What’s New at Snow Software: November 2023
This month’s new and enhanced product portfolio capabilities cover innovations in the areas of:
- Creating IT asset visibility across the enterprise
- Public cloud visibility and cost optimization
- Working with ITAM partners
Innovation area: Enterprise-wide asset visibility, insights and risk mitigation
New UK Snow Atlas datacenter
In response to public sector customer feedback for data residency in the UK, Snow has invested in an UK datacenter. Snow Atlas customers now have four options to store their technology intelligence data: UK, Netherlands, United States and Australia.
ITAM for end-user computing
Snow ITSM Enhancer: Greater control via extended data in updated ServiceNow apps
Version 4.3 of our certified ServiceNow apps for Snow ITSM Enhancer are now published. In short, ServiceNow tables have been extended to include the following out-of-the-box data:
- Software lifecycle dates: End of life (EOL), end of support (EOS), and end of extended support (EOES)
- Application data: Allowlisting and denylisting
This extra data provides service desk personnel with even more control, helping them to serve their internal stakeholders better by resolving support tickets faster than before.
These two upgraded apps are compatible with the latest ServiceNow Vancouver release:
SaaS management
New ServiceNow connector
We are excited to announce our newest connector to track and monitor ServiceNow, now joining our other 23,000 discovered applications in Snow SaaS Management. Many of Snow’s customers are well-acquainted with ServiceNow, the leading IT Service Management tool and one of the biggest SaaS spend line items for an organization.
The connector identifies stale or inactive users, show related costs and insights to identify potential savings. The connector displays:
- User information (name, email, department, country)
- User activity (user’s last login to ServiceNow)
We will continue to build more capabilities that expand your understanding of usage and licensing across ServiceNow’s modules. Features coming soon include license information (license plans, assigned license plan per user) and insights to optimize your ServiceNow licenses. Additionally, organizations will be able to identify users provisioned with the role of “Approver”, a more expensive license, and identify inactive users and unused licenses to further control costs.
Test drive the ServiceNow connector now by reaching out to your Snow Software account manager.
New SaaS subscription trends
Managers can quickly see charts with the most important KPIs — assignment and activity information for the product family. Within these KPIs, you can dig deeper into purchased or free, unassigned or over-assigned, usage and costs related to subscriptions as well as whether they are active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.
Unique SaaS product family grouping
SaaS Management on Snow Atlas is one of the first to offer this exciting feature that filters related products within a family of applications and subscriptions.
IT/ITAM/Finance/Procurement Managers can:
- Easily query these brand families to understand the usage and optimize costs for the family or sub-applications (e.g. aggregated view of the Microsoft 365 offering that bundles all the applications such as Visio, Project, Microsoft Office, etc.).
- Quickly see charts with application and subscription KPIs such as purchased or free, unassigned or over assigned, usage and costs, active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.
- User-centric filtering shows only relevant provisioned users and respective monthly subscription costs that can be aggregated at the Microsoft family level.
Managers can make faster, better decisions around costs, application rationalization and vendor negotiation.
Datacenter computing
Snow Atlas now verified for Oracle Java SE
Snow is pleased that both Snow Atlas and our on-premises SAM offerings have Oracle Verification for Oracle Databases, Oracle Middleware and Oracle Java SE. This new functionality allows Snow Atlas users to generate a .zip file that contains information about the estates where Oracle databases, middleware and Java products are found. This capability helps users quickly respond to audit requests with confidence of accurate data.
Improved data sharing for Oracle verified data
Responding to customer feedback, Snow has made it easier (in Snow License Manager v9.31.2) to share Oracle data with third parties and now computers with incomplete verified data can be exported in PDF or CSV format with all relevant details included. For Oracle verified data, customers can generate a .zip file.
Innovation area: Snow Labs
Snow Atlas Generative AI Assistant – Snow Copilot
Snow Labs is a multiprong innovation initiative to help organizations make better decisions and deliver positive business outcomes with Technology Intelligence, or the ability to understand and manage all technology data, via Snow Atlas.
One of the first innovations developed under this team is Snow Co-Pilot, an AI assistant that leverages the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. It allows customers to input questions and receive insights on their computer data, such as “How many computers have been installed in the last 90 days?” as well as explore “what if” scenarios all directly within Snow Atlas. Snow Copilot reduces the need to export data into PowerBI or Excel to get insights into advanced questions on forecasting, asset allocation, and trend identification of SAM computer data.
Snow Copilot and other AI innovations will be available for current Snow Atlas customers who enroll in the beta program. Reach out to your Snow Account Manager to become enrolled in the beta program.
What’s next?
We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing. Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.