Cutting the ITAM and SAM budget looks like a saving and usually is not. How to tell whether the tooling you already run is producing evidence of value — and what a platform has to cover to be credible now that SaaS, cloud and AI are on the bill.
CIOs and senior IT leaders are under permanent pressure to take cost out of IT while keeping modernisation moving. That pressure sharpens when the change is forced rather than planned — as it was through 2020, and as it has been repeatedly since.
The balancing act is between short-term cost reduction and medium- to long-term investment. It is especially awkward for IT asset management and software asset management, because both are investments in risk mitigation and cost avoidance rather than a line you can strike out of next month’s budget and feel the benefit immediately.
So a decision point arrives. Do you invest further in SAM, HAM and ITAM to extract more value from what you already own, or do you fall back on the rudimentary asset tooling bundled with something you are already buying? The answer turns on one question: can your current tooling show evidence of value?
ITSM platforms and complimentary inventory tools such as Microsoft’s SCCM are not enterprise-scale SAM, and were never built to be. A service desk follows ITIL. System Center is a desktop administration tool. Both do their own job well. Neither produces audit-ready data you would want to defend in front of a publisher, and — the part that gets overlooked — neither carries licensing logic at all. No entitlement records, no downgrade rights, no second-use handling, no processor core factors, no effective licence position.
Established SAM vendors can fall short too. Ageing architecture, thin support and accumulating security obligations all eat into a programme that is supposed to be returning value.
Both situations end in the same place: uncontrolled software spending and an exposure nobody has quantified. Audits happen. The settlement usually exceeds whatever was saved by dropping the capability that would have prevented it. SaaS and cloud make this worse rather than better, because subscription sprawl compounds every month and nothing stops it on its own.
There is a second reason not to let this capability lapse, and it has nothing to do with licensing. SAM is a primary source of truth for what software is actually deployed across everything you own, down to version and edition. That is the first question asked in a security incident. CerteroX SAM resolves titles against the Software Recognition Database — over 3.5 million normalised publisher, product and version entries — and the Software Recognition Service carries release date, end-of-support and extended-support dates alongside them, so end-of-life exposure is a standing report rather than a fire drill.
Ask a plain question of whatever you run today. When the next critical vulnerability is announced, can you say where that version is installed, and how many instances, before the end of the day? If the honest answer is no, the tool is not saving you money. It is deferring a cost.
Before cutting or replacing anything, measure what you have. An independent SAM maturity assessment, benchmarked against industry best practice and the ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017 process standard, is the cheapest diagnostic available.
A proper assessment looks at technology, process, skills and expertise separately, because they fail separately. Plenty of organisations have a capable platform and no one with the standing to act on its output. Plenty of others have deep licensing expertise and no reliable data to apply it to. The assessment tells you which of those you are, and therefore what closing the gap actually requires.
A SAM tool designed a decade ago cannot manage a hybrid environment properly. It was built when the questions were about desktops and servers, and it obstructs IT leaders who now need one view across devices, infrastructure, on-premises software, SaaS subscriptions, cloud resources and — newly — AI.
Agility is the requirement. Information has to be available immediately and it has to be trustworthy. Contracting is moving the same way: publishers increasingly offer single agreements spanning several licensing models and several environments at once, and a procurement team negotiating against that needs an equally holistic picture or it will negotiate blind.
That coverage is no longer aspirational, which is the main thing that has changed since this article was first published. It is worth being specific about what a platform has to do now to be taken seriously.
For SaaS, discovery cannot rely on the finance system. CerteroX SaaS Management converges three signals — identity provider sync from Entra ID and Okta, vendor API connectors, and a browser extension — across 47 shipping connectors and a catalogue of more than 35,000 applications. That combination is what surfaces the tools nobody expensed, including AI tools, which are classified from application feature tags rather than a hardcoded list so the detection set keeps up on its own.
For cloud, “spend went up” is not a finding. CerteroX Cloud Management runs twenty-six named, individually tunable recommendation checks across twelve cloud and data platforms — abandoned instances and load balancers, obsolete snapshot chains, instances stopped but never deallocated, rightsizing, reserved instance and savings plan opportunities — and ingests the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification natively, so the cost model stays portable. Certero’s average cloud cost saving across environments under management is 38%.
For the traditional ground, the depth still matters most where the audits bite: dedicated licence engines for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and Salesforce, with Oracle options and packs, IBM sub-capacity PVU calculation and SAP named-user analysis handled properly rather than approximated.
Savings come from three places here — better-informed purchasing, eliminating waste you can now see, and the negotiating position that comes from knowing your own numbers before the publisher tells you theirs.
The fragmentation is the expensive part. Legacy arrangements scatter the data across several tools, which means there is no single source of truth, which means every significant question becomes a reconciliation project before it becomes an answer.
CerteroX is one platform on one data model, covering ITAM, SAM, SaaS, cloud and AI. It was built rather than assembled from acquisitions, which is why the data model is shared rather than bridged. Scope runs from mobile devices through Windows, macOS and Linux to AIX, HP-UX and Solaris, and out to SaaS and cloud — in one environment, deployed as SaaS or on-premises. A modern foundation also costs less to run and support than a tool designed in 2010, which is a saving that shows up in staff time rather than a licence line.
If the budget conversation is coming, do not open it by asking what ITAM and SAM cost. Open it by asking what they are currently returning, and what the last audit, the last renewal and the last security incident cost by comparison.
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.