When Optimizing Software Licenses, What Are the Benefits?

The first step on your Software Asset Management (SAM) journey is to create an effective license position (ELP). While the ELP will help you maintain compliance, it will not actively help you reduce the cost of licensing, which is an important factor in ensuring an ROI for your SAM activities.

Software license optimization (or SLO) helps ensure the optimum use of your licenses by reducing license use while staying compliant. This will help you reduce costs and make sure you don’t have any nasty surprises in the event of a software vendor audit. Awareness of your user rights and control of installed software usage are two key components to maximize software licenses. Let’s start by looking at user rights.

Optimize Software Licenses: Product Use Rights

The license agreement gives you the right to use your software. Specifically, this explains how you can use it in different scenarios. Although there are many different cases of use, there are a range of generic cases common to major vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe. These include the following types:

• Update: Helps you download the latest software update at no additional cost. In many organizations, this can be difficult to manage because some licenses are being retained (which usually require this free upgrade) and some are not. A good tool is required to customize the application license effectively.
• Downgrade: Allows you to purchase a later version of a product that you are currently using but install an earlier version instead. This is often used with standard desktop deployment images that require a version no longer available.
• Virtualization of the server: Allows installation of software on multiple virtual machines while counting as only 1 license.
• Secondary use: Provides the right to install software on both a desktop and a laptop while counting as a single license.
• Disaster recovery: Allows simultaneous installation on a live server and a backup server using only the live server license.
• Multiple installations: Allows multiple installations of the same application on a device while counting as only one license, usually across different versions. Older ITAM tools may incorrectly identify leftover files from unclean uninstalls as multiple installations.

Analyzing Software Usage

Once you understand each vendor’s usage rights, you can track and analyze the actual usage data of the software to determine the optimum type of license for each user. Many users may have the wrong software version installed, often a higher (more expensive) version than needed. By knowing this relative to your usage rights, you can reallocate higher-value licenses and save on additional purchases. SAP environments, in particular, present one of the most complicated licensing models.

Unused code for re-harvesting and eventual reallocation is also likely to be detected by usage data. This is a vital activity to save costs and optimize licenses.

Storing Consumer Use Right Data

For re-harvesting, different organizations have varying cut-off points—around 90 days for some, and longer for others. A sophisticated tool capable of storing up to 12 months of data is necessary to analyze software usage effectively. This rich history allows decisions to delete expired licenses and make them available to other users. Combined with an integrated corporate app store, users are more likely to relinquish unused software, knowing it can be reinstalled easily in the future.

The tool should also have the built-in ability to store user rights for the software vendor product and apply these rights to automatically determine your optimized license position (OLP).

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