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Flexera Software Upgrades Software License Optimization Solution

By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor

Flexera Software’s Application Usage Management platform for application producers and enterprises consists of Software License Optimization solutions for Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle (News - Alert), Symantec and 20,000 engineering applications.

The company recently announced a significant upgrade to its FlexNet Manager for SAP solution, offering unparalleled performance, agentless usage collection and user-defined optimization rules to deliver a next generation SAP (News - Alert) Software License Optimization solution.

FlexNet Manager for SAP is part of FlexNet Manager Suite for Enterprises. The software licensing optimization solutions automate entitlement-based license management to reduce software license, maintenance and audit costs, while maintaining license compliance.

The announcement is timely as there is significant uptake for SAP. In 2011 SAP was the fourth largest packaged software company with software revenues exceeding $15 billion and the fastest growing of the big five vendors, with a 16.5 percent growth rate in 2011 over 2010, according to IDC (News - Alert).

The latest release provides additional refinements to SAP license optimization, giving the ability to create and simulate user defined rules through an intuitive rules editor. With these, organizations can also predict the cost impact of contemplated changes to the SAP license estate by performing simulations for "what-if," best case, and worst case licensing scenarios.

SAP software licensing is based on user roles, such as professional, limited professional, developer, and employee self-service. Optimizing an SAP license estate requires accurate insight into how each employee uses the system to ensure that the least expense license type is assigned to each user.

The company claims that FlexNet Manger for SAP is the only solution capable of combining multiple license optimization strategies to provide recommendations to SAP administrators, enabling them to achieve an optimized license position. It captures usage data from SAP systems and conducts automated, rule-based simulations that analyze employees' actual usage to determine the lowest cost SAP license type for each user. 

"The sophisticated analysis and reports provided by FlexNet Manager for SAP are unparalleled, empowering administrators to understand at a granular level how employees are using the system, along with key recommendations that, if implemented, can significantly reduce license spend," said Alan Swahn, vice president of Product Management at Flexera Software, in a statement.

"By instituting those recommendations SAP administrators will eliminate excessive costs due to miscategorized users and unused licenses," Swahn added.

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