by: Jeff Jones, Flexera Software
Having worked with 100’s of corporations over the last few years, I have noticed something interesting about the software asset management (SAM) space, and specifically the SAM Maturity Model. While much has been written about the SAM Maturity model, I have noticed an interesting trend: vendors, corporations and analysts either discuss “SAM Basics” – usually Inventory and Tracking, or they discuss the “Pot of Gold” at the “end-of-the-rainbow”: Dynamic SAM and/or “Optimisation”.
It is this second area I find most interesting, because this tends to be where you get to the nexus of business value and software. But what I find interesting is almost every software asset management vendor, and every corporate consumer trying to get there, really discuss this level in different terms. There are papers on “Optimising Business Processes” and “Optimising Infrastructure”. And there are long, consultative “Best Practice” approaches to combining SAM, ITIL, ISO 19770-1, and custom methodologies to “Optimise”.
But interestingly enough, not many focus on optimising software usage, as it relates to licensing, and the monetisation of the value of your Application assets. And shouldn’t that be one of the most important factors? Isn’t the use of software applications the only true way to start to measure business value of software? And if you aren’t measuring business value, how can you “optimise” it? The Operations Management and Interfaces category of ISO 19770-1 touches on this, but doesn’t map this back to license entitlements and cost in enough detail to help optimise the software mixture.
Then combine this with the fact that most of the software asset management literature, when it does discuss “Application Usage”, focuses on Desktop software only. Not much focuses on high cost and high value software applications. Things like SAP or Oracle; or very expensive niche applications like Cadence, Synopsis, MATLAB or AutoCAD; or more difficult licensing models like concurrent users or custom corporate-specific metrics. From what I have seen, these typically make up 75% or more of the typical software budget, depending on the industry.
To really complete the software asset management optimisation stage, it seems that we as SAM professionals need to add more detail on Application Usage Management and Enterprise License Optimisation into the process. We at Flexera Software have been doing this for a long time with our customers, but see a need to extend the current SAM Maturity Model and other standards to include the Best Practices around monetisation of business value of application software.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 1:45 pm and is filed under ISO 19770-1.