Five predictions made at the start of 2020: a wave of rip-and-replace in SAM tooling, a wider audience for inventory data, cloud growing without going first, targeted audit activity, and organisations finally dismantling the Frankenstack.
Looking ahead to a new year and a new decade, what should we expect to change over the next twelve months and beyond? These are personal predictions for what 2020 holds in software asset management and IT asset management.
A great many SAM tool owners are going to conclude this year that what they bought is not delivering what they were sold. There are several reasons for that, and it would be dishonest to blame only the tools: vendors over-sell, and buying organisations chronically under-invest in the skills needed to run what they buy. Both are true at once.
What makes 2020 particularly interesting is timing. There was a surge in SAM tool purchasing across 2016 and 2017, which means a large cohort of owners will this year hit three years or more with the same product. That is long enough to have amortised a perpetual licence cost, long enough to have seen out a three-year fixed-price deal, and — crucially — long enough to tell senior management the original choice has not worked out without looking foolish for having made it.
By then those teams also understand why they are dissatisfied. They have a concrete view of what a replacement product, and the vendor behind it, will have to demonstrate before earning any trust. They will also be far more receptive to alternatives to traditional on-premises perpetual licensing for the tooling itself.
My first prediction, then: 2020 is the year of rip and replace in the SAM tools market.
Demand for SAM and ITAM data has been growing for the last year to eighteen months — particularly for clean inventory data, and for what you might call augmented data. Inventory automatically reconciled against known security vulnerabilities. Inventory enriched with end-of-life and end-of-support dates. The raw record, joined to something that makes it decision-grade.
That trend continues in 2020 as more stakeholders across the organisation realise what inventory data is worth outside the core ITAM and SAM programmes. Security, compliance, governance and finance are already in the queue. Beyond them, business leaders will start recognising that inventory and consumption data are both useful performance indicators and practical instruments for running an efficient organisation.
The challenge for ITAM and SAM leaders — and for the technology they use — is delivering that insight in a form these new stakeholders find accessible and intuitive. A standard SAM dashboard will not do it. Tools that lack either flexible reporting or a broad enough collection mechanism will produce even more dissatisfaction, which loops straight back into prediction one.
Despite the volume of the conversation, cloud will not become the primary driver of ITAM and SAM in 2020. Too much of what organisations own is still on-premises. More programmes will widen to take in cloud-based applications and infrastructure, but most organisations will still prioritise managing their strategic large-scale commitments over managing smaller cloud costs. The share of cloud spend regarded as strategic will grow this year — not far enough to displace the perceived need to manage on-premises assets and licences.
So rather than investing in uncovering shadow IT or other unmanaged cloud costs, I expect to see more organisations investing in cloud ITAM and SAM capability to manage the spend they already know about and already consider worth managing proactively.
Editor’s note, July 2026. This is the prediction that aged least well, and it is the reason this section carries a note rather than a quiet edit. The balance has moved decisively. The average enterprise portfolio now runs to 305 SaaS applications and 46% of SaaS licences go unused, while 29% of cloud spend is wasted. Unmanaged spend turned out to be the larger problem, not the smaller one. It also stopped being a hard problem to attack: CerteroX SaaS Management converges identity provider sync, 47 vendor connectors and a browser extension to find applications nobody declared, and classifies AI tools from catalogue feature tags rather than a fixed list, so Shadow AI surfaces with the rest. The advice to manage known strategic spend properly still stands. The advice to defer discovery does not.
Every new year prediction list includes this one, and it is easy to dismiss as fear-mongering. But look closely at a software publisher’s financial performance and you can estimate with reasonable accuracy which of them will step up auditing in the next twelve months.
Has the publisher over-promised its shareholders and delivered a disappointing quarter or two? Did it forecast a swing to cloud revenue it is now failing to deliver? Is it a publisher known for acquiring software near the end of its life and relying on audit activity rather than investment in development?
You can run the same exercise on your own organisation. Do you have major contract renewals falling due? Has the organisation been through significant change — a merger, an acquisition, a restructure? Have you been deferring a migration or an upgrade? Each of those is a signal to a publisher that your licensing may not be in order.
The prediction: more audit activity in 2020, particularly from data centre publishers — and, oddly, from both the publishers trying to move you to the cloud and the ones trying to stop you.
I have written before about the Frankenstack: an ITAM or SAM programme built on a collection of disparate technologies that integrate badly, or not at all, and perform worse than that. My final prediction for 2020 is that a lot of organisations reach breaking point and finally kill it — retiring or replacing the older components in favour of either a single platform or a genuinely cohesive stack.
The unified platform approach works well for many. But not all platforms are equal, and some built originally for other purposes struggle to offer the depth that dedicated ITAM and SAM capability requires. Shallow modules on a broad platform produce their own flavour of dissatisfaction.
Building an effective stack from separate components is possible, but only if integration is treated as a first-order requirement rather than something to solve afterwards. Bolting together disparate technologies — sometimes, remarkably, from the same vendor — is rarely an effective strategy.
Organisations that have already committed to a generic platform may find its ITAM and SAM modules too new to be rip-and-replace candidates yet. That leaves three choices:
For platform customers who have not yet bought the ITAM and SAM modules, due diligence matters exactly as much as it would with a new vendor. The story about simply adding a module is attractive. If the module then turns out not to be fit for purpose, the organisation has spent both money and — more painfully — time.
Those are the five. The through-line is that depth and integration are the same argument: the reason a Frankenstack fails is the reason a shallow module fails, which is that the data never becomes one picture.
CerteroX is built the other way round — five products, one platform, one data model. ITAM, SAM, SaaS Management, Cloud Management and AI Management resolve against the same schema, so there is no reconciliation project between them, because there is nothing to reconcile.
Other posts covering the same ground.
Most organisations start SAM as audit insurance. The cost case is the stronger one: less overspend on software and hardware, cheaper support through rationalisation, in-house expertise built deliberately, and a negotiating position based on your own numbers.
Hybrid IT broke the ITAM tools built for the data centre. What unified discovery, software recognition and governance actually have to cover when your assets span on-premises, virtual, cloud and SaaS — and how to test a vendor against it.
FinOps was built for the cloud and stops at the data centre door. ITAM knows the assets and licences underneath. Neither is complete alone — and hybrid cost control needs both working from the same data.
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.