Key Features to Look For in a Software Asset Management Tool

Investing in a software asset management (SAM) tool requires not only money, but time and expertise. There are plenty of options out there on the market. But that also raises the risk of choosing a solution because of its eye-catching features rather than because it’s the best fit for the organization. Always start with business objectives. Then identify requirements and use cases. Once you’ve established these, you can shortlist software asset management tool features that will help you achieve these goals. When you’re ready to compare vendors, it’s important to evaluate their products based on eight key feature areas.

Eight Key Areas to Evaluate SAM Tool Features

When you’re ready to compare vendors and products, it’s important to evaluate their SAM tool capabilities based on these key areas:

1. Discovery: Capture Accurate Data

Discovery is ostensibly about getting raw data into the software asset management tool. Some solutions take an agent-based approach, which entails installing an agent on every endpoint. That can be challenging in hybrid cloud environments where you don’t have access to cloud servers to do the install. An agentless approach raises different challenges, such as obtaining the root password for every single environment.

But whatever way is your preferred option, you need two things. You need to ensure the right data is coming in, aligned with your data schema. And you need to ensure that cyber risk is suitably managed, otherwise the security team may block the project. That’s especially true of agent-based options. In either scenario, testing may be the only way to decide which type of SAM tool feature is going to work best with your specific network topology.

2. Inventory: Track, Catalog, and Manage Software Assets

If discovery is about getting the raw data into a SAM tool, then inventory management is about the interrogation of each endpoint to identify and catalog each software asset. How the software asset management solution does that depends on its architecture. Your choices will be to invest in a SaaS solution where data is sent straight back to the software tool provider, or an on-premises offering like Flexera Manager Suite (FMS), where a collection of servers will take the inventory data, aggregate it and then send it back out to the tooling vendor.

You’re going to need to understand how this process works, how the tool is architected, and whether that aligns with your IT infrastructure and security posture/risk appetite.

3. Normalization: Turn Raw Data into Actionable Insights

Normalization is a critical software asset management tool capability. It’s the process of taking raw data and turning it into something valuable for each team that needs it: whether it’s for security, sustainability, license management etc. Consider data that indicates the patch level for Windows on a specific machine. That could be critically important for the security team, if it shows that the endpoint hasn’t been patched to remediate a serious zero-day vulnerability.

Each SAM tooling vendor normalizes raw data via a bespoke enrichment catalog. With ServiceNow it’s called the “Content Service,” while Flexera’s is named “IT Visibility.” These tools are going to check against millions of rows of records in the catalog and suggest the best match for the data that’s fed in. So as an IT buyer, you need to ask yourself how accurate this process is, and what kind of coverage the tool has. No SAM solutions will have 100% coverage, so how regularly the enrichment catalog is updated is another important question to consider.

4. Entitlement Management: Efficiently Manage Software Rights

An entitlement is a right to utilize a specific piece of software. So entitlement management is one of the most essential software asset management tool features, helping to create that overarching license balance. It’s about ingesting contract data and purchasing data to understand those permissions based on the terms of license agreements.

The questions you need to think about are how does the tool onboard the crucial contract and entitlement data? Can you enter it in various screens? Can you attach a link to a contract management system? Is it a tight integration which directly and automatically shows when you bought a particular piece of software? Is it granular enough to go down to the individual SKU level? Most ERP systems like Workday, SAP and Oracle will not work to that kind of detail.

A best-in-class managed approach will trump automation any day. But AI could be a disruptor, which is why vendors like ServiceNow and Flexera are looking at leveraging the tech to analyze contract documents and extract relevant entitlement information automatically. It could be a game-changer in time, and worth asking if it may be a key software asset management tool featureon your prospective SAM vendor’s roadmap.  

5. License Management: Optimize Software Usage

License management effectively brings everything together. If entitlement management is about understanding how many licenses your organization owns, then license management tells you what you’re using based on discovery data. Say you have a server with 200 cores. Software license management will take the SKU and run modeling to tell you if you have a sufficient number of licenses. It might even be able to suggest ways to make the licenses you have go further, to reduce the risk of non-compliance and optimize software usage costs.

6. Metering: Track Usage and Ensure Compliance

Metering helps you understand whether all of your licenses are being actively used or not, in order to reduce IT costs, detect unlicensed software and ensure you’re not breaking licensing terms. It does this by monitoring usage—possibly even down to individual keystrokes and mouse clicks. With this information, it may suggest that a user switch from a “Pro” to a standard or free version of a specific piece of software, or vice versa. It could also provide the intelligence data needed to understand which group of users may need access to a specific tool at a specific time of the financial year—helping everything run more efficiently.

7. Lifecycle Management: Streamline SAM Processes

The next question to ask of a prospective SAM tool or vendor is how well all of this functionality integrates internally and with third-party products to streamline the software asset management lifecycle. It should allow you to request, deploy, re-harvest and reassign licenses, and perform background checks to avoid over-purchasing. The question is how automated and easy this is to achieve, and how thorough the integration.  

8. Reporting: Drive Data-Driven Decisions

Finally, consider whether you can achieve the level of software asset management (SAM) reporting to drive the outcomes and value you want within the tool itself? Or would you have to export the data and take action within a specialized third-party tool? Is it easy to view and click through on all of your software licenses? Is it clear and accurate? Can you slice and dice the data to show, for example, your top 10 vendors?

Whether you ask these questions, and how you rate the answers, will depend on your organization. A multinational with 300,000 users is going to have fundamentally different SAM requirements to an SMB with 3,000 employees. Once again, the only way to start is by understanding what these business goals and requirements are.

How Anglepoint Can Help

If you’re struggling with a shortage of SAM expertise in house, you’re not alone. Anglepoint experts are here to do the heavy lifting for you with a customized, vendor-neutral advisory service.  We’ll help you understand what’s out there and recommend only the software asset management tools with features that are the best fit for your business requirements.