Gartner defines SaaS management platforms (SMP) as software tools that aim to help organizations discover, manage, optimize and automate the SaaS application life cycle from one centralized console. Core SMP capabilities include discovery, cost optimization, employee self-service via an application store, insights to increase adoption and automation of onboarding/offboarding activities. As SaaS adoption accelerates, IT leaders struggle to discover and support SaaS-hosted applications in accordance with company, market or geographic policies and regulations. Increased SaaS costs — combined with limited visibility into the entire SaaS portfolio (including unapproved SaaS) and high levels of overdeployed and underconsumed licenses — result in significant financial, operational and cybersecurity risk.
Software asset management (SAM) tools are solutions that provide automation to support tasks required to produce and maintain compliance with independent software vendor (ISV) license use rights, while improving an organization’s ability to proactively identify and optimize software risk and spend. SAM tools provide in-depth software asset analysis through: - Conducting discovery - Analyzing software license entitlements - Automating the collection of software consumption data - Establishing ISV effective license position (ELP) - Governing software assets - Optimizing software value delivery - Sharing information with other tools and stakeholders