The relentless transition from on-premise to cloud software continues unabated. Gartner estimates that “by 2021, more than 70% of business users will be substantially provisioned with cloud office applications.”1 driven by the potential for infrastructure and maintenance cost savings and the agility provided by SaaS applications. Along with these benefits, however, comes increased difficulty to track and limit software usage and spend. IaaS and SaaS deployments can quickly lead to unplanned expenditure and cost spikes due to over-provisioning of user accounts, excessive account entitlement and expensive overuse of virtual environments.
In addition, many SaaS deployments are done without IT involvement or knowledge. The percentage of technology spend controlled by business units is expected to grow from 17% today to 50% by 2020, making it even more difficult to control spending.
What does this mean for the CIO and their teams? How can organizations avoid significant overspend and optimize their cloud investments? The first step is to establish visibility of all software usage regardless of who bought it or deployment model. Next, IT needs to identify areas for spend optimization such as subscriptions being paid for and not used and ensuring users are not over entitled when a less expensive version would suffice.
It might be tempting to utilize the administration portals provided by cloud vendors (such as Microsoft). There are a number of issues with this approach. First, these vendor-provided views naturally don’t focus on how to optimize that usage and whether users could be switched to a lower cost plan. Next, these portals rarely provide a consolidated view of on-premises and cloud usage. Lastly, the growth in SaaS applications leaves IT with potentially dozens of separate portals, leaving IT with a splintered view of software usage.
Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions provide the visibility IT leaders need to create a true picture of SaaS application usage across the enterprise. Mature SAM solutions provide full details combining on-premise usage with what users are accessing via the Cloud to give a single pane of glass across multiple deployment platforms. It ensures customers are in control with insight in the SaaS suite use as well as usage.
While SAM has long been recognized as effective at ensuring license compliance and responding to software vendor audits, IT leaders are shifting SAM’s focus to optimizing SaaS application usage to eliminate unnecessary costs. This is reinforced by Gartner’s comment that “by 2020, for 40% of software titles, the fundamental priority of Software Asset Management (SAM) will shift from managing compliance with software publisher terms and conditions to eliminating unnecessary expenditure in "as a service" contracts.” In a SaaS world the importance of SAM doesn’t lessen, in fact it becomes ever more important.
The Cloud is simplifying business processes throughout multiple industries. At the heart of IT operations, SAM technology is well equipped to adapt to the cost management concerns. Everyone wants to pay for what they use, and CIOs are seeing real benefit in qualifying software usage costs with SAM.
Gartner states that intelligence and operations organizations can
reduce their software expenditure by up to 30% in the first 12 months[1]. Rather than being the preserve of a small team hidden away and only called upon when a software vendor audit team arrives, Software Asset Management is at the very heart of IT operations and has an important role to play in helping the CIO achieve its top priorities.
The shift towards cloud-based solutions means that SAM processes will need to become even more finely tuned with the ability to gather data from many different sources. With the pace of digital transformation accelerating, much has been made of the growing responsibility to go beyond IT delivery, and focus on the impact that digital solutions have on the wider business.
SAM is the pulsing heart, ensuring compliance and crucially providing insight into what licenses are being used and from which data source, helping to drive businesses’ all important digital transformation.
