Software Asset Management (SAM) Blog

With the UK Software Management and Licensing event on the 12th May drawing closer, the Software Industry Research Board (SIRB) comprising leading software vendors and SAM specialists has announced a special incentive. Anyone registering for the Commercial track within the event will receive a free place for a Technical colleague (and vice versa). So, for just £295, organizations interested in SAM can send two staff to learn more about both the commercial / management side of SAM as well as the technical implementation.

For more information, visit http://www.fastiis.org/SIRBevent/

Depending on your point of view, the Business Software Alliance’s recent likening of illegal software users to the increasingly-active Somali pirates has either earned the watchdog a lot of valuable column inches or seriously affected their credibility in the market.

It was perhaps inevitable that the comparison was going to attracts accusations of bad taste (or simple downright over-exageration) from the media, including the UK’s national newspaper, The Guardian and IT gossip site, The Register.

But it raises a fundamental question - what is the best way to describe the illegal use (some would call it theft, some not) of digital materials?

In the context of software licensing, compliance and - in its broader sense - Software Asset Management (SAM), the main cause of illegal use (within organizations, at least) is not so much a conscious decision to deliberately ‘pirate’ software applications so much as a systematic failure to manage software properly.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Network reportedly prefers terms such as “unauthorized copying” or “prohibited copying” - and while these are undoubtedly accurate, they lack the impact of “piracy”. Stephen Dubner, author of Freakonomics, prefers “Dobbery” as an abbreviation for digital robbery.

Despite the inability to agree on a single term, or even the criticism levelled at the BSA for its attempts to equate digital piracy with recent events off the African Horn, the fact is that software vendors are still losing huge sums of legitimate revenue because organizations are not paying for all the software they use.

For as long as that is happening, there will be piracy / dobbery / prohibited copying / unauthorized copying [choose your own favorite!] to be clamped-down on by the vendors and watchdogs.

Of course, the aternate view on things is to lift the argument away from purely looking at under-licensing and start to focus on the positives that SAM can deliver to organizations… Research conducted in the UK last year found that organizations were, in fact, over-spending on purchasing and maintaining software by an average of 20 percent.

Maybe the way to get executives serious about managing their software investments is not to accuse them of being ‘pirates’ but instead ‘money wasters’?

It’s a commonly-held view that 70-80 percent of IT projects fail - that’s to say they either fall apart completely or, at best, miss key deadlines and go over-budget. The bad news is that it’s no different for Software Asset Management, unless you get the basics right.

Like all IT projects, a critical factor to ensuring success is to have a comprehensive and reliable project plan. And while ‘generalist’ IT project planning principles are still just as relevant to SAM, the simple fact is that the majority of organizations are relatively new to the concept of SAM and therefore don’t have much in the way of experience or expertise to call on (another key factor in determining IT project success or failure).

Traditionally, organizations in this situation would have turned to the services of an external consultant - either a SAM specialist, or someone from their preferred licensing provider. However, with IT budgets at best static (or perhaps more realistically, in decline) this option may not be as viable as it once was. At least, it is probably preferrable to look for a way to minimize the amount of time and money spent on expensive consultants.

Thankfully, there are a limited number of tools available on the market designed to help organizations with little or no prior SAM experience to scope and ‘own’ their SAM initiative - guiding them through each step of the five-stage cycle of SAM - Scope, Discover, Record, Reconcile, Automate.

Working with the right tools, managing the SAM project becomes an interactive process, where progress can be visually tracked and key requirements are flagged to key stakeholders across the team. What’s more, even if the individuals are not familiar with standards like ISO 19770-1 or the Microsoft SAM Optimization Model, these are built-in to the project - ensuring that, while industry standards might not be the initial business driver, any effort put in to SAM will deliver benefits in both the short and long term.

Building the right plan is the key to overcoming one of the most dangerous misconceptions about SAM - that it is primarily a techological challenge. In fact, effective SAM needs three things - people, processes and technology.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll look at each of these five stages and how even organizations with no prior experience can create and manage a SAM project that will deliver real benefit to the organization (and by benefit, we’re talking bottom-line financial savings…).

Gartner has identified Software Asset Management (SAM) as critical to helping IT organizations survive the current economic troubles. Alongside VOIP, virtualization, security managed services and data center hosting, the analyst firm highlighed SAM as critical to getting IT leaders to think more like CFOs, looking to address areas of inefficiency as well as investing in new technologies to drive savings.

It certainly seems that SAM fits the bill: aiding organizations to realize savings through better use of existing assets, preventing uneccessary spending on duplicate software, reducing the cost of support and maintenance agreements and avoiding the risk of costly compliance fines.

But to be truly effective, SAM requires IT and finance teams to collaborate closely. And this will be the subject of a more ind-depth post shortly.