an inventory database. That is no longer the work.
Discovery does the mapping: a native agent across Windows, macOS, Linux, AIX, HP-UX and Solaris, plus agentless and command-line collection for locked-down machines, standalone inventory for air-gapped systems, network discovery, Active Directory import and cloud connectors — all landing in one schema, so there is nothing to reconcile afterwards. Raw inventory is then resolved against the Software Recognition Database, more than 3.5 million titles of normalised publisher, product and version data, which is what turns a list of executables into a list of licensable products.
Your job in the plan is not to build the map. It is to decide what the map has to cover, who reads it, and what happens when it shows something nobody expected.
A SAM plan fails in one of two ways. Either it never starts, because producing the first baseline looks too large. Or it produces one excellent baseline and then decays, because nothing keeps it current.
The four steps above address the first. Continuous measurement addresses the second. Get both and the plan stops being a document you wrote and becomes the way software gets bought, deployed, used and retired.
Other posts covering the same ground.
Locking an application down at user level does not make you compliant with a per-device licence. In a Citrix or RDS environment, one user with access can cost you a licence for every device in the organisation.
A third-party summary of a vendor can be wrong, and it stays wrong for as long as people read it. The case for checking a vendor's facts at source — and the current, sourced record for Certero.
An audit is won or lost on the quality of your inventory long before the letter arrives. Six ways data goes wrong, and what it takes to have the answer already in hand.
Everything argued above is checkable. Name the publisher, the billing account or the platform you would argue with, and the session is built around it — the reasoning attached, not a summary slide.
No gated download at the end of it.