Software Asset Management
Reduce risk and costs for software assets
Software asset management is becoming more complex with software sprawl and new digital environments like containers and cloud. It’s impossible to manage these digital environments with spreadsheets or legacy inventory tools alone. Flexera tools provide visibility, compliance and optimization insights for all your software—on-premises, mobile, virtual, SaaS, containers, and cloud—so you can have complete data intelligence to prepare for audits, renewals and other strategic business initiatives.
Save time and headaches with proactive software license management and optimization.
Audit defense
Proactively positioned to be audit ready
Responding to software audits can wreak weeks of disruption on your business if you aren’t well prepared with a strong software asset management system. Flexera provides you with comprehensive data and reporting to be continuously confident of your effective license position and software lifecycle policies such as timely patching critical software vulnerabilities and removing application versions that are EOL.
Reduce license waste
Find waste with product use rights and verified usage
Our unparalleled product use rights library automatically optimizes your software portfolio by applying product use rights such as upgrade, downgrade, second use, non-production, active/passive cluster, virtual and hybrid use rights. Powered by verified usage data, Flexera's tools specialize in optimizing the software applications that cost you millions, such as Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Websphere, Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware, Oracle Java, VMWare, Salesforce, ServiceNow and SAP.
Reduce manual effort
Spend hours, not weeks, preparing for audits and renewals
With Flexera, you can transform regulatory and vendor audits from a major disruption to a seamless business-as-usual operation. Our advanced license reconciliation algorithms do the hard math for you so you can quickly get the insights you need to reduce risks and costs for all your software installed in physical, virtual, containers, IaaS or PaaS environments.
Prevent application sprawl
Confidently know every application provides value
Distributed purchasing of SaaS applications, PAYG apps on cloud marketplaces and complex global organizations with histories of M&A have made it impossible to reduce software application redundancies without a proper SAM tool. Flexera's tools help IT pros reduce complexity and stop application sprawl with a comprehensive view into software applications used throughout your business, including shadow SaaS applications and applications from cloud marketplaces.
ACCURACY MATTERS
Complete reporting requires clean and accurate data
Flexera is powered by the largest and most complete entitlement library with more than 970,000 applications applications providing software product use rights, metrics and license types and a 98%+ recognition and normalization rate. Eliminate the complexity of software audits and renewals with automated calculations for optimized license positions that your major business vendors will accept.
We were using the supposedly free SAM solution from our ITSM provider; we thought it was good enough. Then one of our larger vendors executed their right to audit their products. To get into compliance, their third-party auditor said we were going to have to pay a 9-figure amount of money. Unfortunately, we were not in a position to defend against that. We executed an RFP and POC and Flexera was by far the leader in the space.
We worked very closely with Flexera and our implementation partner. We had VERY good buy-in from our senior management all the way up to the CEO. In five months, we implemented Flexera and produced the ELP. The ELP showed we were fully compliant and didn’t need to use the settlement catalog that was so generously offered to us.
SR VICE PRESIDENT, IT ASSET LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT Insurance industry
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Frequently asked questions about Software Asset Management
IT asset management (ITAM) is the combination of hardware asset management and software asset management.
- Software asset management (SAM) focuses on ensuring license compliance and reducing risks from vulnerable and end-of-life (EOL) and end-of-support software. And, with the increase in usage of SaaS applications, additional emphasis is placed on ensuring organizations are getting the value from the software they’ve purchased.
- Hardware asset management (HAM) focuses on the process of managing hardware IT assets through purchase to retirement and may include end-user devices and peripherals, datacenter servers, network devices and IoT.
Learn more in this guide, the Basics of ITAM.
SAM has historically focused on on-premises software applications for license compliance. Because it’s so easy to purchase and use SaaS software, SaaS sprawl has become an issue at many organizations—and the need to manage costs and related risks is also now a key objective of software asset managers. A large percentage of SaaS applications are purchased outside central IT, and monitoring usage of SaaS applications as well as sharing this information across the enterprise becomes a key requirement for controlling SaaS sprawl.
Learn more about how the software asset lifecycle changes with SaaS management.
There are many negative consequences when organizations fail to have a focus on SAM. These include:
- Paying for software licenses not used
- Paying for duplicate software purchased in different organizational units
- Not getting volume discounts across business units
- Security risks (e.g., shadow IT, EOL/EOS and vulnerable applications)
- Audit fees
- CMDB with dirty data
- Manual data gathering
SAM is critically important for cyber security because you can’t secure an asset that you can’t see. SAM helps improve cybersecurity by:
- Obtaining a comprehensive inventory of all IT assets
- Identifying application risks related to Shadow SaaS
- Locating assets with software vulnerabilities
- Identifying risky end-of life (EOL) and end-of-support (EOS) assets
Flexera and Snow Software have been recognized as a software asset management market leader and more recently has been recognized as a representative vendors in the latest Gartner SAM Market Guide.
With usage metering for both on-premises and SaaS applications, our software product use rights catalog, which is the most comprehensive technology intelligence library (powered by Technopedia), combined our extended expert service team with more than 25 years of experience, Flexera provides a gold standard for organizations who need to comprehensively and quickly solve their software asset management challenges.
INFORMING IT, TRANSFORMING IT
Industry insights to help keep you informed
Datasheet
Snow Spend Optimizer
Learn how you can quickly identify waste and risk in your software portfolio.
Blog
How to Choose a Software Asset Management Tool: Insights from the Gartner® Market Guide
Webinar
Flexera monthly SAM best practices
Mark Bradley, Flexera Senior Product Manager, will drive the session and share his years of experience in SAM and as a licensing architect with Flexera Services.
Bericht
State of ITAM Report 2024 von Flexera
Der State of ITAM Report 2024 von Flexera beleuchtet wie wichtig ein ordnungsgemäßes IT- Asset-Management ist, die Herausforderungen, die damit einhergehen, sowie Lösungsansätze dieser. Mehr dazu im aktuellen Report.
Guide
The Basics of IT Asset Management
An essential guide on the past, present and future of ITAM
Blog
Why you need to consider vendor certifications in your SAM strategy
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