An effective licence position keeps you compliant. It does not, on its own, make you cheaper. Optimisation is what turns compliance work into money back — and it runs on two things, use rights and usage data.
Getting to an effective licence position (ELP) is the first milestone on a SAM programme, not the last one. The ELP tells you where you stand. It keeps you compliant. What it does not do, by itself, is make you spend less — and spending less is what pays for the programme.
Licence optimisation is the work that comes after. The goal is to hold the smallest number of licences that still leaves you compliant, by making sure every licence you own is doing something useful and every use of software draws on the cheapest entitlement that legitimately covers it. Do it properly and two things happen: the bill goes down, and an audit stops being an event you dread.
Optimisation runs on two inputs. You need to understand your use rights, and you need real data about how the software is actually used. Take them in that order.
Your right to use a piece of software comes from the agreement you bought it under, and that agreement is usually more generous than people assume. The rights below are common across major publishers such as Microsoft and Adobe, and each one is a way of covering more installations with fewer licences.
Upgrade. The right to install the current version at no extra cost. Simple in principle, awkward in practice, because in most organisations some licences sit under active maintenance and some do not — and the ones that do not will not carry the upgrade. Working out which is which by hand, across thousands of transactions, is where this right usually gets abandoned.
Downgrade. The right to buy a later version, typically the current one, and deploy an earlier version instead. This matters more than it sounds. If your standard desktop image runs a version you can no longer purchase, downgrade rights are the mechanism that keeps that image legal.
Server virtualisation. Software installed across a number of virtual machines counting as a single licence, under the conditions the agreement sets out.
Secondary use. One user, one licence, two machines — typically a desktop and a laptop.
Disaster recovery. Software installed on both a live server and its standby, licensed once through the live server.
Multiple installations. The same application installed several times on one device, often at different versions, counting once. Worth flagging a trap here: tools that recognise software purely by scanning for files have an unhelpful habit of reading the debris of a failed uninstall as a second installation, and inflating your position with software nobody has.
None of these rights help you if they live in a filing cabinet. They have to be encoded somewhere the licence calculation can reach them. In CerteroX SAM, downgrade rights and second-use entitlement are handled inside the Effective Licence Position calculation itself, so purchased, used, available, required, variance and exposure are all computed with the rights already applied. The optimised position is not a separate report you run afterwards; it falls out of the same engine.
Once you know what your rights allow, the question becomes what your users actually do — which is almost never what the install base implies.
In any organisation of size there is a population of users running a more capable and more expensive edition than their work requires. Standard where Professional was deployed. A full design suite where a single application would do. Reading these against your use rights lets you reassign the expensive licences to people who genuinely need them, instead of buying more. SAP environments reward this work more than most, because the licence type each named user holds is a per-user decision made across one of the most intricate licensing models in enterprise software; CerteroX SAM proposes the licence type each user should hold using priority-ordered analysis rules, and shows the current, suggested and optimal positions side by side.
The same usage data surfaces the other half of the saving: software nobody has opened in months. That is a licence available for reharvesting and reallocation, and it is usually the fastest money in the programme.
Organisations draw the reharvesting line in different places. Ninety days of no usage is a common threshold; some are more patient than that, particularly for seasonal or year-end tools.
Two measures answer the question between them. CerteroX SAM computes a % Used utilisation metric over a rolling 90-day window, which tells you how heavily a title is being used right now. Alongside it, file-based usage metering records first-used and last-used dates per title, which is what tells you whether an application has been dormant for a quarter or has simply never been opened since the day it was deployed. The rolling window gives you the trend; the first-used and last-used dates give you the evidence to act on it.
Two things make reclamation politically easier. The first is a self-service portal: users hand software back far more readily when they know they can have it again in minutes rather than raising a ticket and waiting a fortnight. CerteroX ITAM includes App-Centre for exactly this, with manager approval chains where the request needs one. The second is the Exclude From Licensing workflow, which takes MSDN, development, training and second-use devices out of the licensable count. Those devices are legitimate exceptions, and if they are inflating your position you will spend the optimisation exercise arguing about numbers that were never real.
Optimisation is arithmetic performed on two datasets that are both hard to get right: what you are entitled to, and what is actually happening. If either is approximate, the answer is approximate, and an approximate answer is not something you want to take into a publisher conversation.
That is the case for doing this continuously rather than in a project every few years. CerteroX SAM holds licences, transactions, agreements, maintenance, suppliers and publishers in one place, with dedicated engines for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and Salesforce, and recomputes the position as the inventory changes. The optimised number is available on the day you need it, not six weeks after you asked.
To see a licence position with use rights and metered usage already applied to it, book a demo.
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.