Curent economic conditions are forcing many IT leaders to take stock of the existing inventory of software and find ways to optimize their usage. Optimization of software assets may be part of larger Tech debt or application rationalization programs which help reduce costs, drive utilization of resources and free of investments for other projects. Software Asset Management (SAM) tools play a vital role in tracking and optimizing software entitlements, reducing, or mitigating audit risks and improving efficiency.
Over the years these tools have matured from just being systems of records to systems of innovation or systems of differentiation. However, businesses no longer use SAM just for recording licenses and entitlement but also for budgeting and reporting, simulations, compliance management, and vendor management.
There is a lot of activity in this space. SAM tools now integrate with other IT financial management tools, ITSM and ESM tools as well. This provides an integrated view of all the assets, their configuration, deployment, usage, support cases logged per asset, time spent on managing and monitoring each asset and overall spend on every asset. Finops tools have grown to include on-prem licenses as well, thus transgressing the thin boundary between software asset management, and SaaS management tools.
Read our latest Software Asset Management Landscape report to know about the main trends, top disruptors, market dynamics, top use cases and the top vendors in this space.
