Invest in SAM to optimize software license costs, says Gartner
With around 20 percent of the enterprise IT budget being spent on software, Gartner has identified license optimization as a key area in which businesses can make significant savings. Gartner recommends building a framework to continually manage and improve the SAM process - mapping how to take efforts from the discovery of software assets and recording of software licenses through to a strategic approach to vendor management and license analysis.
The report identifies five levels of maturity, from ‘Nonexistent’ to ‘Optimzed’. The stages are not hugely dissimilar to those used by Microsoft in its ‘SAM Optimization Model‘ - although Microsoft refers to four, rather than five stages of maturity.
