Axel Springer impressed the awards committee with their consistent implementation of software asset lifecycle management. The strong growth of digital products in particular made it necessary to optimally plan, manage and control the considerable costs for enterprise software over the entire lifecycle. In this context, it was particularly challenging to create sustainable transparency for the cost-intensive SaaS licenses and thereby realize savings without sacrificing performance.

Axel Springer initially focused on the major SaaS vendors Adobe and Microsoft, running the USU Software Asset Management solution. By using software metering features, it was possible to automatically identify unused software licenses and feed them into a license pool for reuse.

Holger Weber (Head of Contract & Licensemanagement at Axel Springer): “Software metering is active software asset management! However, this is not possible without the support of a fully integrated SAM tool.”

Hannes Nitsche (Software Asset Manager at Axel Springer): “Crucial for a successful software metering project is intensive communication towards the end user based on simple, automated processes.”

"We congratulate our customer Axel Springer on this award. The project is an ideal example of how companies can optimize their SAM processes quickly and flexibly – also with regard to the path to the cloud,” said Olaf Diehl, Director Product Management at USU Software AG.