Choosing your focus software vendors Software license management is a journey, not a destination. Here are some rules of thumb to help you choose which software vendors to focus on: Start with the vendor you spend the most on — IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are often at the top of the list.
Look at your stakeholders and choose a vendor that leads to direct benefits for them Is a larger project coming up like migrating to a new version or cloud migration? Do you have an upcoming contract renewal with a major vendor?
Are there vendors whose complex licensing metrics or contracts make it especially hard to ensure compliance and create a license overview? Make sure that you define standardized processes and rules for license procurement, and establish standardized processes for storing licenses and license certificates.
Establish an organizational system responsible people and processes that allows you to locate licensing documents and information easily. Next you need to learn what your license metrics are in order to measure the licenses you need. Normalize software titles to make sure you can match a license to them. You might be surprised at what you own vs. Pro-tip: apply product use rights to get the full value of your licenses and save costs.
The fruitful results of your SAM process and data transparency will allow you to use your licenses more efficiently.
With this knowlesge, you can reallocate your available licenses to cover your needs, saving you money on new licenses and reducing audit risk. When contract renewals come up, use your SAM insights to negotiate better agreements for your company. FAQ: How can you measure software license management success? FAQ: How can you ensure clean data? Share article:. Don't miss a post! More interesting articles. Complicating that is the fact that many licenses are also renewed on a regular basis, so tracking that outgoing expense is essential to cash management.
There are a couple of options for keeping track of this information. Tracking software licenses can be done like any other regular expense, by creating a spreadsheet detailing each purchase, its term length, and its next renewal date if that is applicable. This gives you a sortable, at-a-glance list that you can also use to calculate total annual expenses and track payments. As your number of software license purchases grows, though, it can become unwieldy to track all of this manually and update it as policies change.
Another option, one that is likely to become the norm at some point as companies reach a tipping point in the number of software licenses they have to manage and the time they are willing to spend on it, is to invest in automating all your software license management. License Manager is a powerful yet easy-to-use platform which allows organizations to accurately manage software licenses.
The tool provides advanced licensing automation, speeding up day-to-day tasks for software asset managers and ensuring that complicated license metrics are correctly calculated.
This speeds up implementation and means your organization may have no need to deploy another expensive discovery tool. Importing inventory and entitlement data into License Manager is also quick and easy. A Microsoft Licensing Statement MLS can be automatically imported into the tool in seconds, with no need for work in external spreadsheets. License Dashboard has developed a range of out-of-the-box connectors designed to integrate your existing discovery and inventory tools into License Manager.
If you have gaps in coverage, or no inventory tool currently installed, License Manager can provide a range of agent based or agentless discovery solutions for Windows, Unix and Linux platforms. License Manager makes it easy to automatically import software entitlement data, usually with no need for manual work in external spreadsheets.
From the seamless and automatic import of Microsoft Licensing Statements MLS , to the wizard-based entry of individual licenses, License Manager is designed to make the process of building an accurate and reliable license repository as painless as possible.
Likewise, any additional or improved installation granted by grandfathering rights or tech guarantees. License Manager needs just a few minutes to achieve what would take consultants and previous-generation software license management solutions weeks, if not months. License Manager will also automatically categorize your software, giving valuable insight into how you can rationalise your software estate and make further cost savings.
This provides an easy to understand visual of guest host clusters and Datacentre relationships, as well as the impact of any mobility granted and the understanding of any affinity and anti-affinity rules. License Manager enables organisations to correctly license their data center and optimise their license entitlement, whilst ensuring compliance.
License Manager features a comprehensive suite of reporting options that can be shared with authorized users across the network. This completely eliminates the time spent producing lengthy SAM reports. Our unique notifications offer tips and advice on areas where investigation is warranted.
It guides towards anomalies and challenges the data if there are ill advised licensing choices made within the system.
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