What is the service?
This service supports SAM Professionals and other staff with responsibility for SAM in:
- Establishing or refining and improving corporate strategies and processes to maintain optimal records on software assets and licenses.
- Determining which data and formats for data are most useful for reviewing and maintaining licensing compliance.
Regarding tools, Canyon can:
- Validate asset discovery and tracking tools being used.
- Ensure that staff understand the value and limitations of specific tools being used to track specific software, e.g., use of ILMT for IBM software.
- Make recommendations for future tool use and “spot checking.”
Service can include:
- Working with SAMs to generate a software asset baseline.
- Partnering with SAMS to lead a pro-active licensing review for data management and compliance.
- Recommendations for reviewing licenses based on renewals or changes to corporate IT environment, or on a rolling basis over time.
- Recommendations for bridging communication gaps between the various corporate areas that have some responsibility for compliance, including IT, Operations, Purchasing, Legal, and the user community.
Why is this important?
- The services provided will help your SAM professionals answer two questions that seem very simple:
- Are we in compliance with our software licensing?
- Are there any cost savings we can achieve, e.g., by reducing the number of licenses?
- The discovery of compliance issues, especially during a formal licensing review by the software publisher, can result in extraordinarily costly, unexpected, and unbudgeted findings, including penalties for any period of time in which licensable software was or has been out of compliance. Companies who buy 10K of software per annum from one publisher could result in audit demands for millions.
- Assessing IT needs, making purchasing decisions and developing business cases to achieve cost savings via strategic solutions (e.g. virtualization and migrating to Cloud) require accurate baselines and benchmark data.