Mike Austin explains Software Asset Management as two things: building accurate software inventory data across your systems, and using that data to negotiate better contracts and stay compliant. The goal is cutting costs and avoiding license violations.
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What is software asset management or sam, the abbreviation? If you've done any research out there, you're going to see that this is a huge broad topic. Today we're going to talk about two simple things that you can do to better understand it. Hi, I'm Mike Austin, SAM Expert. Welcome to the SAM channel. If you've done any research on software asset management, you're going to realize that it is a massive topic. You may find things out there the SAM process wheel and wonder, what is this thing? Today I'm going to break SAM down into two simple steps that will help you on your path to becoming a SAM expert. One is software inventory and two is software contracts. So I'm going to boil software asset management down into two key things or two key things that you want to accomplish. One is you want to drive cost of your software contracts and two is that you want to be compliant with your software licenses. So in order to do that, you obviously need to have strong inventory data. So we're going to talk about inventory data here. First. What makes strong inventory data? Well, the first thing is you want to make sure that that data is trustworthy. So what do we mean by trustworthy? We mean that the data and the sources that it comes from, you have a lot of confidence in your accuracy that it is complete. Now, completeness of data comes in a lot of varieties. Think about processors and cores and user based licensing and device based licensing. There's a lot that goes into this. It could be something that you collect manually, or it could be something that you use tools in order to calculate. We do have another video on SAM tools that you can watch to get an understanding of some of the tools that are available to you. If you want to be a SAM expert, you're going to have to become a negotiation expert. And that leads me to number two, which is software contracts. Why do I say you need to be a negotiation expert? Because you're going to be involved in or leading a lot of negotiations around software contracts. So you're going to take that trustworthy data that we talked about earlier and you're going to use that to negotiate the best price or terms and conditions of your software contract. Earlier I also spoke about that the fundamental things that you want to get out of software asset management were cost savings and compliance with your software contracts. We need to understand your software contracts and how your inventory data applies to those to make sure that you're actually compliant with the terms and conditions of your software contracts. So there's a lot that goes into this. But if you're going to become a SAM expert, much like you want to start focusing on understanding your inventory and your data sources, you're also going to want to focus on software contracts and understanding the terms and conditions of those and how you buy against those contracts. If you like this video, please subscribe to the SAM channel. We're going to have a new video every week. Or better yet, click like or leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. I hope you enjoyed this video on the basics of software asset management. I'm Mike Austin, your SAM expert. Until next time, have a great.
