Tool-agnostic consultancy sounds like independence. In practice it often means abandoning the platform you already paid for and rebuilding your licence position by hand in a spreadsheet — which is out of date the day it is signed off.
Software asset management has become important enough to enough organisations that a market has grown up around it: independent consultants who will come in, work with whatever tooling and processes you already have, and produce an effective licence position for you.
Being tool-agnostic is sold as a virtue, and on the face of it that makes sense. Nobody wants advice from someone whose recommendation is fixed before they arrive. But it is worth looking closely at what actually happens on these engagements, because “tool-agnostic” and “independent” are not the same thing, and the second one is what you are paying for.
What we see repeatedly is this: the consultant reviews the technology and processes you have in place, concludes that they cannot certify an effective licence position produced by any of it, and builds one manually instead. Naturally that is expensive. And in the scheme of an audit defence, most people conclude it is money well spent. But is it?
An effective licence position produced by hand is a static, point-in-time report. It is out of date the moment it is signed off.
That matters more than it first appears. An ELP is important — it demonstrates compliance and it protects you from the worst outcomes of a vendor audit — but only for the conditions it was computed under. A single new server build, a virtualisation change, a department that buys forty seats of something on a corporate card, and the position has moved. You know you were compliant on the day of the report. You do not know whether you are compliant tomorrow, next month or next year, unless you commission the whole exercise again.
Vendors do not schedule audits around your last consultancy engagement.
Compliance is the floor. The money is in optimisation — harvesting licences nobody uses, applying downgrade rights, excluding devices that should never have been counted, and buying to a position you can actually defend rather than to a number someone guessed.
A manual ELP tells you where you stand. It does not give you the machinery to improve where you stand, and it cannot, because it is a document rather than a process.
There is also a practical limit. Software asset management is a multidimensional problem: publisher, product, version, edition, metric, host, cluster, user, agreement, entitlement, use right. Spreadsheets — the standard instrument for a manual ELP — are two-dimensional. You can model complexity in a spreadsheet, but only by encoding it in conventions that live in one person’s head, and that is precisely the thing you cannot hand to an auditor with confidence.
The part that should give you pause is the economics. You spent a significant sum on a SAM platform. You spent time and effort implementing processes around it. If the engagement’s answer is to set all of that aside and rebuild the position by hand, that investment produced nothing.
Sometimes that is the right call — a platform can be genuinely unsuitable, or so badly implemented that starting again is cheaper than fixing it. But it should be a conclusion the consultant argues for explicitly, with reasons, not a default. The better and usually more cost-effective route is to choose the right platform in the first place and then make sure it works: the right processes, the right people, and clear ownership of the licence position.
If a tool-agnostic consultant proposes a manual ELP, ask:
To be fair to the profession: independent expertise is genuinely valuable, and there are situations where it is exactly what you need — an Oracle certification, a contentious audit response, a merger where two licensing positions have to be reconciled. The objection is not to outside help. It is to outside help whose default deliverable is a spreadsheet that replaces a system.
This is why Certero only offers SAM services built on our own technology. We think a manual position is a weaker product than a computed one, and we are not willing to deliver the weaker one.
CerteroX SAM computes the effective licence position continuously rather than as a point-in-time reconciliation, covering purchased, used, available, required, variance and exposure. Because the position is derived rather than assembled, it moves when your environment moves. Threshold alerts and KPIs flag a drift into non-compliance when it happens, so you can deal with the cause while it is still small. Governance Policies express compliance rules as code — unauthorised software prevention, prohibited applications, reusable filters — so the controls persist rather than depending on someone remembering to check.
That same data then supports the optimisation work: software usage metering over a rolling ninety-day window to identify what nobody has opened, downgrade rights and second-use entitlement handling, and the Exclude From Licensing workflow for MSDN, development, training and second-use devices.
And there is one accountability advantage worth naming. When the service and the platform are the same organisation, a gap in recognition or a publisher rule that needs modelling is a change to a product we own, not a support ticket into a third party while you wait.
If an independent SAM consultant approaches you, look closely at what they are actually proposing. If they intend to build on the investment you have already made in your SAM platform, that is a real service. If their proposal is to set it aside and go back to a manual process, ask them to explain why — specifically, and in terms of what your platform cannot do.
You may get a good answer. But you should hear it before you pay for the spreadsheet.
Other posts covering the same ground.
An Oracle Unlimited Licence Agreement is only unlimited within its clauses. What certification actually asks of you, where toxic consumption creeps in, and why the measurement work has to start at the beginning of the term rather than the last six months.
Microsoft's August 2025 Product Terms changes: Extended Term standardised across programmes, Exchange and Skype for Business Server Subscription Editions, the Exchange and Windows 10 ESU programmes, and the Dynamics 365 F&O enforcement dates.
Renew, rescope or exit — an Oracle ULA gives you three routes and a narrow window to choose between them. The questions to settle first, and a six-point health check to see how ready you actually are.
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.