• Traditional SAM tools help discover and manage the use of perpetual software licenses for publishers like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle across on-premises infrastructure and cloud platforms.
• SAM tools for SAP natively support license management for ECC and S/4HANA codes, engine metrics and digital access.
• SAM tools for engineering and specialty software measure usage across multiple license managers, identify waste and establish policies to ultimately optimize software spend.
• SAM tools for SaaS utilize multiple methods to discover SaaS applications, provide usage data, reconcile the data with entitlements and optimize SaaS spend.

USU Software Asset Management is one of a few SAM tool providers to cover all categories.

Key findings from the report

In times of economic uncertainties and skills shortage, companies are proactively searching for efficient ways to reduce waste from their IT spend.

Siloed functions and SAM tools delivering partial information hinder achieving cost governance, putting SAM teams and their tools at risk of being sidelined.

Organizations that see SAM tools as a “silver bullet” don’t truly understand the complexity of SAM as a combination of tooling, highly skilled resources, and effective processes.

According to Gartner, organizations that “merge SAM and FinOps into a central governance function will report 60% less financial waste from software and cloud investments by 2026”.

Olaf Diehl, Director of Product Management at USU, comments: “I believe in a future where a Software Asset Management system provides not just IT transparency, compliance, or cost savings. It will deliver enhanced decision support based on AI-driven, high-quality data to help organizations with targeted investments. Moreover, these decisions can be automated to optimize processes and increase the overall value for the company”.

The Gartner report “Market Guide for Software Asset Management Tools,” published on October 3rd, 2023, by analysts Jaswant Kalay, Ciaran Hudson, and Yolanda Harris, is available at www.usu.com.

USU will present their service and solution portfolio for Software Asset Management, among other things, at the international professional conference The Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™ from November 6-9 in Barcelona.

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