Integrated IT Asset Management - A Software Focus
Knowsys Group focuses in on Integrated IT Asset Management, which actively manages and optimizes a holistic view of organizations’ IT portfolios: Software, Hardware, Applications, Data, and Projects. We believe that IT assets are no different than Financial Investments and should be managed accordingly.
Today we would like to highlight Software: define what the major risks and challenges are, and how we effectively resolve these issues – to right-size our clients’ software investments.
Our Results are Cost-Savings and Negotiating Power!
Most organizations only pay attention to software licensing when they:
1. Buy software;
2. Re-negotiate or true-up existing contracts;
3. Get hit with a software vendor audit; or
4. Get asked to find cost savings.
The Major Risks and Challenges of Not Doing This Effectively Are:
1. Unexpected, new, and catastrophic software expenditures resulting from software vendor audits that organizations were never prepared for.
2. Buying software they don’t need because of organizational silos (one part of the organization doesn’t know that another part of the organization has already purchased the same software!). Conversely, too much software is purchased because the organization does not know how much it really uses and therefore actually needs.
3. Buying too much of a certain type of software e.g. Project Management tools when they already have a plethora of them which are not being fully utilized.
4. Negotiating software contracts blind – effectively relinquishing all your power to the vendor and rendering your procurement department irrelevant.
5. Virtualization and cloud risk – In focusing on hardware expenditure reductions by moving to the cloud, virtualizing or migrating data centres, organizations can create catastrophic software licensing risk/expenditures without insight into the financial “Armageddon” they may be creating.
6. SAM tools are not a panacea – organizations can wrongly assume that all the software licensing problems go away when a CMDB/Service Management/Asset Management software solution is implemented. In most cases, this is insufficient to address these risks because the behaviours and governance does not change, and the complexity/time of configuring the solution provides a false sense of security, allowing software license risk to continue-unchecked.
How Does Knowsys Group Solve These Problems?
1. Knowsys provides consulting and managed services to address software asset optimization. We do this by leveraging technology called Software Organizer (Business Continuity Services) which analyses and matches your audit data against hundreds of thousands of software licensing rules. This allows us to automate some of our assessment and provides a data-rich environment that can legally stand-up against any vendor audit. The beauty of our managed service solution is that you subscribe to our software only for as long as you need our service. No more. No less.
Additionally, we have a team of the brightest software licensing minds scattered across the globe. This allows us to virtually assess any software environment for a client, either on an ad-hoc or continual basis.
2. If a client asks us to come in and help them fight an audit, our track record is remarkable in that we have been able to reduce vendors’ audit bills by 90-95%.
3. In other cases you might be preparing for a negotiation with a major vendor and don’t feel like you really understand your licensing picture. We can provide a baseline/risk assessment for you on any software, such that you will be negotiating from a position of power.
4. Finally, if a client needs a repeatable, on-going managed service, Knowsys can augment its existing IT Asset Management team by providing Software Asset Optimization services. This allows us to not only help clients reduce unnecessary software spend, but more importantly to give our clients 100% control over how they should be spending their IT budgets to maximize their best interests (not that of software vendors).
Mary-Ann Massad, CEO and Managing Partner, Knowsys Group
If any of these points resonated with you, please contact sfarnum@knowsysinc.com and we can set-up an introductory meeting.
