Software Asset Management (SAM) Tools Reviews and Ratings

Mandatory Features:

• Share software asset information: Consume and produce information for use across other organizational functions, systems and processes. A central system of record for IT assets enables the enterprise to manage vendors and software assets throughout their life cycles.

• Conduct discovery: Interrogate networks to find the physical, virtual and cloud platforms upon which software executes. Explore vendor portals, procurement systems and other data sources to obtain software contract and purchase records.

• Capture entitlements: Analyze software contracts, purchases and procurement records to obtain the entitlements for software consumption conferred by a given license agreement.

• Normalize data: Consolidate multiple platform consumption datasets and other data sources to resolve duplicated or conflicting records. Consolidate multiple software entitlement records and other supporting data. This creates a single, accurate, organized and categorized dataset.

• Identify platform consumption: Capture platform-agnostic configuration data and extract a list of all software and software consumption levels. Identifying the software installed on, accessed on or executing upon a platform (as in the case of instance-based software licenses) is foundational to SAM.

• Optimize software entitlements and consumption: Track changes to software license models, and improve and balance software spending by comparing usage to estimated demand for the quantity, type and expense of licenses needed and in use.

• Govern: Allow organizations to properly allocate licenses, proactively identify remediation actions for inaccurate data and noncompliance, and automate workflows to improve process compliance.

• Reconcile: Correlate contract, purchase and entitlement records with normalized platform inventory data. This creates an effective license position (ELP), which is the comparison of recorded license entitlements to actual license consumption. ELP provides a basis for compliance management, risk reduction, audit defense, contract (re)negotiations, license “true-ups” and software spend optimization.