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Managing the software assets of an organisation

Clive Longbottom, Service Director

Quocirca Comment
Just as intelligent management of a datacentres hardware assets is critical to ensure that IT delivers business value, managing software assets is vital for maintaining a highly flexible and up-to-date IT platform. But more often, software is purchased by the IT department out of necessity and then forgotten due to its intangible form. Software asset management (SAM) tools have evolved into complex systems using them correctly can ensure that an organisation maintains its software assets to better meet the needs of the organisation and keep itself within the terms of all of its software contracts. As with hardware, the first step that needs to be carried out is a full asset discovery. The majority of systems management tools with include something along these lines, but the capabilities of the systems may not provide exactly what is needed. For example, some systems will only look within the data centre. While this may be useful in identifying the number of licences being used across what software, this is only touching a small proportion of the applications and licences an organisation has. Trawling across an organisations total estate of servers, desktops, laptops, tablets and other mobile devices has become a difficult task, particularly with bring your own device (BYOD) devices where licences may have been bought directly by the end user. However, building up a full picture of what is being used brings in many different advantages. Firstly, patterns of usage can be built up. For example, is a specific group of employees using a specific application? Are employees carrying out the same tasks using different applications? Secondly, the issue of licensing can be addressed. Once a full picture of the application landscape has been established, how these have been licensed can be looked at. In many cases, organisations will find that they have a corporate agreement for licences, yet departments and individuals have gone out and sourced their own software with licences costing much more than if they had gone through a central purchasing capability. Bringing these licences into the central system could save a lot of money. However, it may well be that golden images have been used with corporate licences without any checks in place as to whether the number of seats implemented is within the agreed contract. Although this can lead to extra costs for the organisation in bringing the contract into line with the number of licences being used, it will be cheaper than being fined should a software audit be carried out by the likes of FAST. The usage patterns identified may help here as well. Many SAM tools will be able to report on when an application was last used by the employee. In some cases, this may have been weeks or even months ago in many cases, it will be apparent that the employee installed the software to try out and has never used it since. Harvesting these unused licences can help to offset the need to change existing contracts. Thirdly, as long as the asset discovery tool is granular enough, it will be able to ascertain the status of the application its version level, what patches have been applied and so on. This allows IT to bring applications fully up to the latest version and that patches have been applied where necessary. When combined with a good hardware asset management system, the overall hardware can be interrogated to ensure that it is capable of taking the software upgrades. Where this is not possible, the machine can be upgraded or replaced as necessary, or marked as a special case with the software remaining as is when further software updates are scheduled to run. Good SAM tools should also be able to map the dependencies between software, tracking how a business process will use different applications as it progresses. Again, through the use of suitable rules engines, these dependencies can be

Managing the software assets of an organisation

http://www.quocirca.com

2013 Quocirca Ltd

managed, such that the updating of one application does not cause a whole business process to fail. Also, possible problematic areas can be identified for example where software has a dependency on the use of IE6 and so introduce security loopholes that could be exploited by hackers. For most organisations, the main strength of SAM tools will, however, reside in the capability to manage software licences against agreed contracts. In many cases, this is not just a case of counting licences and comparing them against how many are allowed to be used. The domain expertise built up by vendors such as Flexera and Snow Software means that the nuances of contracts can be used to the best advantage. For example, through identifying all licences that are currently in place and the usage patterns around them, it may be possible to use concurrent licencing rather than per seat licencing. Here, licences can be allocated based on the number of people using an application, rather than on named seats, so bringing down the number of licences required considerably. If this is not an option, then it may be that by bringing all licences under one agreement, rather than several, a point may be reached where a new discount level is hit. For an organisation with, say 1,000 seats and 600 licences under one agreement, and four other contracts for 100 seats each, hitting the 1,000 seats under one contract may optimise the costs considerably, not just on licences but also on maintenance. For international organisations, this can be exceedingly valid bringing licence agreements from several countries together under a single international contract could help save large amounts of money, as well as the time taken in managing the various contracts. When looking at SAM tools, there is one area where Quocirca recommends caution. There is a strong move that has started away from perpetual or yearly licences plus maintenance towards subscriptions, as cloud computing pushes all software vendors to review how they market their products and attempt to maintain revenue streams. In many cases, a perpetual licence will allow a user to continue using the software even if no maintenance is paid from there on. Increasingly, subscription models will include some automated governance of the software if the subscription is not paid, then access to the

software will be automatically blocked. SAM systems will need to be able to look more to the future and advise when subscription renewals are coming up and also to provide end-user selfservice capabilities to gain access to external subscription-based services through agreed corporate policies. Quocirca recommends strongly that an organisation ensures that its SAM partner of choice is already prepared for this and is working continuously to maintain its domain expertise in a manner that allows the organisation to move to a subscription model as and when this makes sense. Indeed, Quocirca expects to see more SAM systems come through in the market which will be able to help an organisation in identifying when this sweet spot is reached, providing helpful information on what options an organisation should be considering to optimise its software asset base. Overall, SAM is greater than the data centre. However, by rationalising client licenses, a better picture of server requirements in the data centre can be built up. Only through a full SAM approach can the data centre be fully optimised for the business. This article first appeared http://www.computerweekly.com on

Managing the software assets of an organisation

http://www.quocirca.com

2013 Quocirca Ltd

About Quocirca
Quocirca is a primary research and analysis company specialising in the business impact of information technology and communications (ITC). With world-wide, native language reach, Quocirca provides in-depth insights into the views of buyers and influencers in large, mid-sized and small organisations. Its analyst team is made up of realworld practitioners with first-hand experience of ITC delivery who continuously research and track the industry and its real usage in the markets. Through researching perceptions, Quocirca uncovers the real hurdles to technology adoption the personal and political aspects of an organisations environment and the pressures of the need for demonstrable business value in any implementation. This capability to uncover and report back on the end-user perceptions in the market enables Quocirca to advise on the realities of technology adoption, not the promises. Quocirca research is always pragmatic, business orientated and conducted in the context of the bigger picture. ITC has the ability to transform businesses and the processes that drive them, but often fails to do so. Quocircas mission is to help organisations improve their success rate in process enablement through better levels of understanding and the adoption of the correct technologies at the correct time. Quocirca has a pro-active primary research programme, regularly surveying users, purchasers and resellers of ITC products and services on emerging, evolving and maturing technologies. Over time, Quocirca has built a picture of long term investment trends, providing invaluable information for the whole of the ITC community. Quocirca works with global and local providers of ITC products and services to help them deliver on the promise that ITC holds for business. Quocircas clients include Oracle, IBM, CA, O2, T-Mobile, HP, Xerox, Ricoh and Symantec, along with other large and medium sized vendors, service providers and more specialist firms.

Full access to all of Quocircas public output (reports, articles, presentations, blogs and videos) can be made at http://www.quocirca.com

Managing the software assets of an organisation

http://www.quocirca.com

2013 Quocirca Ltd

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