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Perplexity AIIn today’s world, data is money. There’s nowhere that’s more true than software, which has become the second largest expense line after people for most modern companies. What people might wonder is where the money is in software data. To be able to answer that we need to look at the two layers of data present in today’s Software Asset Management tools.
The Two Layers of Software Asset Management Data
The first layers contain units from the following: desktops, laptops, servers, users, applications, usage, virtualization, entitlements, product usage rights and much more. This is foundational data. It doesn’t do much on its own, but when you use it the right way you get the second layer of data.
The second layer of data is a combination of two or more units from the first layer: license compliance, security compliance, legal compliance, unused applications, computers under company standard, virtualization of clients and servers and much more. This is where the money is in SAM data. Let’s look at some examples.
Practical Examples of SAM Data in Action
When you combine applications with users/computers, match it against your unique entitlements with product usage right specific algorithms, you get license compliance data. Almost all of the top 20 software vendors are up-staffing their audit departments and/or are pushing them to third party audit firms. Being incompliant in today’s highly virtualized server IT environments can mean a potential initial license fee that is equal to x100 your initial investment.
But being under-licensed is not your only problem. Being over-licensed can make organizations bleed 10-30% more money on their software budget than they actually need to. Either you are perfectly compliant (0 spare licenses, 0 missing licenses) or you are risking/bleeding money through over-licensing. This is where the unused application data becomes relevant. You can read more about unused applications and the importance of good application usage data in our previous blog post about Active vs Total Software Usage.
When you combine computers with data about current OS security updates, anti-virus situation, installed open source products etc., you get security compliance data. The cost for cyber-attacks in 2015 alone was estimated to $400 billion USD, with an average cost of 11 million USD per successful attack. Robust security related data can help to mitigate the risk of cybersecurity incidents, another compelling example of the value of software data.
Having Data and Having Access to Data Are Not the Same
Without data, all you can do guess. “Is my software compliant? Am I using all of my software installations fully? Do I have any potential security breaches?” To eliminate the guesswork, you need quality software data. Getting quality software data requires a few key elements. These are:
Why Access to Data Matters
Many companies know they need better data. This is not a new insight. However, the execution is where things get tricky. This is also where many organizations fail today, not by any fault of their own, but because legacy SAM tools have failed modern users. That’s because the amount of complex, money-saving data your organization has is meaningless if you can’t access it.
One of the hardest challenges for employers today is to find the right people for the right job. When you do find them, you want to get the most out of them, which in most cases is to analyze and act on information relevant to their field. This is the core of the problem with SAM data too. Too many SAM experts today are wasting their precious time on accessing data inside complicated legacy tools that require extensive SQL database knowledge or coding ability. This leaves them with no time to analyze, optimize, act on or share that data. If your experts are drowning in administrative tasks, you’re not utilizing their full potential and the ROI of your software investments goes down, along with the ROI of your legacy SAM tool.
Bad Systems Kill Productivity and Proactivity
So, what is the path out of the problem? One simple thing: User Interfaces/User Experience (UX/UI). When UX/UI are not optimal, important data gets stuck behind a bad user interface, or worse, the mediocre data of a legacy SAM tool is presented in a bad user interface, and it takes SAM professionals too long to realize the data quality itself is poor.
If you ask SAM experts today which tool is best for managing SQL Server licensing, a substantial portion would probably say Excel, which is a user-interface only (all data has to be manually fed into it/exported from other systems). Most SAM experts who use Excel are probably tired of feeding data manually into an expensive SAM-tool, checking which servers have the SQL Server installed, manually mapping the licenses to those servers in a static way inside Excel, and then in the end getting incorrect numbers anyway because their user-interface doesn’t have the intelligence to balance the installation data and entitlement data correctly. This is a major problem for time, money, and productivity. Bad systems kill productivity and proactivity.
Xensam’s Solution to Data Accessibility
At Xensam we believe in providing layers of data that will suite the specific situation and use case. Let’s take our solution for SQL Server licensing as an example. At the first layer, you can simply see whether or not your server estate is complaint on a data center/cluster/host/VM level. A simple Yes or No answer is provided, based on the markets most advanced algorithms.
At the second layer, you can see how it’s licensed, which metric is used, and if the SA or non-SA licenses are used.
At the third layer, you can see everything. How many original cores are on the host? What is the required core count? Is the environment Dynamically Provisioned and therefore either requires Enterprise SA on the host or stacking licenses to cover for the number of virtual machines that exceed the license count on the host? All these critical questions and more are answered.
This is how Xensam believes that you most efficiently present the data: At the first layer, answer the question with a “Yes” or “No”. At the second layer, give the shortest possible answer to answer the question “How?”. At the third layer, let the user analyze the answer to question “How?”.
Why User Experience Matters for Data Accessibility
- Today, data is money. Especially software data, where companies are pouring up to 21% of their budgets. You want your money to work for you.
- For the money spent on software to work for your company and provide ROI, you need to be able to work with your data.
- For you to be able to work with your data, you need to be able to access, act on it and accelerate it throughout the company with ease. UX/UI plays a critical role in making this possible.
That’s the key challenge with all big data, enterprise software today; accessibility. It doesn’t matter what data you have. It matters what data you can access. Xensam’s intuitive interface is simple, easy to use, and makes data available and actionable for IT professionals to act on.