Organizations increasingly turn their backs on legacy tools to embrace new ways to optimize their SAP licensing
June 24 2015: Snow Software, the leading developer of Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions for both end user organizations and service providers, today reported that more than 25% of organizations choosing its Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software solution in the last 12 months have done so after abandoning a previous SAP license management tool. Organizations that have turned their backs on previous investments include RWE and Heinemann SE & Co KG.
Michael Bloch from the Software Asset Management team at RWE IT GmbH (the IT services group serving one of Europe’s leading energy suppliers) explained the decision to move SAP license optimization over to the Snow platform: “Trying to manage the SAP licenses outside of the SAP management interface proved to be not the best solution. We chose to move to Snow for three main reasons: because the solution resides inside the SAP ABAP interface; it’s the only solution of its type to be SAP-certified and because Snow was able to prove very quickly that it could actually meet our business requirements.”
Burkhard Berner, CIO for Gebr. Heinemann SE & Co. KG (a German-based duty free shop chain that generates $2.6 billion a year in revenues), added: “We migrated four years ago to using SAP software. For a spend of roughly $1.3 million per year, we have 2,650 employees using SAP retail, financial, and logistics apps to operate the company’s stores. We were acutely aware that we could overpay for SAP software if we didn’t carefully monitor our investment. With Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software tracking the usage of SAP apps by employees, we have been able to save tens of thousands of dollars a year.”
Just why Snow Optimizer for SAP Software is proving so popular becomes obvious when looking at recent projects. A Fortune 500 company with more than 200 SAP Systems, 500 clients and more than a quarter of million users had been unable to effectively track how employees were using the SAP software. This had led to excessive purchases of high-cost licenses. Using Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, the administrative overhead related to SAP license management has been reduced by more than 80 percent and the internal chargeback mechanism is vastly more accurate.
Claus Uwe Hodum, General Manager of SAP products at Snow Software added: “Usually you expect organizations to persevere with investments before admitting that they need to be replaced. But as more organizations reach critical milestones within their SAP contracts, or have to enter into negotiations for new agreements, the inadequacies of such legacy solutions are brought into sharp focus and the negotiations result in being more costly and painful than the organization was led to believe.
“Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software is a critical component of Snow’s ‘fourth generation’ Software Asset Management offering, which aims to give customers a common platform for managing software use across all devices, from mobile to desktop, datacenter to the cloud. Already we’ve seen global brands using our solutions to reduce their SAP expenditure by millions of dollars. Combined with low acquisition costs and quick implementation times, that’s a compelling argument in the SAP licensing world.”
Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software is certified by both SAP and KPMG and provides an end-to-end solution for SAP discovery, metering, compliance, optimization, and license retirement and recycling.
For more information, visit www.snowsoftware.com
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About Snow Software
Snow’s Mission is to stop organizations paying too high a price for the software they consume.
To bring transparency and fairness to the licensing of software across the network, Snow provides on-premise and cloudbased Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions that safeguard the US $320 billion spent each year on enterprise software: ensuring organizations realize the full benefit of optimized licensing.
Snow is the largest dedicated developer of SAM solutions, headquartered in Sweden with more than 300 staff across 15 regional locations, three development centers and local support teams in seven territories.