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Software Licensing and Asset Management Offers Quick ROI

Featured Article from Software Licensing

Software Licensing and Asset Management Offers Quick ROI

 
June 21, 2016

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  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

Tracking and managing software licenses is a full-time job today, but many companies simply don’t have the resources to devote a full-time worker to the process. Ideally, better management of software licenses could eliminate onerous manual processes and save time and money. It would also allow companies to become more efficient and make the most of their software assets. It’s not always easy to understand where to start. Vendors’ policies may vary wildly, and simply having a database of assets and their terms won’t allow companies to optimize them properly. One of the biggest challenges of managing software licenses is the thousands of product codes, manufacturer IDs, and reseller SKUs, and manually tracking these is a time consuming and potentially expensive process.


In order to better understand their customers, Flexera Software recently directed a question to them: “What business challenges did you experience before adopting FlexNet Manager Suite for Enterprises?" The top two reasons customers turned to Flexera for software asset management and license optimization solution were "tracking, managing, and understanding license entitlements" and "time-consuming manual processes for managing the software estate.” These two choices were selected by 71 percent and 63 percent of respondents, respectively, according to a recent blog post by Flexera’s Eric Feldman.

“These results are understandable,” wrote Feldman. “Tracking license entitlements can be difficult. You need to manage volume licensing agreements from many vendors, all of which have different terms and conditions. There are also OEM licenses that are included with hardware purchases. These are not included in any volume agreement and are not tracked by the software vendors. And exacerbating the issue are the single copy and retail software purchases. These may go through enterprise procurement processes and be tracked, or users may install themselves in which case the entitlement may go unknown.”

Today, all but the smallest companies need help when it comes tracking and managing software assets if their organizations are to get the most out of them. It’s also important to do the job right if companies are to avoid violating the terms of usage of the assets. Feldman noted that the next most frequent reason why customers adopted FlexNet Manager Suite for Enterprises was "cost and risk of expensive software audits.”

“Software audits can be painful! And expensive,” noted Feldman. “I know of a company that had a $6 million liability as a result of an audit from a major software vendor. That is unbudgeted money which would need to be diverted from funding growth initiatives or strategic activities.”

Essentially, while software cost control and reduction are great goals for a software licensing management solution, the end goal of avoiding an audit alone will pay for the solution in a short amount of time.  




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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