Snow Software eases management of Adobe & Autodesk licensing

Stockholm, Sweden- October 13, 2013- Snow Software, the leading developer of Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions, has enhanced its award-winning Snow License Manager solution to help organizations better manage their Adobe and Autodesk software licensing.  The latest developments from Snow will enable organizations to both minimize compliance risks and optimize cost savings through the accurate differentiation between full and trial Adobe software versions, plus the identification of software licensed through the Creative Cloud scheme.  Autodesk users will benefit from the ability to automatically read the serial number applied to individual installs, which will help them better manage network and standalone licenses.

While discovering Adobe software installed on PCs across the enterprise is relatively straightforward, organizations have for year struggled with identifying the commercially-licensable packages associated with the installed files. This has led to compliance and cost management issues as organizations have resorted to guesswork to estimate their license liability.

The enhancements to Snow License Manager remove this guesswork by accurately determining whether installed software instances are trial or full versions – avoiding the perceived need to license all Adobe installs, regardless of status.  

Adobe’s launch of its Creative Cloud licensing model earlier this year has also created challenges for SAM managers, as they struggle to assign and track the new licenses against installs on the network.  This challenge is made harder still by the fact that Creative Cloud licensed applications are still installed on the target device, just like the older on-premise licensed applications.  The Snow enhancements simplify the process of managing Creative Cloud installs by differentiating between Adobe applications installed using on-premise media versus those installed from the Creative Cloud.

Snow Software CTO, Peter Bjorkman, explained why the enhancements to the Autodesk recognition are important: “Autodesk customers generally either have network or standalone licenses.  Standalone installs must be reconciled by taking the serial number of the install and checking it against invoices from the vendor – historically a slow manual task.  Snow can now automate this task – and at the same time make it easier for organizations to decide whether standalone or network licensing is the most cost-effective option for them.  Where the customer organization has network licenses but is not using its full entitlement, Snow can highlight this and enable them to amend their license agreement with Autodesk.”

The Adobe and Autodesk software recognition enhancements, plus support for the latest Microsoft Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 platforms, is available in the new 3.6 version of Snow’s Windows Client.  The latest agent is available to existing Snow users with an appropriate support contract at no extra cost. Customers should contact Snow technical support for assistance with upgrading their client agents.

For more details, download the Release Notes on www.snowsoftware.com/download