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Excellence in Software Asset Management

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 17:59:28 Z

Many, many years ago I briefly taught in an undergraduate chemistry laboratory (mainly marking scripts and samples, as well as extinguishing the occasional fire). I noticed that although students could achieve a reasonable grade by just following the text they were given and answering, “it turned blue” (or whatever), the really good students who got the best results took the time to understand how and why it turned blue. They could report not just on what was happening, but on what was driving the change. They came to understand what differences apparently small changes in their actions would have. These students excelled.

The same is true when it comes to using Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence. You can get results just by looking at the pretty charts that are provided, but you can get much better results if you put in a bit of effort to understand what you are being shown. Then you will excel in managing software spend and optimizing your software estate.

While software asset management can be complicated, at Ivanti we make the case that it doesn’t have to be. Some organizations have an entire department of highly skilled people looking after their software assets, whereas others have only one over-worked individual who is feeling a little bit daunted and is desperately trying to keep on top of things while also dealing with their real job. They probably wish they’d not walked past the boss’s office at the precise moment that the cost of software licenses was being considered.

We offer a different approach. Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence gives you the tools you need to get on top of your software asset management challenges and to save your organization money. You don’t have to determine your Effective License Position, with the immense effort that entails, to reap great benefits from software asset management. Just let Ivanti Neurons discover your software estate, then create a connector to your SaaS SSO, and import your license transaction spreadsheets to open up a treasure trove of information that can revolutionize your understanding of your IT estate.

And here’s where the comparison to the chemistry students comes in. You can get a lot of basic information from just taking a quick look at the pretty charts, which puts you on a par with the students who could report back that “it turned blue.” But by spending some time understanding what Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence is doing and why it is doing it, you’ll begin to see the underlying drivers of change, and get a better understanding of how small changes can make a big difference. Like my students who excelled in chemistry, you can excel in managing your software estate.

To support you in your journey to excellence, we provide not only a powerful and intuitive set of tools via Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence, but we’re also committed to providing a range of learning materials to help you to excel. Check out this new series of step-by-step learning videos, covering a range of topics designed to sharpen your expertise in managing your software assets and hone your understanding of their impact on the business.

Plus we provide additional help to get you deeper into the why as well as the how, along with formal learning and certification resources to provide an even more complete picture.

Are you ready to excel? We’re here to help.

Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence: SaaS Management

Fri, 07 May 2021 15:31:25 Z

You’re probably familiar with the many benefits of licensing software using a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model. The most frequently touted benefit is that you pay only for what you use when you use it. Additionally, you don’t have to worry about upgrading, or server maintenance, or security. That’s all taken care of. However, even using a SaaS model, you still need to monitor and manage costs, which can be a challenge if you are working with several suppliers.

Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence provides Software Insights and License Management capabilities that help you to manage spend on software that is licensed for on-premises use. These tools help you to determine where you have too few or too many licenses, how to identify end-of-life software, when the time is right for an upgrade, and where you might be wasting money on unused software. Also included are tools to help you manage your spend on software delivered via a SaaS model.

Managing SaaS Spend

By connecting with a single sign-on subscription, you can use Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence to collect and curate a huge amount of usage data for all the associated single sign-on applications. Ivanti then presents this information on a set of dashboards that provide such information such as:

The number of active and inactive users
Which users have many applications
Possible duplicate users
Which users are from outside your organization
Which applications get the greatest and least usage

For some SaaS applications, such as Adobe, Microsoft 365, or Salesforce, you can gain even greater insights by implementing connectors specific to those applications that provide even more detail.

Perhaps the most valuable insights, however, come when you also import license information into the system. Ivanti identifies which license transactions reflect subscriptions for discovered SaaS applications and links them to the appropriate application. These links help you to monitor your compliance – do your subscriptions match your usage?

The Monthly SaaS spend chart on the SaaS Management home page helps you to track your monthly spend on SaaS applications. This chart has two major components:

All SaaS Transactions shows the monthly spend on applications that are identified in the Ivanti Definitive Software Library as SaaS applications
Linked SaaS Transactions shows the monthly spend on applications that have been linked to transactions for SaaS subscriptions either automatically when you imported licenses or manually afterwards

If the All SaaS Transactions line is displayed above the Linked SaaS Transactions line, this suggests that there are transactions for SaaS subscriptions that have not yet been linked to SaaS applications. This suggests you need to get those additional applications linked in order to have a complete picture of your SaaS usage and compliance.

On the other hand, if the Linked SaaS Transactions line is displayed above the All SaaS Transactions line, this suggests that there are transactions for SaaS subscriptions that have been linked to applications that are not identified as SaaS applications in the Definitive Software Library. This could be for several reasons, such as having a special agreement with your vendor, the license having a hybrid usage, or the Definitive Software Library not having been updated. This calls for identifying any applications that truly are exceptions and making sure that all required SaaS applications have been listed in your Definite Software Library.

To learn more about using Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence to manage SaaS spending, check out the video below which provides an overview of this important capability.

How to Become a Successful Software Asset Manager

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 21:06:35 Z

As part of a challenge, I read Ulysses by James Joyce. 😬

Never again. At almost 1,000 pages (although about 250 of those pages were just explanatory notes), it was tough going. Especially when some bits of it were written in Latin, Irish, and Hungarian. I may have skimmed parts.

At 42 pages, the Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Licensing Guide is no Ulysses, and it does have the benefit of being written in a single language. But it’s still not an easy read for us mere mortals. Definitely not a page-turner.

And, of course, this describes the licensing for only one version of one product from one vendor. You can see why understanding your license position for all products on your estate is not a trivial job.

Effective License Position (ELP)

There are different levels to understanding your license position, with the ultimate, top-end version being the Effective License Position or ELP (it is so impressive that it even gets Initial Capital Letters and a TLA). Like many things in life, however, there are diminishing returns in determining your license position, with an ELP taking a serious amount of effort and requiring highly skilled and experienced SAM experts using complicated software. And it will take them a significant amount of time to gather the required installation, license, and contract data, and then crunch all of those numbers using often complex metrics to come up with the answer for a specific vendor. It’s a big investment.

If you are being audited, you’ll probably need to put in this much effort, including reading and fully understanding that 42-page licensing guide for SQL Server. Good luck; I wish you a safe journey—and do contact Ivanti, we can help you with this: we have people who understand that document.

However, an audit isn’t the only reason for understanding your license position. There are other reasons, and reasons that don’t need such a detailed solution to give you valuable information to help your business that are possibly just as important.

Gain Insights Quickly with Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence

The dynamic summary of your license and install data provided by Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence quickly provides you with insights into your license position. It’s not an ELP, but it’s a good indication of where you stand and where to focus your resources to gain a better understanding. This is important because software licenses can be expensive and you don’t want to buy too many—but you don’t want to purchase too few, either, because that way lies trouble.

Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence is not targeted at experienced licensing experts wanting to create an ELP, but at IT generalists who have an interest in the license position of their IT estate and who want to have a feel for what their license position is, and where their money is going.

With very little configuration, Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence helps you to identify where you may have too many or too few licenses. It also shows you where users are consuming a license for software they are not using, aiding license reclamation and so improving your license position without buying more licenses. You can also see where end-of-life or prohibited software is being used on your estate, when contracts are approaching their renewal dates so that you can prepare for and negotiate a new deal, what upgrade opportunities exist on your estate, and so on.

Possibly more important than any absolute answers that Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence provides are the insights it provides. The charts and grids help you understand your software estate: its opportunities and vulnerabilities, its weaknesses and its excesses, where to spend, and where to save. A successful Software Asset Manager needs to understand their IT estate in this way, and Ivanti Neurons for Spend Intelligence can help with this.

Your IT estate is dynamic, and you need tools in place that are equally dynamic. If it takes a month to get an answer, then that answer is a month out of date. Better to have found a quicker, good enough answer and then have more time to spend immersed in a good book.

Accidental Benefits of Ivanti License Optimizer

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 23:22:27 Z

They say that you don’t get anything for free, but you can get some additional benefits by accident if you know where to look.

The main use for License Optimizer is to determine your Effective License Position or ELP. In very simple terms, how many licenses do I need, how many licenses do I have, and where do I have too many or too few?

Ivanti Asset Manager: Free Demo

However, there is a lot more to it than that—software licensing can be challenging at times—and in developing your ELP, License Optimizer gathers and curates a huge amount of data. It is this data that can give us some extra, accidental benefits if you know where to look.

Take these two instances:

1. Your ELP might show that you have a shortfall of seven licenses for a particular software title. The obvious solution is to buy seven more licenses. But if you have gathered your software inventory data using a discovery tool such as Ivanti Endpoint Manager, then this data also includes usage information, which has then made its way into License Optimizer.

So if you discover a shortfall in licenses in License Optimizer, it takes only a few moments to discover if this software title is actually being used by everyone who’s installed it. If you discover that there are people who have it installed but haven’t used it for months, then instead of buying more licenses, why not see if you can uninstall the unused instances and fix your license position? Much cheaper and ultimately more efficient.

2. The next feature we recently added to License Optimizer is the result of a suggestion from a customer. We love hearing your suggestions, and although we can’t promise to implement all of them, they contribute to our plans for the future of License Optimizer as they help us get a better understanding of your real-life SAM challenges— so keep them coming!

Sometimes client software can make its way onto a server. There may be a good reason for this, but it’s important to check that it’s really needed on that server because it can create unnecessary security risks, consume resources, and take up valuable licenses. The software page in License Optimizer lists all the software in your estate and includes a tab called Assigned to Server OSIs (Operating System Instances), which lists all the software in your estate that is installed on a computer running a server operating system. If you find client software in this list, you can open the record for the device it is installed on and see who owns that server. Then you can have a chat about whether this software is really needed on that server, and if not, then you can uninstall.

I created a video on this subject that gives more details on both of these suggestions.

You’ll find videos about all our products on our YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe. And please let us know if you manage to save some money using the techniques described here or if you have any other suggestions for how you can use License Optimizer to cut costs.

Schrödinger’s Licenses: License Optimizer's Perfect Paradox

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 23:27:23 Z

In 1935, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed his famed thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of quantum mechanics when you apply its principles to everyday objects. In his thought experiment, a cat is simultaneously alive and dead in a paradoxical quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.. And, it was around this time that I decided quantum physics was not for me.

Ivanti Asset Manager: Free Demo

Yet, this topic came back to mind when I was recently reviewing the results of an Effective License Position in Ivanti License Optimizer. There appeared to be a couple of places where I had both a surplus and a shortfall of licenses for a particular software title. How could that be? What are these mysterious Schrödinger’s licenses?

It turns out—much unlike Schrodinger’s thought experiment—there are perfectly good reasons for this paradox in licenses. Let me explain.

The default view for the data summary in License Optimizer shows the effective license position for your entire estate. However, some licenses are tied to a specific business unit rather than the estate itself, and this can cause licenses to appear both abundant and scarce. I may have software installed in a business unit that doesn’t have licenses, but also have licenses for a different business unit that doesn’t have the software installed.

You can check for this on License Optimizer’s Data Summary page by clicking the Product Information row for the software title, which shows the liability, number of licenses, and balance for each business unit. See the image below:

The other set of Schrödinger’s licenses I found related to another common issue, which comes about because you must completely cover your license liability on a server. You are either fully licensed, or not licensed at all. No partial licensing allowed. If your server needs 16 licenses but you have only eight, then you have a shortfall of 16 and a surplus of eight—you can’t claim to have a shortfall of eight because you have eight unused licenses. You get no benefit from those additional eight licenses until you buy another eight to correct your liability.

You can check your software license balance using License Optimizer’s Software By Install tab of the Data Summary page, which shows each instance of installed software and its liabilities. To get a full picture, filter the data grid by software title, which then allows you to see the liability you have for each software installation. Remember, you need enough licenses to cover each server entirely.

In the image below, I have two servers that both need 16 licenses. If I have 24 licenses, then one server is licensed and the other isn’t, so I will have a surplus of eight licenses and a shortfall of 16:

If you want to learn more about how you can remedy Schrodinger’s licenses in Ivanti License Optimizer, watch this short video entitled “Schrodinger’s Licenses – Understanding Your Effective License Position in License Optimizer”.

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