A short YouTube presentation by Mike Austin (SAM Expert) comparing three software asset management (SAM) tools — Snow, ServiceNow SAM Pro, and Asset Labs. Mike outlines each tool’s strengths and weaknesses, target-customer fit (e.g., Snow and ServiceNow for larger/complex environments; Asset Labs for beginners/small visibility projects), implementation cost considerations, and rough per-device pricing to help viewers choose an appropriate SAM tool. He also recommends proofs-of-concept and checking vendor fit against an organization’s specific software estate.
Chapters
If you've been in it for a while, you'll know that there's nothing worse than purchasing a software package, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to have it implemented, turning it on, and then not getting the results that you want. Hi, I'm Mike Austin, SAM Expert. In order to successfully implement software asset management, one of the things you're going to need is a SAM tool. Picking the right SAM tool is crucial to your success. So in this video, I'm going to go through three of the SAM tools that are available in marketing and talk about what their best features are and where their weaknesses are to help you make a decision on what's the best SAM tool for you. If you want a more comprehensible list of SAM tools that are available in the market, click the link in the description to download our report on the best SAM tools of 2020. First, we're going to talk about Snow. Then we'll talk about ServiceNow, SAM Pro, and then finally a small but up and coming tool from a company called Asset Labs. Here's what you can look forward to in Snow and what they do really well. Snow is a large software company. Recently they've had private equity invest in them and they're on a little bit of an acquisition spree. So they've been acquiring other software vendors in the market to fill gaps in their current tool set. So if you're looking for a complete platform, Snow is probably a good place to start. They pretty much have the full functionality that's required in a software asset management tool. They have discovery modules, they have license optimization modules. They even have modules that can go in and look at SaaS applications that are out there in your environment. They are very strong at some of the more complex licensing modules. SAP, for instance, is one of the ones that if you're looking for a solution around SAP and indirect licensing, Snow is definitely the place to look. So now let's talk about some things to maybe look out for in Snow. So the other thing that you want to be careful with around Snow is the fact that you could be isolating if you're using a cmdb, your inventory data for software from the CMDB in Snow's inventory management tool. So that's one thing that you want to be careful about, is that now you potentially have two data sources that could cause you some problems. So Snow is best suited for organizations that are fairly large and complex looking for a lot of diversity in your software programs. So if you've got SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, you may want to start by Looking at snow so here are a few good things about ServiceNow if you're using ServiceNow as your ITSMM platform now, you can actually put software asset management in there and have a complete view of your environment both from how you manage it from a service management perspective, as well as how you manage it from a software asset management perspective. ServiceNow is a large global organization with lots of resources and a big R and D budget. The changes that we've seen in the ServiceNow SAM Pro platform are indicative of this. When they first launched the SAM Pro module a few months back, the functionality was not very robust, but we've seen it quickly evolve to the point where the tool is becoming more and more user friendly and increasing in terms of the functionality that is provided. Now for some of the challenges with ServiceNow, ServiceNow is new to the market in the SAM space and the tool is lacking in functionality in a number of areas. Although like I mentioned in the benefits, their roadmap is progressing quickly. There's still a lot of things in complex licensing scenario that you can't actually do within the tool. So in order to make a ServiceNow SAM Pro implementation successful, you're going to have to have a really strong SAM team that can actually do a bunch of things manually outside of the tool. And in order to give you the picture that you're looking for from a software asset management perspective, ServiceNow SAM Pro is a great tool if you're using their other features such as itsmm. Ideally in those cases your CMDB is already populated, then you're just going to normalize it. In order to be able to use software asset management, it's going to give you a single pane of glass where you can get a single source of truth around your positions for software asset management. So the final tool we're going to talk about is one of my favorites from a company called Asset Labs. Asset Labs has done a great job at creating a tool that takes inventory from multiple sources such as SCCM, Altiris, land, VMware, etc. And gives you great views of what's actually deployed out there. Their graphical interface is one of the best on the market today. Where Asset Labs really excels though, are for organizations that are first beginning out on their software asset management journey. If you're managing things in spreadsheets and don't have a lot of visibility into what's in your environment, they are a great first step to start giving you the visibility to what's installed out there, where it's installed, and all the details that are required to begin the licensing of some of the simpler programs like Microsoft and Adobe that you have in your environment. Now, the challenge with Asset Labs is that they're not very good at doing complex licensing structures. So if you're looking for a tool to do Oracle, IBM, SAP, Asset Labs is not going to be the right fit for you. So another thing that you want to consider when purchasing tools is the fact that there's implementation costs. Both ServiceNow and Snow are large platforms that are going to require a fairly substantial budget to do implementation. We hear anywhere between 50% and 100% of the license costs in the first year in order to implement the tools, whereas on the other hand, Asset Labs actually has no implementation cost. So that might factor into your decision as well. If you'd like to compare pricing between the three tools. Roughly, you can estimate snow and ServiceNow at about 250 a device per month, whereas Asset Labs would probably be somewhere more around $1.50 per device per month. In order for your SAM program to be successful, the SAM tool that you choose is going to be crucial in that journey. As you're evaluating SAM tools, you're going to want to make sure that you ask all kinds of questions around what type of customer it fits with, what software vendors they're strong at, and how that compares to your environment. We actually even suggest doing proof of concepts with these vendors to see how quick and easy it is to get them up and running, or to see how involved or labor intensive it may be to get them up and running. Remember, if you're looking at a SAM tool and you want to see what SAM tools are available and what the best are for 2020 to click the downloadable link in the description below and grab our free checklist of SAM tools that you may want to look at and compare. Thank you for watching. Remember to like and subscribe to the SAM channel in order to receive more informative content like this. Until next time, have a great day. I'm Mike Austin, SAM Expert SAM.
