SCCM can tell you a file exists on a disk. It cannot tell you whether the application was installed, whether it belongs to a suite, or which edition you are running — and every one of those decides what you owe.
SCCM software recognition is weak. Its capabilities are what has traditionally been expected of an IT Asset Management tool, and for that job it is fine. It was not designed for Software Asset Management, and it is not capable of the parts of SAM that matter.
That becomes a problem the moment you try to use it for licence compliance, and a bigger one if you go further and try to optimise your licence position to reduce cost.
None of this means your investment in SCCM was wasted, or that it should be ripped out. It means SCCM needs something alongside it that does the part it was never built to do.
When SCCM recognises software, it attempts to take its raw output data and convert it into something digestible about licensable applications. It is reasonable to assume that is useful for SAM. In practice, the data it produces is often unreliable or unusable for the purpose.
Take the standard example. SCCM can tell you that word.doc has been detected
on the hard drive of a system. That is close to no information at all. For SAM
you need to know:
That added intelligence is not a nice-to-have. It is exactly what gets asked for at the time of a vendor audit, and getting it wrong leads to compliance findings and large true-up costs.
Different editions of the same product vary dramatically in what they cost to licence, which makes identifying the edition correctly the whole ballgame.
SCCM data has missing edition information on key Microsoft server products, including SQL Server and Exchange Server. There is no visibility into whether you are running the free edition of SQL Server — Express — or one of the paid editions, Enterprise or Standard. Those are not adjacent numbers on an invoice.
The same gap appears elsewhere. SCCM does not return Autodesk serial numbers or licence types, so you cannot tell whether an install is a standalone licence or a network licence. If an organisation has licensed the wrong way round, the true-up at audit is significant.
The answer is a proper software recognition database sitting behind the raw inventory, doing the normalisation and the identification that SCCM does not.
The Software Recognition Database. The SRDB holds more than 3.5 million titles — the normalised publisher, product and version library that recognition resolves against. Scale matters here for a specific reason: recognition is only as good as its coverage, and the long tail of what is actually installed across a large organisation is where unrecognised entries pile up. Titles are centrally maintained and categorised, so commercial and non-commercial software separate automatically and you can concentrate on the software where the investment and the risk sit.
Suite resolution. Recognition establishes whether a product is standalone or
a component of a larger suite, which is the distinction the word.doc example
fails on. Publisher normalisation and version recognition run alongside it, so
the same product does not appear four times under four spellings of its
publisher’s name.
Edition and lifecycle detail. Software Identification (SWID) tags carry UNSPSC classification, and the Software Recognition Service adds release date, end of support and extended support dates per title. That last one turns the recognition data into a lifecycle plan rather than a snapshot.
Microsoft server licensing that understands the hard part. For SQL Server and Windows Server specifically, CerteroX SAM handles core and processor licensing with cluster and virtualisation awareness, alongside device CALs, user CALs, named user and external connectors. The difficult part of Microsoft licensing is the server room, not the desktop — which is precisely where the SCCM edition gap bites.
Usage, not just presence. AppsMonitor meters application usage from the file level, recording first-used and last-used dates and reporting a utilisation figure over a rolling 90-day window. Knowing an application is installed is a compliance fact. Knowing nobody has opened it since March is a cost decision.
Having invested in SCCM, you should not need to discard it to get the information SAM requires. You do not.
CerteroX ITAM includes a direct SCCM interface: it imports SCCM applications, packages and jobs, and can drive them. SCCM stays in place doing what it does well, and the recognition, entitlement maths and licence position happen in a layer built for it.
One thing has changed since this post was first written, and it is worth being straight about. In 2016, complementing SCCM was the only realistic route, because SCCM was where the inventory lived. That is no longer a constraint. CerteroX ITAM has ten discovery methods of its own — native agent, command-line inventory, agentless, standalone for air-gapped systems, network discovery, Active Directory import, third-party ITAM import, cloud and SaaS connectors, browser monitoring and file metering — and all ten land in a single schema across six operating system families, including AIX, HP-UX and Solaris.
So the choice is now genuinely a choice. Keep SCCM and layer proper recognition over it, or let CerteroX discover directly. What you should not do is keep making licensing decisions on data that cannot tell an installed suite component from a file on a disk.
Book a demo, or read more about CerteroX SAM and CerteroX ITAM.
Other posts covering the same ground.
More than forty seasoned software asset management professionals were asked for one piece of advice for someone starting out in a SAM role. Their answers fell into four categories, and none of them was "buy a tool".
Most SAM programmes are built on Active Directory and an agent deployment, which means they are built on a list that is already wrong. Discovery is not a preliminary step to software asset management — it is the foundation the rest of it stands on.
SCCM is good at what it was built for and was never built for software asset management. You do not have to throw it away to close the gap — but you do have to know precisely where the gap is.
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.