The difference between a genuine SAM platform and a rebranded collection of tools, and the eight criteria worth testing before you sign anything.
First published in September 2019. Updated on migration so that what it says about CerteroX is true of the product today.
A SAM platform that actually works is a bit like an urban myth. Nobody has one, but almost everyone knows someone who knows someone who does — and cannot tell you how or where to get one.
After years of being over-promised and under-delivered to, a lot of enterprises have quietly lost faith that a SAM tool vendor can hand them something that works. That scepticism is earned. Vendors marketing a “SAM platform” are often selling a disparate collection of products under one logo, with fragmented data sources and a great deal of manual work required to extract even basic value. That is not a platform. It is a portfolio with a shared invoice.
The difference shows up in specifics, not in positioning.
| A genuine platform | A collection of tools |
|---|---|
| One interconnected product | Separate products sold together |
| SaaS, on-premises or hybrid, with the same functionality in each | No end-to-end SaaS option |
| One login, one interface | Multiple logins with conflicting interfaces |
| One normalised data source | Fragmented sources and formats |
| Complete data across every device and platform you run | Partial coverage, with gaps you find later |
| Depth on all the publishers that carry audit risk | Depth on one or two |
| Cloud, SaaS and AI covered as first-class asset classes | Cloud handled thinly or not at all |
| Analytics built into the platform | Limited reporting, data exported elsewhere |
| Bespoke, dynamic reporting on any variable | A fixed set of pre-built reports |
Every row in that table is testable. That matters more than the table itself, because the only reliable way through vendor marketing is to make the vendor show you the thing rather than describe it.
The list below is not exhaustive. Add your own criteria — the ones that reflect the environment you actually run rather than a generic environment.
What to look for. Whether you deploy as SaaS, on-premises or a hybrid of both, the functionality should be identical in each. Automation, analytics and reporting should work out of the box rather than being a configuration project. For SaaS the specific advantage is that there is no server build, no capacity planning and no infrastructure sign-off before you start collecting data. Agentless inventory and network discovery let you get early coverage of an environment before you have deployed anything to it.
What to avoid. Most SaaS-delivered SAM tools contain no ITAM data, and that is rarely obvious at the start. SAM cannot be done properly without hardware and inventory data, so you end up buying a separate ITAM tool — which typically needs on-premises servers to gather and inventory. All the effort you were avoiding comes back, plus a second contract and a second data source. The point of buying SaaS quietly disappears.
What to look for. Automation should be in the architecture, not bolted on top of it. It should cover the implementation as well as daily operation, and it should work with little or no additional configuration. The test is simple: how many people does the vendor expect you to hire to run their product?
What to avoid. Tools built on decades-old architecture push manual work back onto you. Fragmented data sources cannot be presented in a single view without someone normalising and merging them by hand, and by the time that work is finished the answer is out of date. The same is true of implementation, where manual configuration and per-tool integration extend the timeline and let human error into the result.
What to look for. A genuine platform covers everything you run, and covers it consistently. That means operating systems beyond Windows, mobile devices, virtualisation, cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications and — now — AI. And it means real depth on the publishers whose licensing is genuinely hard, not just the ones whose licensing is easy to model.
Here is what that looks like as shipping capability rather than an ambition. CerteroX ITAM runs a native inventory agent across six operating system families — Windows, macOS, Linux, IBM AIX, HP-UX and Oracle Solaris — with ten discovery methods that all land in one schema, plus mobile device management for iOS and Android. CerteroX SAM carries dedicated licence engines for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and Salesforce, resolving against a Software Recognition Database of more than 3.5 million titles. CerteroX SaaS Management ships 47 connectors and three converging discovery signals — identity provider, vendor APIs and a browser extension — against an application catalogue of more than 35,000 applications. CerteroX Cloud Management covers twelve cloud and data platforms with twenty-six named optimisation checks. CerteroX AI Management governs models, experiments, GPU compute and AI seats as one asset class.
What to avoid. Older tool sets usually specialise in one area and struggle outside it. They may be perfectly good at Microsoft on PCs and much weaker on everything else. The consequence is predictable: you buy from a second vendor to fill the gap, and now you have two data sources and a reconciliation problem that did not exist before.
What to look for. Modularity. Your requirements are not the same as the requirements of the organisation the product was demoed to last week, and the platform should be configurable to what you actually need to govern. A modular structure means you can start with one discipline and add others as the scope of your programme grows, without a migration.
What to avoid. Products where functionality is welded into bundles, so that reaching the capability you want means taking a great deal you do not. That tends to be a symptom of legacy architecture rather than a deliberate design choice, and it usually comes with the same rigidity after implementation — a system that cannot be shaped to your requirements once it is in.
What to look for. One interface, one login, one data source, across hardware, software, SaaS and cloud. That is what makes analysis and reporting quick, and it is what makes optimisation and governance possible at all — you cannot govern across boundaries you cannot see across.
What to avoid. Legacy portfolios have separate data sources per product and those products function independently of one another. You log in and out of several systems to manage what is, from your side of the desk, one problem. Each carries inconsistent data that is not updated on the same cycle, and each has a different interface. The real cost is not the inconvenience. It is that the output becomes difficult to trust, and untrusted output does not get used.
What to look for. A single normalised source covering every vendor and platform, queryable without an export. Discovery and inventory generate a great deal of data, and a platform should keep it rather than discard what it does not immediately need — the value of an inventory record is frequently in the field nobody thought to ask for at implementation time.
What to avoid. Vendors who feed discovery output into several separate databases to power several separate products. Analysis then requires normalising and merging those sources before you can start, and the resulting business intelligence is built on data with a higher chance of being incomplete, stale or inconsistent — usually some combination of all three.
What to look for. Reporting you can build yourself, across every variable in the data source, inside the product. Dashboards you can share, so that updating management is not a monthly export exercise. If the vendor’s answer to a reporting question is “you can export that”, the reporting is not in the product.
What to avoid. A fixed catalogue of built-in reports with little room to build anything new. That is how organisations end up maintaining a parallel reporting layer in spreadsheets — a layer that has no owner, no version control and no audit trail.
What to look for. If you are buying a SAM managed service or consultancy rather than the tool, ask how long the provider needs before they can give you data. The answer tells you what they are running underneath. A provider working on a SaaS platform can start collecting without an infrastructure project first, which matters a great deal when the deadline is an audit response date rather than a planning cycle.
What to avoid. Lead times measured in months, before configuration and before any data has been gathered. Publishers do not schedule audits around your implementation plan.
If the platform is genuinely one product rather than several, the benefits follow from the architecture rather than from any individual feature:
Certero was named the sole Customers’ Choice in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Software Asset Management Tools — the only vendor in the category to reach that position. Those are the opinions of the customers who wrote them, which is rather the point: they are not our claims about ourselves.
Book a demonstration, and go into it with the awkward cases already written down: the Unix servers, the Oracle options, the unsanctioned SaaS, the cloud accounts nobody owns. A walkthrough tells you what a product does well. The awkward cases tell you where it stops.
Ask every shortlisted vendor what they do not cover. The willingness to answer that question is usually more informative than any answer to the ones on your scoring matrix.
One licence position, computed continuously, in one place. Talk to us or book a demo.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark, and PEER INSIGHTS is a trademark and service mark, of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.
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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.