Done right, license management can be a source of operational excellence with bottom line benefits. Software license management can also be a significant source of value. And by value, we mean the tangible, measurable kind of value the CFO likes.
Because with organizations looking more and more to IT and enterprise software such as EDI and business integration applications to help them survive against global competition, it's a good bet your plate's going to be overflowing in the months ahead.
Which is why you need to be developing your SAM strategy now, before 2020 arrives with a flood of meeting requests about new issues to deal with.
Reason 1: You Need an Accurate Picture of How Your Organization is Using the Software You Have
For our clients, data and information is the lifeblood of their businesses, with EDI and integration software being the heart that keeps it all flowing.
No matter what types of software you’re responsible for or use in your role, you know how important it is to get all the functionality and value you’re paying for. However, making a business case for investing in upgrades and new software applications in the year ahead is darn near impossible unless you can tell those who control the purse strings:
- Who is using your current software
- How they are using it
- Whether it’s delivering the value for the dollars invested
Properly deployed and managed, tools like the IBM® License Metric Tool (ILMT) give information and insight that let you maximize software investments and optimize performance. Full disclosure, we install lots of IBM software and we’ve seen the value of using ILMT to manage and optimize EDI and integration deployments.
Reason 2: Be Certain You Get What You’re Paying For (and Not Paying for More than You’re Getting)
With a potentially mixed economic picture forming for 2020, especially in the manufacturing and logistics segments, avoiding legal and financial difficulties are just two benefits of diligent software asset management. In addition, SAM insights can help you:
- More easily predict and forecast climbing software costs
- Align acquisitions with business goals
- Budget for new software investments
According to global consulting firm Deloitte, companies who implement a strong SAM program typically see ROI of 5 to 25 percent by identifying instances of either under- or over-entitlements. Which brings us to the next reason to get cracking on your SAM strategy.
Reason 3: Show Added Value for IT
Given that the benefits of software management are easy to quantify, SAM is an ideal vehicle for IT to demonstrate value and justify the effort to support it. Yet by some estimates, only 4.5% of companies are using their software at fully optimized levels.
By allowing you to gather and share data on software utilization, SAM helps create more support for acquisitions that are likely to generate high user engagement and make it easier to identify what applications aren’t pulling their weight.
Reason 4: Mitigate Security Risk
When you execute a SAM strategy, your network becomes less vulnerable to threats. That’s because by ensuring your software is properly configured with respect to access privileges and user verification, you also help prevent network breaches, viruses, conflicts, and the potential for malware to be released.
Reason 5: Compliance Peace of Mind
No software vendor wants to ding customers with non-compliance fees and no customer wants to be blindsided. However, as companies increase their reliance on cloud-hosted applications, you should expect software audits to increase.
Fortunately, in our experience the right SAM strategy and tools like IBM’s ILMT can do several things, all of them good:
- Help you avoid audit penalties
- Save you 100s of man hours in prep time and data-gathering via ILMT-triggered automated monitoring and quarterly reporting
- Identify instances of under-utilization where license fees can be lowered at renewal points
Lower licensing costs via smart strategies like sub-capacity licensing - Streamline and simplify the tasks of managing growing list of software applications and licensing rights
Questions about the best way to identify and turn your potential software licensing gaps or under-utilization instances into bottom line savings? REMEDI offers more than two decades of helping clients extract the most value from their EDI and integration software.
Feel free to reach out to schedule a free one-on-one, 30-minute session to review your integration strategy, including the must-have elements of a SAM plan.
