Software Asset Management | Overview - YouTube

This video provides an overview of Software Asset Management Professional for ServiceNow.

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Software Asset Management Professional provides visibility and control of software licenses throughout their lifecycle.

With SAM Pro, it’s important to know: What software you own

Are you buying what you need?

And are you using what you have?

SAM Pro helps us answer these questions so that software assets can be efficiently managed throughout their lifecycle.

Dashboards show you important information to help you manage your software licenses and processes...

... such as true-up costs, software spend, and more.

The Software Asset Analytics dashboard allows you to view true-up costs...

... Publishers and products that are out of compliance...

... and potential savings, if removal candidates are reclaimed.

Clicking on True-Up Costs allows you to drill down to publishers and products that are out of compliance.

We can also access these from the License Workbench…

…which allows you to view the compliance status on various publishers’ products that you have installed or subscribe to.

Selecting any of the publisher cards allows you to view all their products….

… as well as their compliance status.

Here we see two different products from the same publisher.

One is in compliance…

… while the other isn’t.

Drilling down into them provides a view of additional points of information.

License Metrics shows the rights owned for a product, versus the rights consumed to license that software.

In this case, since the consumed rights is greater than the rights owned...

... the license for this software is not compliant.

Remediation options provides various ways to remediate or correct your non-compliant software.

Unlicensed installs shows users who are using the software without a license.

And removal candidates list users that may not be actively using the software...

... or who may not be using it all...

... such as employees who are no longer with the company.

Now let's look at an example to see how you can use SAM Pro to correct a non-compliance for Microsoft Projects 2016 Professional Windows.

Here, we see that one-hundred rights have been purchased...

... yet there are one-hundred and thirty-five rights being consumed…

Which means 35 licenses need to be purchased to get back into compliance.

We see here, that there are 28 licenses which are not being fully utilized.

You can harvest these project licenses by using the reclamation workflow to ask the users permission before reclaiming their license.

Once these licenses with low usage have been reclaimed...

... you can distribute them to users who need them.

Now, with only 7 licenses to be purchased, instead of 35, money has been saved.

Another thing you can do with SAM Pro is setup the system to discover rogue installs of blacklisted software that your organization is not allowed to use...

... and automatically initiate removal of this software.

Games are a common example of software that might be blacklisted

SAM Pro automatically initiates the workflow to remove the blacklisted software without the software asset management’s intervention.

Another SAM Pro feature is publisher packs which exist for several large software publishers like Microsoft...

... Oracle...

... IBM...

... VMWare...

... Citrix...

... and SAP...

Sam Pro gives you visibility to your Microsoft products that are out of compliance and the top products which contribute to your Microsoft True-up cost.

As Microsoft products go out of support...

... Sam Pro shows you your risk exposure and helps you make plans to mitigate your risk.

For Oracle, you can use the dashboard to get visibility to the Oracle database products you are running...

... the database server options that you have installed...

... and their usage.

This helps to optimize your deployments based on what’s being used.

If you’re using IBM products, you need to proactively monitor and manage your Processor Value Unit (PVU) ...

... and Resource Value Unit (RVU) counts.

SAM Pro saves you time and money by giving you visibility into your compliance...

... and helping you track over-spending and under-used software titles.

With the VM Ware publisher pack, you can keep track of your deployments across various territories...

... and entities that may have and impact on your compliance position.

With the Citrix Publisher Pack, you’ll have visibility to your license compliance for Citrix Published Apps and Published Desktops.

SAM Pro supports both concurrent licensing as well as the user-device licensing...

... publishing you comprehensive support for your Citrix software.

With the SAP Publisher Pack...

... SAM Pro gives you visibility into your compliance position for your SAP Named User Type Licenses.

You’ll be able to see how many users are performing functions directly in SAP...

...or indirectly via other applications.

You can also optimize licenses and reduce costs with recommendations on optimal Named User Type license assignments...

... based on the roles your users perform in SAP.

SAM Pro also offers an extensive software content library to recognize your software and normalize it.

And it includes software lifecycle information, software suite definitions, and use rights.

As our content library evolves, automated, incremental weekly updates are sent to our customers.

Customers can also opt into the Content Service...

... anonymously providing information on discovered software which was not automatically normalized.

This allows SAM Pro to crowd source new content, research it and publish it in the software library for everyone’s benefit...

... thereby improving our normalization rates.

Keeping track of SaaS licenses...

... monitoring their use and managing renewals can be a tedious and time-consuming task.

With SAM Pro’s SaaS license management capabilities, you can manage your subscriptions for Adobe...

... Microsoft Office365, Salesforce,  Zoom, Box, Dropbox, G-Suite, and DocuSign.

By using a single platform, you get visibility into the utilization of top SaaS products...

... and proactively manage your licensing needs to optimize SaaS spending.

You can use Software Spend Detection to discover software spend on over sixty thousand applications in your financial transaction data...

... from multiple systems to paint a picture of your software spend.

SAM Managers can easily see all the “un-managed” software, that is currently not being tracked with SAM Pro...

within SAM Pro, helping prioritize the publishers and products to bring into the SAM discipline.

Department, Cost Center and Location data can also be analyzed so SAM teams know who to speak with about the software purchases being made.

Additionally, this capability classifies your software apps detected by using over fifteen hundred software categories...

... giving you insight on overlapping software in your SaaS landscape.

By exploring opportunities for license spend optimization by consolidating overlapping software...

... SAM Pro can play a more proactive role in driving the enterprise’s application strategy.

SAM Pro also works to integrate with other products on the ServiceNow platform, such as ITSM, HR, ITBM and security operations.

This allows you to work seamlessly with other products and departments...

... which accelerates time to value for your business.

With all these features, Software Asset Management Professional serves as in IT solution that reduces compliance risk...

... optimizes license utilization, and helps to reduce software spending…

As well as bridging the gap between other departments and products within your organization.

For more information, see our product documentation, knowledge base, or podcast. Or ask a question

in the ServiceNow Community.