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Software Asset Management (SAM) From Certero

Software Asset Management from Certero provides complete visibility into your business’ software landscape, giving you absolute control over license management and software governance.

What is Software Asset Management?

Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions allow you to take control of your business’ entire software landscape throughout its lifecycle. This includes the management, deployment, license compliance, usage, optimization and disposal of software – whether it’s deployed on premises, consumed as SaaS or cloud based software.

SAM solutions identify any causes for concern across your software estate that require responsive action. For example, SAM discovery tools will discover and identify all installed software and whether the software you have deployed is compliant with your software purchases. That means that your business can maintain control over legal and financial licensing risks, limit unnecessary expenditure and make cost savings. It can also ensure that software is deployed efficiently. In the bigger picture, this allows your business to consolidate licensing data and improve future licensing strategy.

Get full Software Asset Management (SAM) support in one unified platform

The Drivers for Software Asset Management

Software Asset Visibility

Having a real-time view of your IT landscape will allow you to do software asset tracking – essential for effective lifecycle management. You can’t manage what you can’t see, so this information can be very useful for other IT functions like Service Management and IT operations.

Reduce Audit Risks and Maintain Continuous License Compliance

Trying to anticipate when a vendor audit letter will arrive is difficult. You know it will happen at some point, so you should always be prepared! Plus, software vendors are reducing how long you have to respond to audit requests. Therefore, maintaining continuous compliance is rapidly becoming the only way to effectively manage software costs and audit risks.

By implementing a comprehensive SAM solution, you’ll be ahead of the game and able to provide software vendors with the information they need – without the disruption of working through an audit. And, because you’re already informed and in control, you can spend time actively reducing your software costs, not just defending against vendor audit requests.

Under an audit, if you have deployed software that you are not entitled to deploy, your business could face some serious repercussions. Firstly there is usually significant, (often unbudgeted) cost implications. It’s extremely easy to have software deployed in error. Often, this software is not even being used to deliver any value, yet it must be paid for.

Secondly, software audits can cause damage to your businesses reputation, especially if an audit results in a messy legal battle.

business strategy

Optimize Software Licensing Cost

Whilst investing in a comprehensive Software Asset Management solution may seem like another expense, it will save you time and money in the long run. Your biggest cost is the software itself, yet on average, 20-30% of software is unused. Software Asset Management will allow your business to understand:

  • Where you are over-spending and have too many licenses. Unused software can be re-harvested and re-deployed, reducing the need to purchase more.
  • How you can right-size your investments when buying software.
  • How you can identify what software features employees actually use, and where less expensive license types will do the job.
  • Where you are not fully utilizing the benefits of a Volume License Agreement (VLA) and could deploy and upgrade software.
  • Your best licensing strategy. You could take advantage of long-term volume discounts or unlimited license agreements to reduce overall costs.

The Additional Benefits of Software Asset Management

Negotiating Software Renewals

Each software product you deploy across your IT estate will have its own contractual terms, conditions and timescales to manage. It is important to understand these contracts and how they fit into your wider software strategy ahead of your big renewals. Being compliant with your licensing and knowing your Effective License Position (ELP) puts you in a position of strength. 

Supporting Future Business Growth

As your business evolves through a merger, acquisition or divestiture, it is essential that valuable business assets are accounted for. This governance process should also include IT assets and software licenses.

Having a solid SAM solution in place helps to prevent wandering into any costly software licensing risks. A merger or acquisition could easily cause a licensing issue and for this reason, the software vendors target businesses with audits at these disruptive times. Therefore, having a SAM solution in place can reduce risks and costs by gaining a clear understanding ahead of a deal being made.

Increased Security

Ensuring that all your primary ‘Tier 1’ software is secure and without any vulnerabilities is a tricky task in itself. Next, consider all the Tier 2&3 software that is not in use, or is used infrequently.

Should your business be unaware of any software, you will not be able to identify it or patch it against any potential security vulnerabilities. This is why having an enterprise class SAM solution in place is essential. It will actively discover, identify and maintain a live inventory of all the software deployed across your entire business.

Improve Efficiency and Productivity

A SAM solution needs to include a detailed inventory of your entire IT infrastructure. It can therefore remove the barriers to information that IT teams need on a daily basis. Moving to live dashboard reporting instead of relying on laborious data exports can improve productivity and efficiency across a broad spectrum of IT functions.

Communication can be unified, with IT teams all referencing a ‘single source of the truth’ – a common understanding of your IT infrastructure.

Keeping Software Up-to-Date

Whilst your priority may be avoiding wastage, you’ll also want to ensure that all software is patched and up-to-date. SAM tools can be tailored to automatically identify a particular piece of software; remove it and replace it, all without any user or IT intervention. This policy-driven automation helps to create a more efficient software lifecycle.

 

Unifying the Management of Software Environments

Not all software environments share the same license models, therefore you may need different SAM solutions to manage different software assets:

End-User Devices

From desktops to mobile devices, the licensing on end-user devices needs managing. This is usually done on a per-user or per-device licensing metric and would be covered by our Certero for Enterprise SAM solution.

Datacenters

Managing Datacenter software vendors is a lot more complex and expensive than those within general end-user environments. They often require dedicated license management solutions, purposefully designed to address the unique challenges. For this reason we have solutions to manage the biggest datacenter vendors. These are Certero for IBM, Certero for SAP Applications and Certero for Oracle.

SaaS Subscriptions

Software Asset Management also extends to Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS subscriptions bring an end to the risk of software audits, but create more wastage than the on-premises world. Reviewing your SaaS subscriptions should be included within your SAM process as almost 50% of SaaS applications go unused. This is cost that can be removed easily, using Certero for SaaS.

Cloud

Cloud brings its own licensing challenges, with the introduction of BYOL (Bring your own license). This allows you to utilize your existing on-premises licensing in the cloud, which can reduce cloud software licensing costs by 70-80%. To do this, you will need to understand your on-premises licensing and ensure you have the licenses available and accurately assigned to the cloud. Certero can see both the on-premises and cloud worlds in one unified platform solution. Vitado by Certero lets you see and manage multi-cloud in a single pane of glass.

Managing Software Asset Management

Whether you are looking for a Software Asset Management Tool or SAM Managed Service, Certero has a range of solutions to help.

Questions You May Have About Software Asset Management

+ Why is Software Asset Management Important?

Investing in a SAM solution is essential for businesses, especially larger organizations. This is because working environments are becoming more and more reliant on IT to function, so these assets must be efficiently monitored, managed and optimized. If not, a business could face the harsh realities; overspending, compliance risks or even a mass security breach.

+ What does a Software Asset Manager Do?

The software asset manager is the go-to person in the organization for everything related to software assets, managing the SAM processes and the technology. A software asset manager requires excellent communication skills as they are the key point of contact for all business stakeholders. It is the software asset managers’ role to educate all employees on the importance of license management. Stakeholders need to be aware of software of the need to right-size investments and use software efficiently.

+ Can a Business Monitor its Software Usage Internally or Manually?

A business would need to employ a sizable team of data processors to monitor, manage and control the IT landscape manually. This would clearly be a waste of time, money and resources, as solutions exist to give you the information you need. At Certero, we use our own intelligent technology to deliver SAM Services, rather than manually wrestling with massive data sets. This enables better results to be achieved much faster and, we’re able to work with live asset data instead of out-of-date reports.

Software Asset Management from Certero offers businesses a holistic and transparent understanding of their entire software estate, ensuring that internal decisions can be made in shorter time frames and with increased understanding. Making software solutions simple, accessible and undeniable.

Want to discover how Software Asset Management can unlock your business’ potential?

Get in touch with one of our expert team members today!

Certero’s [software-as-a-service] Solution

Certero help organizations transform their outdated operations and technologies in days and weeks not years. All of Certero’s solutions can be delivered as SaaS with no loss of functionality. 

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IT Hardware, Software, SaaS and Cloud Asset Management products that can run ‘stand-a-lone’ or ‘holistically’ and optimally together as a single solution, no dependencies. True unification across all asset and platforms and all delivered as SaaS. All of Certero’s products have the best TTV (Time to Value) by some distance.

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Go beyond standard MDM and deliver full management and security for your mobile workforce.

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Transform raw software inventory data into actionable intelligence about application usage and licensing.

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Optimize your Oracle Database, Middleware and E-Business Suite applications.

Certero for IBM
Discover and manage all IBM software & entitlements across the network. Dual Inventory, ILMT and Certero.

Certero for SAP Applications
Managing and automating the analysis of complex SAP named user and engine licenses across your estate. 

Passworks
An intuitive self-service password reset solution that can reduce service desk calls by 30%. 

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PC Power Management solution. Save money and reduce your carbon footprint. 

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