An introduction to Software Asset Management!

This Blog provides an overview of Software Asset Management Professional for ServiceNow.

 Software Asset Management Professional provides visibility and control of software licenses throughout their lifecycle. With SAM Pro, it’s important to know: What software do you own Are you buying what you need? And are you using what you have?

 SAM Pro helps us answer these questions so that software assets can be efficiently managed throughout their lifecycle. Dashboards show you important information to help you manage your software licenses and processes such as true-up costs, software spend, and more.

 The Software Asset Analytics dashboard allows you to view true-up costs publishers and products that are out of compliance and potential savings if removal candidates are reclaimed. Clicking on True-Up Costs allows you to drill down to publishers and products that are out of compliance.

 We can also access these from the License Workbench which allows you to view the compliance status on various publishers’ products that you have installed or subscribe to selecting any of the publisher cards allows you to view all their product as well as their compliance status. Here we see two different products from the same publisher. One is in compliance while the other isn’t. Drilling down into them provides a view of additional points of information.

 

 License Metrics shows the rights owned for a product, versus the rights consumed to license that software. In this case, since the consumed rights are greater than the rights owned...

 the license for this software is not compliant.

 Remediation options provide various ways to remediate or correct your non-compliant software.

 Unlicensed installs show users who are using the software without a license.

 And removal candidates list users that may not be actively using the software or who may not be using it all such as employees who are no longer with the company.

 

 Games are a common example of software that might be blacklisted SAM Pro automatically initiates the workflow to remove the blacklisted software without the software asset management’s intervention.

 Another SAM Pro feature is publisher packs which exist for several large software publishers like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, VMWare, Citrix, and SAP.

 Sam Pro gives you visibility to your Microsoft products that are out of compliance and the top products which contribute to your Microsoft True-up cost.

 As Microsoft products go out of support, Sam Pro shows you your risk exposure and helps you make plans to mitigate your risk. For Oracle, you can use the dashboard to get visibility to the Oracle database products you are running. the database server options that you have installed and their usage.

 

 SAM Pro saves you time and money by giving you visibility into your compliance and helping you track over-spending and under-used software titles.

 With the VM Ware publisher pack, you can keep track of your deployments across various territories and entities that may have an impact on your compliance position.

 With the Citrix Publisher Pack, you’ll have visibility to your license compliance for Citrix Published Apps and Published Desktops.

 SAM Pro supports both concurrent licensing as well as user-device licensing publishing you comprehensive support for your Citrix software.

 The SAP Publisher PackSAM Pro gives you visibility into your compliance position for your SAP Named User Type Licenses.

 You’ll be able to see how many users are performing functions directly in SAP or indirectly via other applications.

 You can also optimize licenses and reduce costs with recommendations on optimal Named User Type license assignments based on the roles your users perform in SAP.

 SAM Pro also offers an extensive software content library to recognize your software and normalize it.

 And it includes software lifecycle information, software suite definitions, and use rights.

 SAM Managers can easily see all the “un-managed” software, that is currently not being tracked with SAM Pro within SAM Pro, helping prioritize the publishers and products to bring into the SAM discipline. Department, Cost Center, and Location data can also be analyzed so SAM teams know who to speak with about the software purchases being made.

 Additionally, this capability classifies your software apps detected by using over fifteen hundred software categories. giving you insight on overlapping software in your SaaS landscape.

 By exploring opportunities for license spend optimization by consolidating overlapping software.SAM Pro can play a more proactive role in driving the enterprise’s application strategy.

 SAM Pro also works to integrate with other products on the ServiceNow platform, such as ITSM, HR, ITBM, and security operations.

This allows you to work seamlessly with other products and departments which accelerates time to value for your business. With all these features, Software Asset Management Professional serves as an IT solution that reduces compliance risk optimizes license utilization, and helps to reduce software spending as well as bridging the gap between other departments and products within your organization.