Kris Wong explains why software asset management requires deep expertise in licensing and contracts, not just deployment tracking. He warns that SaaS vendors like Salesforce now audit customers directly, and argues that moving from reactive to proactive governance demands C-level support and the right partner.
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My experience is that companies fail to deliver on kind of their, their value prop around SAM or ITAM when they lack the knowledge and expertise to actually deep dive. So there's a, there's a notion in asset management that like you, you can take your deployment data, anybody can look at your deployment number data and look count but the, the real value that you're going to get from, from Sam in particular is knowing the deep expertise on the license models, understanding how the negotiation cycle and contract amendments can be processed. And most organizations do not go through that on a regular basis. They do, you know, they have a contract with say Microsoft once every three years and so they get that experience once every three years. Whereas if you use, you know, a professional services firm and services, the folks that are in those, you know, that are delivering on those services go through that on a weekly, if not daily basis. They understand how those publishers interact, you know, what is the art of the possible. And they have the deep subject matter expertise to defend the positions. And as an aside, I've gone through audits before with zero experience. That's how I got involved in this. And I have the war wounds to kind of showcase that. My first audit with Oracle, it went okay, but it wasn't, it's not. If I were to repeat the process now and the experience, the outcomes for the company I was working for at the time would have been far better than what we experienced. And I think that's just a function of experience and a function of going through those situations and, and understanding kind of more of the technical underpinnings of those particular publishers. Well, I think SaaS is poised to have some compliance issues. We know, or at least from my experience, I know that a lot of the SaaS companies could be auditing right now and there are compliance based issues you can just look towards like Salesforce on how they assign users, they have all of the intelligence to audit if they want to without touching your on prem. And so that's probably a compliance concern. And the only real thing you can do to kind of combat that or to defend against that is become proactive. In the past Sam, ITAM has been really a reactive discipline or typically a reactive discipline. Most companies didn't want to invest in kind of like doing proactive governance around their software. But I think with Cloud and SaaS that it's really going to have to become more proactive because it's not about just keeping compliance about optimizing as well. And you can kind of kill two birds with one stone if you take A proactive approach. So my experience is that unless you have a C level exec that understands what the benefits of SAM and ITAM are, you typically get kind of lackluster support support and thus you typically don't get resources, both financial resources to, you know, fund the particular program, but also like human resources of like expertise and the willingness to invest in those expertise to drive the outcomes that the company is looking for. And those outcomes may or may not be compliance related. I think most businesses want to stay compliant, but really most of the C levels or that I've interacted with are looking for more than that. They're looking for how do we, you know, positively impact the business? How do we deliver service faster? How do we, you know, take, you know, our investment dollars and repurpose them to kind of high value projects? And I think SAM and ITAM can do that. But the story being told specifically in North America is typically around compliance and I think that needs to shift. But you know, going back to the question, it's, it's really, I think around executive support and how do you communicate both with those executives and then kind of some of the different lower tiers or lower levels of the organization on why this is going, going on. There are plenty good SAM services out there, but a word of caution is to really figure out what you need and what are the outcomes that you're looking for before just jumping into a SAM service. A lot of the tool vendors will say that, you know, their tools are kind of the silver bullet. But I know from experience and most, most folks that have worked in SAM or ITAM know that a tool is only as good as the tool is and it doesn't really deliver the outcomes you're looking for. So whenever you're working with a SAM provider, I would ask really relevant questions on can you deliver this outcome, what is going on, how do we get support those types of things and really make a judgment call on whether they're there to support you in your SAM journey or are they there to sell you something. You know, at metrics data 360, we're really there to help you deliver on the, the outcomes that you're looking for, which is typically around optimizing your licenses and thus taking that data and pushing it back to procurement and delivering, you know, common costs, hard dollar cost savings at a contractual level. And that might be reducing your price per unit. It might be adding additional terms and conditions to the agreement. But we, you know, from a metrics data perspective, we really aim to arm the business with the facts and evidence to support what they're trying to ask for within negotiations. And that delivers kind of the outcomes that most organizations that we've ever worked with are looking for.
