Most organisations start SAM as audit insurance. The cost case is the stronger one: less overspend on software and hardware, cheaper support through rationalisation, in-house expertise built deliberately, and a negotiating position based on your own numbers.
Too many organisations implement software asset management defensively — as insurance against a nasty surprise when a publisher audit lands. That is sound business sense as far as it goes, but it should not be the only reason to do it. The cost savings on their own make a compelling case.
The most obvious saving is straightforward overspend, on software and on hardware both. The hardware part surprises people. It should not: the discipline of a strong SAM programme surfaces where hardware has been over-deployed and where consolidation — servers most obviously — will take cost out.
The inventory that supports this has to reach further than the word “software” implies. In CerteroX ITAM that means:
Ten discovery methods feed one schema — native agent, command-line inventory for locked-down machines, agentless, standalone for air-gapped systems, Active Directory, network scan, third-party import, cloud connectors, browser monitoring and file metering — so there is no reconciliation exercise between tools that each know part of the answer.
On the software side, monitoring usage tells you where software is installed and not being used, so the licence can be re-harvested and reissued elsewhere. This is what stops the organisation buying what employees think they need rather than what they demonstrably use. Usage metering in CerteroX SAM is file-based with first-used and last-used tracking and a percentage-used figure over a rolling ninety-day window, which is long enough to catch monthly and quarterly patterns without treating a fortnight’s holiday as abandonment.
Capturing usage is only half of it. The licence position also depends on where and how the software runs:
Get any of those wrong and the compliance position is wrong regardless of how good the usage data is.
The next saving is in support.
Knowing exactly what hardware and software you have — typically down to version and patch level for software, and processor and memory detail for hardware — makes support easier day to day. More importantly, it makes longer-term rationalisation decisions possible at all. You cannot standardise on three builds if you do not know you are running eleven.
Better information also produces better purchasing. A more consistent architecture reduces support cost, and it improves security across everything you run, because a smaller and better-understood set of versions is a smaller set of things to patch.
That security benefit deserves to be stated plainly rather than left as a by-product. The Software Recognition Service in CerteroX SAM carries release date, end-of-support and extended-support dates alongside each recognised title, so end-of-life exposure is a standing report. When the next critical vulnerability is announced, the question is where that version is installed and how many instances — and the honest test of any tool is whether you can answer that before the end of the day.
There is a hidden cost in managing software licences, and it is people.
You need internal expertise to do it properly. That is true whether or not you have a formal SAM programme, because you have to manage software licences as you would any other asset regardless. So it makes sense to build that expertise inside a programme, where processes are defined and the knowledge is developed deliberately from the start, rather than accumulating it ad hoc through a succession of audits.
The final saving is in the conversation with the vendor.
A complete and accurate view of what you have installed puts you in a materially stronger position in any negotiation, including one that follows an audit finding. It prevents significant overspend, particularly where a publisher uses a licence shortfall as pressure to move you onto a new agreement that makes the problem go away on terms that suit them rather than you.
Walking in with your own numbers changes what is being discussed. Without them, you are negotiating about their figure.
A centralised view also lets you consolidate purchasing. Once all software and hardware is visible in one place, volume and support options can be negotiated across the whole organisation instead of department by department, which is usually where the duplicated agreements were hiding.
The article above was written when the software bill meant licences and the hardware bill meant machines. Both are still there. Two more have been added, and in most organisations they now grow faster than either.
SaaS. Subscriptions are bought outside procurement, renew automatically, and are invisible to a discovery agent because there is nothing installed. CerteroX SaaS Management converges three signals to find them — identity provider sync from Entra ID and Okta, vendor API connectors across 47 shipping integrations, and a browser extension — against a catalogue of more than 35,000 applications. Unused licences are flagged at thirty days of zero usage, overlapping applications are ranked by recoverable saving, and offboarding is tracked per licence so a leaver’s seats are actually released rather than assumed released.
Cloud. “The bill went up” is not a finding. CerteroX Cloud Management runs twenty-six named, individually tunable recommendation checks across twelve cloud and data platforms — abandoned instances and load balancers, obsolete snapshot chains, instances stopped but never deallocated, rightsizing, reserved instance and savings plan opportunities — with per-check thresholds and pool exclusions so the engine fits your environment rather than nagging about it. Certero’s average cloud cost saving across environments under management is 38%.
The same argument applies to both as applied to licences in 2016: you cannot re-harvest what you cannot see.
Added together, these contributions typically outweigh the cost of running the programme, which is what makes the return on investment argument straightforward to put to a finance director. Reduced overspend, cheaper support, better purchasing, a stronger negotiating position, and — increasingly — subscription and cloud waste that would otherwise compound quietly every month.
If you want to talk through what that would look like against your own numbers, get in touch.
Other posts covering the same ground.
Five predictions made at the start of 2020: a wave of rip-and-replace in SAM tooling, a wider audience for inventory data, cloud growing without going first, targeted audit activity, and organisations finally dismantling the Frankenstack.
Hybrid IT broke the ITAM tools built for the data centre. What unified discovery, software recognition and governance actually have to cover when your assets span on-premises, virtual, cloud and SaaS — and how to test a vendor against it.
FinOps was built for the cloud and stops at the data centre door. ITAM knows the assets and licences underneath. Neither is complete alone — and hybrid cost control needs both working from the same data.
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.