A practical checklist for judging whether your software asset management platform and provider are earning their keep — and a realistic look at what you can actually do about it when the answer is no.
First published in January 2018. Revised on migration.
Is your software asset management platform — and the provider behind it — meeting your expectations and delivering everything you need? What should you be looking for? And what can you actually do to get more value out of what you have already bought?
Too often, organisations implement something they believe will do a particular job, only to find it does not live up to expectations. Usually that is down to poor support, weak technical capability, or both. SAM is no different, and Certero has seen too many organisations sit with that dissatisfaction because they cannot see a way to act on it without incurring additional cost or operational disruption.
Working out whether your current platform or provider is delivering is reasonably straightforward. It comes down to a handful of questions.
Are you getting the benefits advanced SAM is supposed to deliver? Those are:
Do you have complete, accurate, end-to-end coverage and visibility of what you own? And even where the information exists, how easily can users and stakeholders get at it, or turn it into something useful? Too many platforms still fail this fundamental test.
How much manual effort does it require? The best platforms are highly automated. Manual intervention takes time, costs money and — without rigorous process — introduces errors. Can you produce a current effective licence position on demand, or does it take a fortnight and three spreadsheets?
If a vendor audit notification arrived this morning, how covered would you feel? The honest answer to that question tells you most of what you need to know.
Is the platform actually being used? Where it is not, the cause is usually poor training and knowledge transfer to your key users and system administrators rather than the technology itself.
How good is the support? Continuous value from a SAM platform requires continuing access to technical support and licensing expertise. Being sold to once is not the same as being supported.
How painful are upgrades? Costly, disruptive migrations to get to the next version are not acceptable.
Does it integrate with your other systems? ITAM, ITSM, the CMDB, identity — integration is what protects the investments you have already made and produces a single, coherent view rather than four partial ones.
How well does it handle what comes next? In 2018 this was a question about flexibility in the abstract. It is no longer abstract. The things that were coming have arrived: SaaS bought on expense cards, cloud spend that nobody owns, and AI tools adopted faster than any procurement process can track. A SAM platform that only understands installed software on managed devices is now looking at a shrinking share of your software spend.
The list could be longer. But a negative answer to any of these is reasonable grounds to question the value you are getting, and to push back.
It is easy to write a checklist that no product could pass. So here is what these questions look like answered against CerteroX SAM specifically.
On the effective licence position: purchased, used, available, required, variance and exposure are computed continuously rather than reconciled at a point in time, with downgrade rights, second-use entitlement and an exclusion workflow for MSDN, development, training and second-use devices handled as part of the calculation rather than as a manual adjustment afterwards.
On usage: file-based metering records first-used and last-used per title, with a percentage-used metric over a rolling 90-day window, plus Terminal Server and RDS remote-usage tracking per device. That is what turns “we own 400 licences” into “nobody has opened 130 of them since March”.
On audit readiness: six publishers have dedicated licence engines — Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and Salesforce — because the depth is where the audit finding lives. Oracle’s audit team can accept data from Certero during an official audit, as an alternative to installing Oracle’s own measurement tools.
On integration: a read-only API with a documented Power BI data source, 28 named system connectors, and Active Directory, SCCM, Intune and ITSM integration, so the asset data can feed the systems you already run.
On what comes next: SaaS, cloud and AI are separate products on the same platform and the same data model, not bolt-ons. That is the answer to the future-proofing question — not a promise about the roadmap, but five asset classes shipping now.
If further analysis confirms your current platform falls short, there are four options:
In our experience most organisations choose option 1 or option 3, and neither usually produces a significant improvement for the end user. Option 2 is rarely invoked; unless there has been a serious breach, the customer takes a financial hit on the remaining licensing commitment, on top of the cost of investing in and implementing a replacement.
The reluctance to act immediately is entirely understandable. It comes from concern about financial and personal exposure — nobody wants to shoulder responsibility for an investment decision that went wrong, however misled they were — and from the operational impact of rip-and-replace.
Which leaves option 4.
A migration handled properly does not have to mean rip-and-replace. Discovery can run alongside what you have today rather than instead of it, which means you can compare two positions on the same environment before you commit to anything. That is a far more useful basis for a decision than a demonstration, and it removes most of the personal exposure that keeps organisations on option 3.
So whether you feel your hands are tied, or you were simply unaware that a better SAM experience was available, there is another way. Talk to us about how this compares with what you run today.
Other posts covering the same ground.
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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.