Software License Optimization

Webinar: Lifting the Lid on SAP Licensing

By John Emmitt

Optimizing your SAP licenses to ensure that you are buying what you need, based on actual usage, can be a challenge. SAP has also jumped into the top 10 list of major vendors that are performing more software license audits, so organizations need to do more to maintain SAP license compliance.

Join David Blake of UpperEdge and Chris Hughes of Flexera Software for a Webinar on SAP license management. SAP uses a combination of user based licensing and engine (or package) licensing for its products. David and Chris will discuss strategies for gaining control of your SAP licensing to optimize costs, maintain compliance and better forecast future needs for SAP software.

Date: Tuesday, 26th June, 2012
Time: 10:00 am CT (GMT -6:00)

Attend this Webinar to learn about:

• Managing the complexity of SAP User Based Licensing
• Identifying duplicate users, user data validation and cleansing
• Automating the process of selecting the optimal license type for each SAP user
• SAP Package (aka Engine) licensing and collection of package measurements
• Issues with indirect access and SAP license compliance
• Forecasting future needs for SAP software

Register Here

 

 

 

The Strategic Importance of Software License Optimization

By John Lipsey

Why has enterprise license optimization risen to such strategic importance within the enterprise?  Because organizations have finally realized that an ad hoc approach to software asset management is insufficient to ensure that they are buying only what they need, using what they have, and staying in compliance with their software license agreements.  Last month, Flexera Software won the SIIA CODiE Award for best asset management solution.  David Znidarsic, Flexera Software’s Vice President of Technology, was there to accept the award.

In this video produced by the SIIA, David discusses the organizational pain points that underscore the need for sophisticated software license optimization solutions, including:

• The complexity of software license agreements, license metrics and product use rights
• The multiple users and touch points of that software within the organization making software license compliance more difficult to achieve
• And the growing complexity of the IT environment – from desktop to datacenter – due to new technologies like virtualization and the cloud.

David also discusses why traditional software asset management solutions that provide ‘point-in-time’ software inventory capabilities are insufficient to help organizations minimize software spend and reduce software audit true up costs due to noncompliant use.  David explains that without the ability to track application usage and minimize license consumption by applying license entitlements-- product use rights provided by the license agreements, achieving a truly optimized license position is impossible.  And this task grows exponentially more complicated in virtualized environments.  License optimization is where FlexNet Manager Suite for Enterprises differentiates from the other solutions on the marketplace, and is the “secret sauce” that led to our winning the CODiE award.

Notes from SAM Summit 2012—Top 10 Steps to Software Asset Management

By John Emmitt

This is the second installment of my blog series on the SAM Summit event in Chicago. On Tuesday, I attended a session on The Top 10 Steps to Improve SAM by Adam Cahn and Martin Latz of Deloitte. They started off with a brief discussion on the benefits of a Software Asset Management (SAM) program:

• Cost optimization (software licenses and maintenance)
• Asset visibility and control
• Governance – SOX, SOX II, etc.
• Risk reduction – legal liability and audit risk
• Improved security

Next they introduced a 3-phased approach to implementing a software asset management program: Phase 1—understand what you have

Phase 2—benchmark your program and measure maturity

Phase 3—dynamic software asset management

Their 10 steps to improve SAM were distributed across these 3 phases. Here are the 10 steps:

1. Create a centralized entitlement, license and contract repository
   • Highlight any special terms and conditions of your contracts.
2. Perform a vendor risk assessment based on:
   • Business dependency on the software
   • Audit risk
   • Software spend/cost per instance
3. Perform internal audits
4. Define your SAM strategy
   1. Where is the SAM team in the organization—under the CIO or the CFO?
5. Establish a SAM team
6. Monitor hardware asset changes
   • If you do a hardware upgrade, make sure the software vendor approves the simultaneous use of both legacy and new systems during the transition period.
7. Integrate SAM risks with change management
8. Assess impact of emerging technologies
   • License management implications of the Cloud
   • Virtualization—they said that companies that monitor their virtual environments are seen as twice as likely to be in license compliance
9. Selection of a discovery tool

   • Maximize the potential of one wide-ranging tool, while benefitting from some of the free vendor tools (e.g. ILMT)

10. Employee training

    • Meet with others in the organization to educate them on what the SAM team does and how it benefits the organization

The only thing that really surprised me in this session was the mention only of discovery tools as discussed on step 9. Discovery and inventory tools are obviously important—you need to know what’s out there in your IT environment, but this really represents only the most basic first step in the SAM and license optimization process. There are tools on the market today that go well beyond discovery and inventory to bringing in purchase order data (basic license entitlements) and streamline the purchased versus installed license reconciliation process—required to understand your license position and maintain license compliance.

Enterprise License Optimization tools go a step or two further and consider vendor specific product use rights to reduce license consumption and calculate an optimized license position. So, to only suggest a discovery tool is akin to recommending that a house builder go out and buy a hammer, rather than getting a sliding compound miter saw with laser guidance. Yes, you need the hammer, but you could definitely use some more advanced tools to make the job a whole lot easier and vastly reducing your time to value—whether that be a finished house or ‘dynamic SAM’.

This too was a very informative session. Hopefully this article has helped convey some of the insights gained by those who attended.

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Readers may also be interested in the Forrester Research report on Software License Optimization to learn more about going beyond traditional software asset management (SAM).

Bringing Software License Management Under Control

By Vincent Brasseur

The primary business goals of software license management and optimization are to prevent costly software vendor audits and avoid over licensing (over spending) situations. Tools on the market are available to process inventory data and reconcile it with purchasing and contracts in order to calculate your vendor license position. Regardless of the tool used, achieving these goals always involves, at first, spending time and dedicating resources that in some cases could be significant. Once this initial effort has been completed, the tool monitors the license positions on a regular basis to ensure compliance and alert operators of any deviation. The problem here is software asset managers are waiting for non-compliance issues to happen in order to fix them; but ideally, license compliance issues should be prevented rather than remediated. Best practice processes and tools exist in this area to help organizations; some of the most important ones applicable to desktops and user devices are described below.

The first best practice is to centralize all purchases related to software products. Problems always arise when end users or business units purchase their own licenses. There is a high risk of losing track of the entitlement (proof of license) as purchases, for instance, can be made with a credit card and reported in an expense report. These software purchases may eliminate the benefit of having an existing enterprise agreement between the vendor and the organization. They may not follow the company standard in terms of maintenance and support: for example, full package products do not have the same product use rights as products purchased through a volume agreement. Finally, end users or business units may not purchase the software products recommended by the organization.

Another best practice that could be impacted by a decentralized procurement process is the standardization of software products within the organization. If purchases orders are not centralized, multiple products may co-exist within the organization fulfilling similar functions; this impacts compatibility between applications, security as some old software product versions can bring malware and viruses and increases the workload for the service desk. It also adds work for software asset managers, as more software titles and agreements must be monitored for license compliance.

Another important step is to prevent rogue installation of software products. Unless computers are locked down, this will likely always occur. One way to minimize this is to offer end users an on-demand software request tool. Enterprise application store tools usually provide an iTunes-like user interface to end users, allow request approval by management and automated delivery of the software products through integration with configuration management or software distribution tools. App stores contribute to the standardization of software products used by the company as the choices presented to the end users are limited to products recommended by the organization. They help identifying rogue installations by comparing actual software product installations and requests. They enforce proper licensing through connection to the software asset management and license optimization tool; each time a request is submitted, the availability of a license in the pool can be checked, and if available, the license can be allocated. Obviously, flexibility is important here as not all licenses have the same rules; some licenses are trued-up on a regular basis (e.g. an annual true-up event such as for Microsoft Enterprise Agreements) when othermay be s purchased as soon as requested. If computers are locked down, there are still many benefits to using an app store as they provide a very efficient way to fulfill user requests and are able to dynamically update the license management repository.

Retirement of computers is another process that should be considered, as it impacts license management. When a computer is retired, the hard disk is wiped clean and the equipment disposed. At this point, the device should be removed from the inventory in the asset management repository to free-up all non-OEM licenses, making them available for re-assignment. If this hardware asset retirement and license recycling process does not exist, the inventory tool may keep reporting inaccurate inventory until a timeout, usually three months, is reached. During this period of time, all licenses attached to the device will be unavailable for re-assignment. As organizations retire on average 25 to 33% of all devices every year, the cost associated with a lack of that step in a hardware retirement process can be significant.

There are many other processes that can be used to prevent license compliance issues and avoid over spending on software licenses in the desktop world. For instance, metering application usage and uninstalling unused software products will free up licenses for other devices or users—this is sometimes called license re-harvesting. License management should not be limited to passively monitoring non-compliance issues. It should always be integrated within organizational processes to provide up to date and accurate data. Tools such as enterprise application stores should be deployed to help manage and control licenses. With these processes and tools in place, license managers will be pro-actively monitoring their licenses rather than waiting for a disaster to happen and trying to remediate issues.

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To learn more about software asset management (SAM) best practices, please read our white paper: NCC Guideline for IT Management: Software Asset and License Management Best Practices

Notes from SAM Summit 2012—Microsoft License Reviews

By John Emmitt

Flexera Software was a vendor sponsor of the SAM Summit event last week in Chicago. The event was well attended and had many informative sessions on software asset management, from case studies to vendor and customer panel sessions.  My goal is to provide a series of blogs on session content and lessons learned at the event. It would have been great if I could have done this closer to “real time”, but you know how that goes.

On Tuesday, I attended a session on Mastering a Microsoft Review: Insider Tips for Success by Tres Larsen of KPMG. Microsoft is, of course, one of the top 10 software vendors that perform the most license reviews of customers to ensure software license compliance and drive revenue from true-ups. During a license review, it’s important to collect all of your software license entitlements, also known as “proof of license”. As Tres noted, the gold standard for proof of license is your (paid) invoice. Another good source of entitlement information would be your software purchase orders—if these have stock keeping units (SKU numbers) for each of the line items, then next generation software asset management (SAM) tools can automatically process the PO data and determine your license entitlements. Microsoft SKU numbers define exactly what has been purchased—e.g. Microsoft Office Professional, and how it was purchased—e.g. under an Enterprise Agreement (EA).

In cases where the organization has been involved in merger and acquisition activities, transfer of license documents provide important information on license entitlements that may have been obtained as a result of that transaction. Enterprises also need to track OEM and retail licenses; Microsoft doesn’t track these, so it’s up to you to keep track of these and make sure you get credit for all of your purchases and entitlements. For example, if you bought laptops from Dell, they will have OEM licenses for the Windows operating system and possibly other software pre-installed on the machine.

Tres also discussed the need to understand product use rights for Microsoft software. His first example for this had to do with dedicated training facilities—Microsoft, in some cases, provides complementary licenses for training. But the auditors, such as KPMG, won’t know what machines are in that training facility unless your IT asset management systems are able to keep track of that sort of thing and report it. Software asset management and license optimization tools can be used to track the role of the machine (training, production, test, backup/failover, etc.), to make sure that your organization can take advantage of free training licenses.

Similarly, under the Microsoft Select (or Select Plus) agreement, you may have the right of second use (aka portable use), whereby you are entitled to have the software installed on both a desktop and a laptop assigned to the same primary user. Once again, the auditors won’t necessarily know which portable devices are assigned to which users and may not take this right into account, leading to a possible (apparent) under-licensed situation. Your software asset management and license optimization system should keep track of which devices are assigned to which users and apply the second use right (and potentially other use rights), as appropriate, to avoid this problem.

A number of other examples of product use rights were briefly discussed, including MSDN licenses, unlimited virtual use rights for SQL Server 2012 Enterprise edition, and passive failover rights in SQL Server clusters. Tres mentioned that SQL server is the most common out of compliance Microsoft product. For SQL Server running in a virtual environment, he recommended that organizations create a SQL virtual cluster licensed for unlimited virtual machines (VMs) to avoid any risk of being under-licensed.

Other recommendations included:

• License virtual environments with Windows Server Datacenter Edition, which allows an unlimited number of VMs running Windows Server. The cost difference between Datacenter edition and Enterprise edition is not that great.
• Split the license review into specific product families—Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, etc., and assign specific personnel to be responsible for each area.
• Consider hiring an outside consultant to help you with the license review; KPMG has found that about 1 in 10 companies do this.

All-in-all it was a very informative session. Hopefully this has helped convey some of the insights gained by those who attended.

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To learn more about Strategies for Optimized License Management, including understanding and applying product use rights please view our on-demand webinar.