A Consultant’s Story: Knowing Your Weaknesses

Though maybe best known as an innovator and developer of ground-breaking IT Asset Management and SAM solutions, Certero has always retained a global network of in-house SAM and licensing experts, who deliver Certero’s broad scope of independent SAM and ITAM services.

A pioneer of what we call the ‘Technology-Led Services’ approach, Certero’s consultancy team have the unique benefit of the full Certero technology platform at their disposal, to help them provide value to customers much faster and with greater accuracy than the traditional consultancy-heavy, ‘tool agnostic’ or manual approaches to delivering services.

This is because the substantial knowledge and expertise within Certero is what informs the creation of the technology and how it’s used by the consultancy team in practice, to deliver value beyond the norm – each element doing what it does best, in harmony.

In this blog series we look to Certero’s SAM team including dedicated specialists in Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP and SaaS & Cloud, who discuss where the lines are between the expert knowledge and the unique insights from the solution, the value of symbiosis between the two and the knowledge they provide that will never be captured within a SAM solution…

In this second blog of the series, Certero consultants look at approaches to assessing SAM maturity and identifying where the gaps are, and how the additional capability, expertise or resources can be ‘Switched ON’.

Based on the ISO framework and the SAM processes standard, ISO/IEC 19770-1, the SAM Maturity assessment and ‘SAM Optimization Model’ has been widely adopted in various forms across the SAM industry.

Originally conceived in a basic form by Microsoft, it has since evolved into a much more thorough assessment of how robust your organization’s policies, procedures and capabilities are to manage software licensing and realize greater value from SAM investments. This again is beyond just SAM solutions, it requires the right skills, experience and senior sponsorship to perform. The Certero SAM Maturity Assessment for example, looks at the following elements:

• Overall Management – responsibility, risk management, policies and procedures, competence, awareness and training, performance and continuous improvement, service continuity and availability management
• Core Software Asset Management – asset identification, asset control and financial management
• Logistics Processes – requirements definition, design, evaluation, procurement, build, deployment, operation, optimization and retirement
• Verification and Compliance – verification and audit, license compliance
• Relationship Process – contract management, supplier management, internal business relations and outsourcing

There are also advantages to using a 3rd party to validate internal licensing decisions and processes, Certero consultants are able to help businesses understand where they are making mistakes and the impacts of that decision making. Certero has a wealth of experience in working with businesses in this way as Peter Chance, Certero SAM consultant within the APAC region, clarifies:

Once capability and potential weaknesses are understood, it’s then possible to identify the ‘gaps’ that need to be filled – either through technology, resources / skills retained in-house, or through the assistance of a trusted SAM partner.

A good example is retaining the specialist knowledge required to manage major vendors like Oracle, IBM & SAP alongside the desktop environment. It’s not common for businesses to retain dedicated licensing experts for all of the major vendors they use and before the advent of Certero’s single platform, there was no real technology solution to help manage all of these vendors either. With no means to manage everything holistically, SAM governance and reporting across all vendors and platforms was therefore not an easy thing to achieve.

This has now finally changed and the option is there for SAM teams to simply ‘switch on’ the additional solution scope within Certero, so that they have visibility and holistic reporting for all software vendors. However, acquiring the resources, knowledge and expertise in-house is not quite as easy.

Misunderstandings in the way vendors operate can, and will, cause significant problems; so having the trusted option of Certero expertise to hand that can be essentially ‘switched on’ to help you understand what’s happening in your estate, is vital to being able to derive the most benefit from your licensing purchases and will also help to reduce pressure on your SAM teams.

If the preferred route is to build an internal SAM team around the single SAM solution, knowing where and how to begin can be a challenge, particularly if there is no established program in place.

Skills-Transfer training is an option here and is sometimes built-in to a Certero SAM Managed Service for example, so as to utilize Certero’s capability to do the initial ‘heavy-lifting’ of establishing an Effective License Position – a valuable position of control – that is then handed over to an in-house team, trained by Certero, to manage going forward.

For many enterprises this can be the missing link when investing in SAM and helps to eliminate the risk of failure and provide the assurance of business value: controlled risks and cost savings, whilst helping to bridge the gap operationally from an often-chaotic starting position to an established and robust SAM program delivering measurable business benefits.

The increasing scope of environments is another area where new knowledge is required as well as the solutions that provide the essential visibility. SaaS applications and the proliferation of new Cloud infrastructure is adding to the challenge and is far from being ‘the end of needing to worry about licensing’ as many supposed.

Costs, wastage and especially unexpected bills are increasing, so it’s not just traditional on-premises licensing you need to consider, as Peter Chance has seen first-hand:

We understand that some organizations are still considering Cloud migrations but this decision is regularly offset by the need to keep legacy applications on premises, simply because they will not run in a Cloud environment or because customers are risk-averse to full Cloud. Certero think this will be an on-going challenge for many, compounded by new associated costs in keeping dedicated gateways available to share data between the two infrastructures.