Asset Management

As organisations use more and more software applications, it gets harder to avoid wasted spend

Formal approaches such as ITAM and ITIL Asset Management support optimisation through:

Inventory of software installations

Mapping of software licenses to users & roles

Accounting of software license assets

Analysis to identify potential optimisations

Many organisations utilise Software Asset Management (SAM) Tools, which are efficient at optimising the inventory of on-premise software.

47%

of IT budget spent on software licensing

11%

increase in enterprise software spend in 2019

30%

potential to cut enterprise software costs

The SaaS Dilemma and SAM

The ongoing shift to Cloud-delivered Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications makes optimisation even more challenging.

Previously, enterprise software was selected by the IT team in a formal procurement process, and deployed by IT into infrastructure they directly controlled.

Today, focussed SaaS applications can be selected and deployed by departments or teams without involving the IT team, and paid locally from department budgets or via expenses.

The major enterprise vendors have themselves migrated to SaaS delivery, but the ease of SaaS adoption means many more applications in use than ever before, and the IT and Finance teams have much less visibility into what is in use and minimal control.

The result is rapidly increasing uncontrolled spend, multiple overlapping applications performing similar functions across different teams, and abandoned SaaS subscriptions continuing to bill every month. 

SaaS can be hugely beneficial to the organisation, but unless managed carefully it will lead to wasted money and employee confusion.

Even worse, SaaS software is not installed where traditional SAM tools can find it to build inventory and optimise spend.

SAM tools build inventory by examining software installed on the users’ computers. But most SaaS is accessed via a web-browser so it goes unnoticed.

The optimisation problem just got a lot harder and the quality of data you have to work with is greatly reduced.

Do you know all the Cloud applications that have been adopted across your organisation?

The SaaS vendor knows exactly who has signed up, and they will continue to bill each month without fail – but they’re unlikely to tell you which subscriptions are not fully utilised.

SaaS economics encourage a move away from integrated software suites to a large number of individual SaaS apps from many vendors. This makes it much harder to negotiate savings and quickly reduce software spending. 

SaaS is a massive challenge for asset managers and SAM tool vendors.

Without a trustworthy mechanism to find and understand all the SaaS in use, it will be impossible to manage your software assets.

Can your SAM tool identify....

Benefits

Understand why users have adopted specific SaaS – and does it have a business benefit?

Vendors

Do you understand the contractual obligations for hundreds of SaaS EULAs?

Unused

Identify abandoned SaaS subscriptions that are still being paid for.

Automatically build a trusted SaaS Inventory

Discover

New SaaS applications and vendors as they are used.

Understand

How your users really use SaaS through detailed traffic analysis.

Detect

Uncover all your SaaS vendors contracts – not just the ones procurement knows about.

Measure

Understand who is using which SaaS applications, how much – and why.

SaaSGuard Assess

Automatically provide an inventory of SaaS your SAM team can use

Identify

Identify newly introduced SaaS that overlaps with pre-existing applications

Find

SaaS subscriptions that are unused or under-used.

Engage

 Engage with your users to gather feedback on every SaaS application.

Understand

The specific benefit a SaaS app provides to your users 

Automatically extend the reach of your existing SAM Tools

Discover

Build a normalised inventory of all SaaS that your existing SAM Tools cannot discover.

Export

Export discovered SaaS inventory in a format compatible with major SAM tools.

Integrate

Integrate an inventory feed directly into SAM tools using industry standard API.