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Software asset management- An essential metric to enhance the productivity of organization

The article illustrates the benefits of software inventory management to manage all IT resources and applications around a network to minimize IT costs and increase productivity. The article also recommends an effective tool that can manage all changes in an organization.

Author: Patrick Goohan
Date: Feb 1, 2012 - 2:57:16 AM

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Software Asset Management or SAM is a business practice that involves the process of managing and optimizing the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilization and disposal of software applications within an organization. The Information technology Infrastructure Library or ITIL defines Software Asset Management as “…all of the infrastructure and processes necessary for the effective management, control and protection of the software assets…throughout all stages of their lifecycle.”

The fundamental concept of SAM is intended to be an essential part of organization’s information technology business strategy. The primary objective of SAM is to minimize IT costs and reduce the probabilities of business as well as legal risks associated with the ownership and use of software while enhancing IT responsiveness and end- user productivity. It’s an important facet that covers both network management as well as software inventory management.

Software inventory methods or tools intelligently discover software installed across the computer network and collect information about the software files like title, product ID, size, date, path and version. There are also some inventory tools that compare inventory data with purchasing information to find out license deficit and ensure that organizations comply with the licensing agreements and policies.

The Software Inventory features of software asset management tool helps in maintaining an inventory or records of software applications used around a network. It scans computers and servers of a network at regular intervals to collect details of inventory. It also can gather information about the software applications installed in a network and their usage information. The information collected by the inventory controller further helps the administrators to easily monitor the usage of the software applications in a network. Apart from this, the software inventory feature also enables in addition of license information to any commercial software application installed in the network.

Software Inventory Reports

In order to collect the details of software inventory systems the asset management software scans the Windows systems. After collection, it stores them into the database which is usually presented in the form of reports for ready reference. Generally, following reports are produced by asset management tool:

• Software vendors by volume: It provides the volume of the software which have been installed in the network.

• Software by volume: This metric provides the installed number of copies of each software in the network. This information can further be utilized to view the software of a specific vendor.

• Recently installed software: It enlists the software installed recently.

• Software license compliance report: Gives the details of the commercial software with their software license compliance status as compliant or non- compliant.

• Software licenses to be renewed: Enlists the software whose licenses have to be renewed shortly.

In recent days, IT deployments are getting more complicated regardless of the scale and size of the organizations. Users face it as a challenging role to manage all consecutive changes in an organization in this era of virtual and mobile technologies. If a software inventory management scheme is configured, long- standing burden of the organization around a hybrid network could be minimized.

Lepide Software Asset Management is an effective asset management software presented by Lepide Software group. It’s an enterprise- wide software which is designed to control organizational investments, meet software license compliance, enhance productivity and increase the satisfaction level of employees.

The author of this article is a renowned network administrator and has deep knowledge in asset management software. The author has delivered many articles and tutorials that can help the users to know about software inventory management and network management tools.

View all articles by Patrick Goohan

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