SAM Tools automates many of the tasks required to maintain compliance with software licenses, thereby controlling software spending. SAM tool manage entitlements from enterprise license agreements, purchases and other records to automatically determine and optimize license position against discovered software. Infrastructure & operations (I&O) leaders use SAM tools for managing software entitlement, in lieu of using spreadsheets, due to rising complexity of software-licensing schemes.
- Software Asset Management (SAM) provides complete visibility of all hardware, software across your entire network, reconciled against your entitlements and contracts.
- This ensures you are have right set of reports/data to support audit compliance as well as helps in automating license optimization, that get the best deal for your organization at the time of contract and renewals and identify future cost savings
- Providing IT and other stakeholders with actual usage reconciled against entitlements establishes a complete compliance position, including an Effective Licensing Position (ELP).
- Useful to identify opportunities to optimize and reduce costs, such as excess licenses accounts, and over-entitled users.
What are the challenges with Software Audit?
- Audit is a time consuming effort and number of cross functional employees that need to be part of the audit makes them expensive.
- Collating the required data and ensuring compliance to purchase licenses is tedious job.
- If regular internal audits are not conducted it may lead to huge unexpected expenses during the vendor audit.
- Availability of resources with required skill to conduct the internal audits regularly will be significant overhead for the concerned departments
- Non-compliance results discovered during internal audits needs to be reviewed and corrected in order to close the audit cycle which increases the total time taken for audit process.
SAM Process
SAM solution helps by giving you a complete view of your software licenses, helps to improve internal processes to lower costs, reduce risk, and improve end user productivity.
Benefits to IT Team
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Assessment of the software usage in the organization
With SAM implementation, the current state of IT infrastructure, discovering the software usage, validating against the purchased licenses helps to assess excess or deficit purchases. - Legal risk reduction
Organization will determine all the minor violations, outline the measures to be taken, introduce new regulations to ensure there are no legal risks with software licensing. - Documentary proof of license purity
Helps organization with the readiness for audit and compliance check by providing required reports that serve as solid proofs for software compliance. - Consulting in the field of IT strategy
Helps organization to arrive at a suitable approach and the strategy for the IT Infrastructure to resolve all technical requirements. This ensures that the Organization gets benefited by the reports from a financial point of view as a reasonable decision is made for all licenses purchased. - Rational use of existing licenses
Software utilization analysis allows to determine the products that are very rarely used by employees, licenses can be deployed on-demand and returned to the common license pool when they are not needed.
Business Benefits
- IT cost transparency
We translate the request of the IT department to the language of business by explaining the destination of IT expenditures to financial directors, and seek a way to decrease them without any negative impact on business processes - Discover what your employees are really doing on their working place
Workstation inventory allows to reveal the number of computer games and torrent clients installed on them. - Transparent IT financing structure
You will discover, which part of IT costs is related to regional development and which is dedicated to headquarters. Therefore, you will be able to determine IT project costs with the highest accuracy. - Opinion on software use reasonability
We will determine whether all software installed on workstations is really necessary for end users and analyze whether it is possible to replace some products with less expensive software with reduced functionality - Project cost calculation
After the primary audit, we will be able to calculate the project cost and assess the economic efficiency from SAM implementation. - Economic security
Legal document analysis is important for increasing the economic security of the company and conducting internal investigations