8 Minute Overview. The Premier Agentless License Management Solution. Modern IT & The Importance of Software Asset Management

Transcription

1 8 Minute Overview Modern IT & The Importance of Software Asset Management

2 Executive Summary Never before in the history of enterprise technology has the need to maintain a comprehensive picture of software assets been so high. Faced with major disruptive marketplace changes and rising competition, traditional vendors increasingly use aggressive tactics to maintain revenue. As enterprise environments begin to leverage hybrid cloud, and grow ever more complex with mixed virtual and physical deployments, keeping track of all software assets has quickly become an intractable problem. This white paper documents a variety of difficulties that IT administrators face in ensuring software compliance, and examines state-of-the-art technologies for helping them accomplish this goal. 2

3 The Difficulty The modern IT administrator is wearing more hats than ever before. He s administering physical endpoints, keeping the health of the network in check, ensuring patches are up-to-date, deploying disaster recovery, and capacity planning for his company s future growth, all while attempting to implement executive-mandated projects. To make matters worse, gone are the days where software vendors like Adobe and Oracle experience unprecedented growth and are able to focus entirely on growing their customer base. These days, vendors are turning their attention inward, choosing instead to focus on extracting more money from existing customers. Audits are on the rise, and show no signs of slowing. Times Are Hard For Software Vendors Oracle exceeded $1B in revenue in 2014 from audits alone. Gartner estimates your organization has over a 65% chance of being audited by a software vendor each year.* This is clearly a very big part of their business *Source: Gartner Research,

4 Gartner expects the number of companies using a tool to track their software assets & entitlements will increase 4X within the next 2 years. Sales Are Flat, But Audits Are Up Business Software Alliance (BSA) estimates that $62B of commercial software (1/5th of total sales) is used illegally, often by accident. 40% of unpaid enterprise software usage comes from North America & Europe, and it s clear that software vendors are intent on bringing this number down.* In these markets, there is substantial governmental and legal support for Software Asset Management, including a well established legal basis under which a vendor can execute their right to audit clause. Example Explosion of Audits With limited growth opportunities in new customers, software vendors are devoting more time and resources to extract additional revenue from existing customers. They are hiring more auditors, which in turn translates to more audits and fees. In this hostile environment, you need an organization on your side. Licensing contracts are complex, and there are a variety of unique metrics demanded by vendors. Fees for non-compliance are severe - for many vendors, up to 10x the original cost of the software per copy. Can Your Company Afford Not To Know? A medium-sized manufacturing firm with 15 extra copies of AutoCAD could face a fine up to 150% than the initial software cost of 100 copies. higher (assuming a 10x penalty fee for non-compliance) 1 copy of AutoCAD $4,740 If Autodesk audits and finds an extra 15 copies over the purchased amount... With 100 licenses, their Autodesk software inventory is valued at $474,000 The organization is liable for a $711,000 fine *Source: BSA, 2014 Global Software Survey. ** Gartner, Software License Optimization & Entitlement (SLOE) 4

5 Spreadsheets Won t Cut It Many organizations today use home-rolled solutions to manage their software licenses. While this may help organizations estimate how many licenses are being used by internal departments, it will not stand up to the scrutiny of an audit. Simply put, a professional tool is necessary because a massive amount of data collection is required, most of which cannot be done by hand. While a spreadsheet may help keep track of who has been given a license key, or which machines an application is installed on, certain contract types are far more complicated. Enterprise software license agreements are like IT Snowflakes -- no two are created alike. Vendors each require a unique and diverse set of metrics for their licenses, including CPU counts, processor speeds, named users, concurrent usages, machine installs, device counts, and more. Do you currently have access to data showing every time an application launches, or when an Active Directory user logs onto a machine with a particular set of applications? What if part of your environment s hardware gets upgraded to newer processors - does this affect any of your software licenses? Software Asset Management tools are designed to answer these questions, and enable organizations to have a top-down view all of their assets and compliance status. SAM Tools To The Rescue Software Asset Management tools are designed specifically to provide answers to these hard licensing questions, and enable organizations to have a top-down view of all their assets and current compliance status. Unlike spreadsheets or other custom solutions, SAM tools scale with an organization, helping to aide expansion, instead of being a hindrance. The best SAM tools on the market are those that sit passively in the datacenter, quietly gathering data that can be displayed instantly at the request of an IT admin or compliance officer. If designed correctly, they can be an invaluable single source of truth for a variety of departments inside an organization, from the IT admin who worries about capacity planning, to the compliance officer who worries about each department s application licensing status. 5

6 Virtualization Is The New Frontier Most enterprises are transitioning into a fully virtual IT stack, and with this comes brand new challenges for tracking software assets. As any experienced IT veteran knows, virtualization makes many things easier, but it also introduces its own unique set of problems and constraints. Many existing Software Asset Management tools on the market are not designed for virtual environments, and are incompatible with new types of virtualization technologies that simply didn t exist when the SAM product was initially built. Examples of Breaking Technologies Include: Virtual Servers Virtual desktops (VDI) Floating pool non-persistent machines Virtual storage area networks Contemporary application delivery (e.g. AppVolumes) And much, much more Increased Importance of SAM With this explosion of new tools comes a myriad of new edge-cases and potential licensing pitfalls. For instance, because virtual machines are commonly cloned, it s all too easy to accidentally clone a base image with licensed software for an entire new department, resulting in hundreds of unlicensed copies of software, and a catastrophic out-of-compliance status. Fortunately, software tools are the natural solution to world of increasing complexity, and the best are easily able to handle these potential trouble spots. SAM tools that integrate with your virtual environment are automatically aware of all virtual assets, even those assets that are easily lost inside of large data center environments. 6

7 About StacksWare StacksWare Inc. is a Silicon-Valley based technology company committed to preventing enterprises from paying too much for software. The StacksWare analysis platform was designed for the modern datacenter, and works to control the surging costs of operating a datacenter, making organizations less wasteful and more insightful. Within minutes of installing a simple drag-and-drop virtual appliance, StacksWare customers gain complete visibility into their software assets, and the ability to make immediate cost-reducing decisions. Virtualization has enabled rapid growth in IT, resulting in enterprise technology that is more effective than ever before. Yet, few enterprises understand their software consumption. The few tools that can monitor software licensing today take months to deploy, resulting in massive capital expenditure and IT frustration. At StacksWare, our mission is to develop a platform that extracts valuable insight from massive IT environments in minutes. We pride ourselves on shielding IT stakeholders from the complex models underpinning software license analysis, so that they only receive actionable insights that impact their jobs. Global HQ San Francisco California, United States contact@stacksware.com StacksWare, and the StacksWare logo are registered trademarks of StacksWare, Inc. All other trademarks or service marks are the property of their respective holders and are hereby acknowledged StacksWare, Inc. All rights reserved.