Who is SAM? What is he? SAM is Software Asset Management – a framework for managing the life cycle of software.
And now why is he important for all size businesses? In order to fully control your company’s software investment from acquisition, deployment to retirement of Software. SAM is not just software licensing.
While software is conventionally the influence of the technology department, SAM is a company-wide accountability. From the end-user who uses the software to the CEO responsible for ensuring growth tactics include financial support allocations to guarantee users have the tools to do their jobs, every plane of an organization is accountable for and impacted by SAM.
I deem each person recognize the serious risks coupled with being out of compliance with software licensing (and not simply the fines for copyright breach). What is not as well known are the benefits that come from implementing SAM and being appropriately licensed.
The financial rewards for implementing SAM are reliant upon your organization’s software purchasing practices. If your organization makes it a practice to stay fully licensed, then the financial rewards can easily be 15% of your software costs. If your company does not obtain software to be compliant with licensing then it will cost you money, but it could easily be 20-30% less than if you merely attempted to become compliant without an assessment.
The benefits of SAM extend far beyond fiscal savings. Businesses that utilize SAM can understand incredible benefits through enhanced security, quicker rollouts, improved negotiating capabilities, better supported operations, and superior planning and forecasting capabilities — not to mention the comfort of knowing that your company is appropriately licensed on all your software.
The first step to implementing SAM is to complete a SAM assessment to obtain a baseline and a plan for improvements.
A SAM assessment is in general comprised of:
· a review of past purchases to spot the investment made and identify purchasing practice
· an inventory of what is installed on each machine
· a evaluation of existing policies to ensure the organization is shielding itself as well as educating its users appropriately
· a process assessment to categorize the current process and any process improvements
· a gap analysis to find out a baseline between what is owned and what is deployed and
· a purchasing plan taking into consideration the organization’s future planned growth or changes
By and large, there is couple of ways to execute a SAM assessment: in-house or outsourced. An in-house assessment classically completes only the inventory and a portion of the gap analysis. The prime reasons for this partial in-house assessment is lack of time and lack of knowledge. Outsourced solutions will depend upon the outsource partner. If the outsource partner is your re-seller, they will characteristically focus on the inventory, gap analysis and purchasing plan. Nonetheless, businesses need to keep in mind that your re-seller is in the business of selling software. The other option for outsourcing is to use a firm that does not resell software and has an actual SAM practice. Using this type of firm will result in a full assessment being completed.
