SAM Tools — Does One Size Fit All?
With contributions from Version 1’s license experts, Paul Bullen and Karl O’Doherty
Managing your enterprise license estate can be a herculean task and one that requires skilled resources, processes and, more often than not, some tools. Note here that we said TOOLS, plural.
There is no single tool on the market that will provide all the functionality you will require to support a complete software asset management implementation. You will need discovery tools, monitoring tools, custom control and reporting scripts, repository tools to extract entitlement and consumption data. This is on top of the potential need for a SAM tool.
As experts in enterprise licensing and software asset management (SAM), we are often asked to recommend a SAM tool to support the effective management of license estates. This post covers our thoughts on the topic and serves as a cautionary tale for those hoping to resolve all their license management concerns with a single SAM tool.
SAM tools for Oracle.
There is no ‘one’ tool we would recommend for Oracle licensing: what customers need to do when considering a tool is understand clearly what they need it to do, for example: do you need to capture entitlement? In which case it needs to be reasonably advanced especially if you have complex customised contracts and need to be able to accurately represent the hierarchy of your company. Your requirements must drive your evaluation process otherwise you’ll never meet your goals.
- Any tool should be flexible and have a flexible and transparent data model; you need to be able to put the data into the tool in a logical way and represent its complexity as it changes over the years.
- If you are looking for a tool to manage usage, then you need to understand whether this will be able to scan everything in your estate. Can it access all your servers and databases for interrogation? The other consideration is if you have less technology and more application products, then most tools are not going to be useful: application metrics are generally business-value-orientated and so you won’t be interested in infrastructure discovery. Applications products are inherently complex and there are no ways to automate the discovery of such products.
- None of the certified SAM tools that Oracle have approved to generate Oracle Server Worksheets (OSW’s) cover applications, (such as JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft — anything that is not based on Processor or Named User Plus.) Tools might be able to capture your entitlement (once manually entered), potentially with those exceptions mentioned above, but they are not going to be able to measure your application usage. You would have to get that from the system and the system owners themselves, which is likely to take a lot of manual effort and understanding of responsibility mappings, roles, licensable modules, and the individual users using it.
- There are also some key elements that a tool will not be able to measure such as customisations within E-Business Suite, so take that into account.
- Oracle accredited tools are, in our opinion, just acceptable for use with the proviso that their output and any subsequent value you can derive from it is limited to a subset of database information. To coin a vox pop phrase, your mileage may vary, and you are as likely to achieve success with a manual process coupled with a spreadsheet as you are with an accredited tool. When you consider WebLogic, middleware, and applications/products, there are no tools on the market that perform well in our view.
Ultimately, before you buy a tool, you need to understand your estate, what products you have and try to map it to the best possible tool, taking advantage of existing tools. You should understand the limitations of tools and determine whether a tool is the best option in the first place. If you have products on million-dollar revenue metrics for example, then it’s no use having a tool whatsoever. It doesn’t matter how many modules you have covered under that particular metric; you just need to look at your million-dollar revenue.
Our advice would be to go through a proper tool evaluation process and be absolutely clear on your needs to ensure this is achievable.
SAM tools for Microsoft
There are some good tools available from a Microsoft standpoint but when it comes down to understanding some of the intricacies of certain applications and clarifying usage to the right level of detail, even some of the Gartner classified ‘leaders’ in the industry are missing key capabilities within their toolset. These tools need to be complemented with some form of automated custom scripting as well as manual inputs from either a SAM consultant or by your in-house resource, if available.
We firmly believe that a blend of data sources is the best fit when trying to understand what’s in your Microsoft estate, how it’s being used and what the licensing implications are.
- In the Microsoft stack, some of the licensing has been somewhat simplified, as we have seen more and more customers adopt a cloud-first strategy. Consequently, this can be quite dangerous as some customers now think that they don’t have to worry about license compliance — but those license compliance headaches still exist, even if you are in the cloud. There are plenty of examples with Office 365 and Azure that can create license compliance headaches for organisations that would potentially go unnoticed.
- The benefit of a tool is being able to identify and control costs — a key metric that we are looking at now when we are working with customers to assess what their license position is. As with Oracle estates, we would urge customers to understand whether they need a tool in the first place.
- Within the cloud space, we are moving away from a model where we would have completed a static license position and then returned in 12 months’ time into a situation where the customer needs to have a continual view of what their costs are, and where the optimisation opportunities exist. Trying to stay on top of cloud costs is key. Having said that, with Microsoft Azure, there are some great native tools from Microsoft to help you track and stay on top of that spend, but less so in Office 365.
Summary
There is no silver bullet to effective software asset management through a single tool. We would always urge customers to thoroughly assess their needs before investing in an expensive tool and putting the people, process, and training behind it.
Let’s be clear on this, our licensing team has been operating in the licensing world since 2002. We neither advocate nor resell SAM tools. We are happy to use a customer tool if they have invested in one, but, more often than not, the tool output doesn’t provide the required level of detail, estate coverage or is just plain wrong, so we end up reverting to our tried and tested methodologies which have been delivering impressive ROI to our customers since we began. The point here is if we can run a business offering SAM services without an off the shelf SAM tool, so can you, and save yourself a whole chunk of change in the process!
Version 1’s license experts have considerable experience in license optimisation and software asset management practices and tools. If you are considering a tool to support your software asset management processes and have a question, take a look at our SAM tools webinar or contact us for our view.
About The Author
Jason Pepper is the Head of SAM Practice here at Version 1.
