In Snow’s development team, we put a lot of effort into creating the best reporting engine, making it easy for stakeholders from across the organization to generate management reports and examine detailed information relevant to their role, whether that be compliance, procurement, network management or business operations

Recently I've spent some time with two of our larger UK customers, both with complex IT estates totalling more than 30,000 devices each. In both cases, the organizations had contracted external SAM teams to assist with the process of establishing a baseline and reconciling software usage against entitlement.

According to recent research from IAITAM (the International Association of IT Asset Managers), the number one priority for ITAM in 2014 is to drive down the cost of IT. Hardly new; hardly surprising. But the fact that we see something similar practically every year does suggest that many organizations don’t think they are optimizing their costs.

The costs that arise are nearly always due to the unexpected ‘true up’ organizations incur if they are audited and found to be lacking licenses. In most cases it happens because the user has not understood or tracked their licensing obligations in the first place – a problem compounded by increasing complexity in both licensing terms and IT environments

They say that life is never simple, and that’s never more apt than for those charged with managing an organization’s software assets and licenses. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking the world was conspiring against successful Software Asset Management (SAM) – what with ever-increasing complexity on the network, new and confusing licensing schemes and a greater diversity in software delivery…