From operations to finance, marketing, product development and HR, every function within a business relies on software. Employees need access to a wide array of applications every day, in order to do their jobs effectively. And, our reliance continues to grow – Gartner predicts software spend in the enterprise will increase 11.8% in 2023, up from 9.6% in 2022, reaching more than $900 billion.
As software is so essential to business continuity and success, it’s of paramount importance that it’s available, secure and up to date at all times. Optimizing licensing costs and ensuring compliance are also key challenges. Companies seek to minimize time spent auditing their software estate, a process that can take up to 60 days to complete, interfering with normal business operations and burdening IT staff with extra work that prevents them from servicing the needs of the business. Not only that, errors can result in steep fines for non-compliance, and failure to implement the proper policies and security controls can leave an organization vulnerable to cyber attacks.
As a result of these challenges, companies are adopting Software Asset Management (SAM), a critical practice for IT teams that helps reduce the cost and risk associated with owning and using software, while also empowering employees to be as productive as possible.
What Is SAM?
SAM involves processes and technology that help teams understand, track, manage and optimize their software assets. When done right, SAM can help organizations reduce IT spend significantly – Gartner reports that organizations can save up to 30% of their software spend in the first year of implementing a SAM program. SAM also helps organizations:
- Mitigate legal and compliance risks associated with software licensing and entitlement.
- Identify and remediate security vulnerabilities resulting from outdated OSes and security software
- Enhance user productivity and maximize IT performance
- Identify duplicate applications, unused software and shadow IT
- Optimize licensing options to reduce costs of new software purchases
- Simplify and accelerate the auditing process
In order to benefit from SAM, organizations must create and maintain a complete and accurate inventory of all of their software assets – everything from desktop and mobile applications to device drivers, operating systems, server software, security applications and more. Why? Because you can’t manage or protect what you don’t know you have.
Lansweeper and AssetLabs Integration Demon
Register for the WebinarAssetLabs and SAM
AssetLabs originated from AssetMetrix, a web-based PC inventory & Asset Intelligence service that was offered by Dell, Software Software Spectrum, Compucom, Compugen and SoftChoice. Today the company offers IT-risk analytic web services that empower corporations and IT service providers to identify licensing, productivity, security and budgeting risks by analyzing their software estate. AssetLabs’ solution Streamline integrates with customers’ existing inventory tools – including Lansweeper – to enable a comprehensive solution for tracking all software licenses using, detect license deficiencies, deduplicate multiple installations and apply product and downgrade rights.
Streamline transforms Lansweeper data into normalized, categorized and data-enhanced reports and views, providing a powerful Risk Analysis service that helps lower software license and hardware spend. The solution auto-calculates concurrent and downgrade installs on all devices, and leverages a global library of product prices to instantly determine the cost-risks of products and their parent vendors, enabling users to identify redundancies and overlap across applications and vendors. Streamline also provides a historical census of product population counts over time. All software titles are automatically normalized to ensure a single reporting reference for vendors and products, eliminating the need to search for variations. The solution then categorizes the titles for simplified reporting and management.
AssetLabs + Lansweeper = Valuable Insights into Software Asset Data
Streamline depends on complete and accurate software asset data – the data that Lansweeper provides. That’s why, according to Steve O’Halloran, Co-founder and VP of Business Development at AssetLabs, Lansweeper is the “Scotty of the software enterprise.” “We take Lansweeper data and enhance it to pinpoint various risks in licensing, productivity, policy, security, support, and budget, as well as maintain a comprehensive view of what’s happening week by week,” he said.
Lansweeper’s agent-based and agentless deep scanning and credential-free device recognition (CDR) technologywork together to continuously and automatically scan the network and discover all of the connected technology assets across an organization – hardware and software, OT and IoT, and even “shadow IT,” which is typically one of the biggest ways organizations waste IT spend. It then creates a complete and accurate inventory, including detailed information about installed software, which can be leveraged for implementing an effective SAM practice.
While Lansweeper’s inherent Software License Compliance capabilities enable IT teams to track software license keys and build a basic overview of software license purchases and product pricing, combining the solution with AssetLabs Streamline provides a more comprehensive approach.
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Try It Out Now!Read more about all of our other available integrations, or contact us today to learn how to leverage Streamline with your Lansweeper data to improve SAM in your organization.
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