My previous post was on Understanding Software Asset Management (SAM) and Software License Management (SLM) where I gave a general overview and talked about the reasons and benefits of SAM and (SLM) practices/tools.
Continuing from there, now I will try to explain how Software Asset Management and Software License Management work together to visualize license and software usage information and can save money for organizations in different scenarios.
Consider that you are working as an IT asset manager in a organization of 15 employees using laptops, desktop or other computing resources. You are responsible for managing and tracking the software assets your organization uses and depends on. At this scale, you can easily purchase, manage and keep software assets compliant. You can identify what software you have, where it’s running, it’s respective usage and any redundancy.
Now on the other hand, take a medium or large organization with more than 500 or 1000 employees and even more. Manually keeping track of enterprise software purchase, licensing and respective usage would be a tedious and challenging work to do. A part- or full-time person might be able to manage the company’s software inventory and licenses to be in control and compliant. But at large scale, for long term, it will be challenging and almost difficult to manually or with tools with limited features to identify what software you have, where it’s running, it’s respective usage and any redundancy. This is where software asset management (SAM) and software license management (SLM) tools help in these growing scales.
Despite the company operations size, a resource is required to keep track of software application purchase, distribution and licensing. It is vital for any company to manage software inventory and licences to keep software assets in compliance and in control.
Coaching a Potential 