The software asset manager owns the compliance position, but the value of the role is wider than that: risk prioritisation, procurement intelligence, tooling and the answers nobody else in the business can give.
Software asset management is the business practice of managing and optimising the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilisation and eventual disposal of software. That sentence sounds administrative. It is not.
Every one of those stages runs into terms set by the software publisher, and those terms are legally binding. They decide what you pay, what you are allowed to do with what you bought, and whether the commercial benefits of a volume agreement are available to you at all.
Get it wrong in the other direction and you are non-compliant: short of the licences you need to cover the software you have deployed, regardless of whether anyone is actually using it. That is the asymmetry at the heart of the discipline. Deployment creates liability. Usage does not reduce it.
So software asset management is technically and commercially difficult, and it carries real legal and financial risk, because if software is left unmanaged there are very few hard barriers stopping costs from running away. Publishers know this. It is why their End User Licence Agreements almost always reserve a right to audit you periodically.
And if the financial governance case is not enough, consider the security one: not knowing what software is deployed across your infrastructure is not only a licensing problem.
Controlling all of that takes people, process and technology together. Here is what the SAM manager does with each of them.
The clue is in the title. The SAM manager is accountable for the software asset management programme.
How that programme operates varies enormously with the size of the business and the maturity of the function. Some run on in-house licensing subject matter experts. Many bring in specialist skills from external consultants, either temporarily to answer a specific question or on a long-term basis.
An effective licence position engagement, for example, establishes where you stand with one publisher: your compliance position, your exposure and your overspend, with guidance on what to do about both. A managed service does the same thing continuously, so you can measure whether risk and cost are actually falling rather than assuming they are.
Each major publisher demands its own expertise. Microsoft server licensing, the Oracle options and packs question, IBM sub-capacity, SAP named-user classification — these are not one skill set. The SAM manager is either the subject matter expert or the person who knows when to bring one in.
Whichever route is taken, the primary objective is unchanged: the software deployed across the organisation is adequately covered by the organisation’s licence entitlement. Being compliant means you are not exposed if — realistically, when — a publisher audits you, and it means you negotiate from a position of knowledge rather than hope.
The same work prevents waste in the opposite direction. Organisations routinely buy licences nobody uses. That waste is easiest to quantify in SaaS, where 46% of licences go unused and the average organisation uses 54% of what it pays for. Installed software has the same problem. It is simply harder to see without usage metering.
A good SAM manager makes sure that when a renewal comes round, the business is in the best possible shape to negotiate and to source only what it genuinely needs — avoiding audit risk and unnecessary spend at the same time.
There is a great deal of software in any organisation. There are not many publishers that matter commercially.
Most businesses have a handful of Tier 1 publishers — typically Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, IBM and SAP — where the majority of the cost and almost all of the audit risk sits. The SAM manager knows which of those to work on, and in what order, weighing potential expense against likelihood of scrutiny. The sequence is often set for them by an audit request or a renewal cycle rather than chosen freely.
Software asset management only works if the surrounding business processes hold. That makes the SAM manager the standing voice of reason about what software the business uses and how it is consumed.
Most organisations have learnt at least once that you cannot consume software without understanding how it will be paid for. Publishers understand this better than their customers do, which is why audits arrive at moments of disruption — a merger, a divestment, a major migration — when control is weakest.
The SAM manager’s job is to be ahead of that: talking to senior stakeholders, making sure the commercial consequences of a technical decision are understood before the decision is made rather than after the invoice.
That is also where SAM meets procurement. Knowing what the organisation needs to buy in order to serve its strategy is the SAM manager’s contribution. Procurement can then go to market knowing precisely what is required, instead of renewing what was bought last time.
The oldest problem in software asset management is knowing what is out there, who uses it and who does not. For years that problem was compounded by tooling: either there was no discovery and inventory at all, or there were several overlapping tools and no agreed view between them.
The historical consequence was that most of a SAM manager’s time went on exporting data from one or more inventory tools, de-duplicating it, cleansing it and formatting it into something that resembled reality. It is why manual SAM services have traditionally produced only a handful of effective licence position reports a year. The report was expensive to make, so it was made rarely, and it was out of date the week it landed.
That is not the constraint any more, and the SAM manager’s relationship with tooling has changed accordingly. What the role now expects from a platform:
One inventory, not several to reconcile. CerteroX ITAM lands ten discovery methods — agent, command line, agentless, standalone, Active Directory, network scan, third-party import, cloud connector, browser monitoring and file metering — into a single schema, with native agents across Windows, macOS, Linux, AIX, HP-UX and Solaris. There is no reconciliation project because there is nothing to reconcile.
Recognition, not a list of file names. Discovery tells you a binary exists. CerteroX SAM resolves it against the Software Recognition Database of more than 3.5 million titles, so what you get back is a named publisher, product, version and edition. In an audit, that distinction is the difference between arguing your position and conceding it.
Evidence of use, not just installation. File-based usage metering records first-used and last-used dates and computes a percentage-used metric over a rolling 90-day window, including Terminal Server and RDS remote usage per device. That is what turns “we have 400 installs” into “we need 260 licences and can harvest the rest”.
A licence position that is current. Purchased, used, available, required, variance and exposure are computed continuously rather than assembled for a quarterly report. Downgrade rights, second-use entitlement, and exclusions for MSDN, development, training and second-use devices are handled inside the calculation rather than in a spreadsheet beside it.
The practical effect is that far less of the role is data preparation. That is a significant time saving, and it accelerates the point at which a SAM programme starts returning value — which leads directly to the next part of the job.
Not from anything mystical. From the people, processes and technology that make the function work.
A SAM manager needs to be able to answer questions like: what software do we need to buy? What are we not using? If we make this change, what happens to the cost? Those are not licensing questions. They are business questions that happen to require licensing knowledge to answer.
Done properly, software asset management means you can predict your software costs rather than discover them. It means you can identify everything installed and, by extension, where company data sits and where your known vulnerabilities are.
It also means having a plan — that investments in software are deliberate and return value, rather than accumulating by default.
The SAM manager holds that knowledge and, crucially, has to be able to communicate it well enough to influence decisions. Above all, the role exists to eliminate the expensive, disruptive surprises that arrive when software is left unmanaged.
There is a wider benefit here that is easy to miss. The same understanding of what software is deployed serves other teams. Security wants to know where the vulnerabilities are across everything you own. Service management wants a single reliable record of the infrastructure and an accurate answer to what a piece of discovered software really is. The SAM function produces both as a by-product.
This article was written when software asset management still largely meant installed software. That is no longer the boundary of the role, and any description of the job that stops at the network scan is out of date.
SaaS. Applications are now bought by departments, on cards, without asking. CerteroX SaaS Management converges three independent discovery signals — identity provider sync from Entra ID and Okta, authoritative user and licence lists pulled through 47 vendor connectors, and a browser extension that detects SaaS domains with per-user attribution — and resolves what it finds against a catalogue of more than 35,000 applications. Unused licences are flagged at 30 or more days of zero usage, and the actions to deal with them are built in.
Cloud. Consumption billing behaves nothing like a licence, but it lands on the same person’s desk. CerteroX Cloud Management applies 26 named, individually tunable optimisation checks across twelve cloud and data platforms, with budget and policy controls that fire before the invoice does.
AI. The newest asset class, and the one arriving fastest with the least procurement involvement. AI tools are classified from application feature tags in the catalogue rather than a fixed list, so the detection set grows without maintenance, and adoption risk is ranked by the share of the organisation using each tool.
None of this replaces software asset management. The publisher audits have not stopped and the entitlement mathematics on Oracle, IBM and SAP is unchanged. What has changed is that the software asset manager is now accountable for several categories of spend that no network scan will ever find.
Like any role built on skills and experience, it is hard to know where to start.
Learn the publishers. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM all publish licensing training, and their own material is the right place to begin — it is the authority on the terms you will be arguing about. Start with whichever publisher represents the largest share of your organisation’s spend, because that is where your first real problem will come from.
Learn the discipline, not just the vendors. The principles of software asset management and of IT asset management more broadly; how mergers, acquisitions and divestitures change a licence position; how virtualisation and cloud hosting change what is licensable. Vendor knowledge without the surrounding discipline produces someone who can read a EULA but cannot run a programme.
Get access to real data early. Licensing theory is unfalsifiable until you apply it to your own environment. The fastest way to learn is to compute an effective licence position for one publisher and defend every number in it.
You no longer have to be the expert in everything yourself. An independent managed service can supply the skilled people, the process and the technology as a working extension of your team — and hand a mature programme back to you once control is established.
If you would like help with hardware, software, SaaS, cloud or AI management, get in touch.
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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.