By Jeffrey Tefertiller

Hello, this is Jeffrey Tefertiller, I want to take just a moment to talk about Software Asset Management. Some people call it SAM, for short. Software Asset Management is growing in prominence as well as importance throughout many organizations. The function is used, and frankly needed to control risk and cost.

For example, on cost, many studies have shown that a good SAM program can save an organization up to 30% of its software spend. That is a huge, huge savings that requires investment.

What makes SAM more difficult, is that technology is everywhere in an organization. Think about how many types of software your organization has now and trying to control the usage versus the entitlements that you own. Entitlements is just a big word for what licenses do have you paid for that you can use. So, SAM is always looking to strike that balance of paying for what you use and use what you’re paying for. That’s difficult in these large organizations. And software publishers want to keep it that way.

There are audits that go on that make it difficult for software asset managers. These audits try to see if a company is over deployed in a certain publisher. The results of these audits is usually pretty interesting to me, because the software publishers, want you to overpay. Yes, that is what happens. But, they also use the results of that audit, as incentives to push you towards a certain type of products skews, if you will. And as been a trend, in the last five years is the push towards software as a service SaaS).

Let me give you an example. When Microsoft comes in, they do an audit, usually through a third party. They say you owe hundreds and 1000s of dollars. And they say well, you can pay this or will discount it if you promise and sign right here to move these workloads that you now have on premise to our cloud version. It’s real prominent with Microsoft Office moving to 365. They incentivize it through pressure and organizations must be wary that this happens. They must understand their entitlements versus their deployments.

I want to close with some numbers and statistics from Gartner that I find interesting.  Gartner has traditional on premise spend, staying pretty flat with nominal one or 2% growth throughout the year 2025. That growth is probably just growth in business not growth in that area. If you compare it to the cloud, cloud is going up 10 to 20% every year. So, think about that, that line that’s going up at almost 20 degrees on a chart. And so, when you think about this cloud spend going through the roof, it comes back to Software Asset Management, and how do we manage the software publishers and that leaks over to how we do cloud asset management. And the topic is a big one, because organizations can spend millions and millions of dollars on software.

In fact, the average employee has well over $10,000 of software spent on them every year. In some companies that’s close to 50,000, Now do the math in your company. That is a lot of money spent and that’s why investing in a good SAM program can help save.

To learn more about SAM, Click Here.

We reached out to IAITAM, Inc. the other day to find out how SaaS affects SAM and would like to send a big thank you their way for contributing to this article.

SaaS and SAM

Software As A Service affects many aspects of SAM. Before SaaS everything was more physical.  Programs had to be physically installed on our hardware assets (desktops, laptops, etc.) and this required a request, justification, approval, and negotiation before the software could be acquired and installed.  As technology enables us to move away from handling physical assets – just like we no longer use paper money or credit cards as much as we favor PayPal and Apple Pay – installing new software is as simple as a few clicks of the mouse, enabling departments to bypass the typical acquisition process.

How SaaS Makes SAM Even More Important

This ease of access and ability to bypass the acquisition process does not eliminate the need for SAM.  In fact, it further complicates SAM.  The assets are still assets and require management.

SaaS requires ITAM managers and teams to have a good deal of control and understanding of their SAM program because subscriptions need to be renewed and can be negotiated as an auto-renewal and are often easier to forget since the renewal doesn’t require any action or permission to happen.

Because SaaS makes it very easy for employees and departments to find what they need with little help, ITAM teams are often bypassed in ways that they couldn’t be before.  When this happens, it can wreak havoc on the ITAM team and their ability to manage and control asset spend and affect their ability to accurately inventorying the IT assets of the organization.

SAM, HAM & Security

Another significant impact is that when software is virtual, it is accessible to almost everyone. This makes it very easy and tempting for employees to download what they need, especially if it’s free and without having to put in a request for an IT manager.  However, if left unchecked – in no time, the company has no way of pulling together a list of the programs installed on company devices. This is why it’s so important for Software Asset Managers to have solid security restrictions on all desktops, laptops and mobile devices.

Software Asset Management must work more cohesively with Hardware Asset Management (HAM) and Security to restrict the ability to download and install software without the knowledge or approval ITAM.  SAM must be aware of every detail in the fine print of our EULAs and other Subscription Agreements to remain compliant. This requires a stronger SAM team and more robust tools than we’ve had in the past.  Many organizations employ multiple Discovery Tools now, for example.

SAM is More Important Than Ever

In principle, the Acquisition and Vendor Management of SaaS requires the same policies, procedures, and strategies as our traditional IT assets.  There are just different questions to ask the vendor and different considerations to make that are specific to the cloud asset itself.  Ultimately, the ITAM program remains the same, but the need for the Communication and Education KPA has never been greater!

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