Request a demo for it asset managerThey 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?

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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.