Proactively Control Asset Risk and Cost while Optimizing & Automating your Estate

You can’t manage what you can’t see. In the case of your IT asset estate, without a clear line of sight, you can’t prevent large penalties from failed compliance audits or security risks and vulnerabilities from versioning and unauthorized use. Some organizations purchase more and more licensing in hopes of covering their bases and remaining compliant and avoid penalties. Others may spend weeks or months trying to understand their SaaS spend, existing shadow IT, and licensing compliance ambiguities.

You need a better approach than crossed fingers and guesswork. A centralized platform like ServiceNow enables proactive planning and management of unforeseen impacts to your asset lifecycle, so you can be prepared for anything.

The ServiceNow platform’s ‘One Platform, One Architecture, One Data’ approach reduces manual and siloed processes while leveraging trustworthy data provided by your Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Your CMDB, along with ITOM visibility, clarifies your software consumption within the organization and identifies software that is actually in use. ServiceNow leverages CMDB data in Software Asset Management (SAM) to accurately describe the software publisher, product, version, edition information as well as where the software is installed, whether on-premises or in the cloud, with near-real time information updates.

SAM also enables you to gain visibility of accurate SaaS asset data, detailed usage information, and action reclamation by integrating with hundreds of SaaS providers within the ServiceNow platform.

But understanding what software is currently in use is only half the battle for SAM; you also need to understand what you own, how much it costs, and who is using it. In ServiceNow Software Asset Management, SAM administrators can collect and consolidate software entitlement & allocation data. This combines both consumption data with entitlements data, so your organization can understand where gaps in compliance may cause issues in future audits.

SAM facilitates a unified workspace that allows you to determine what tools are being used sufficiently to justify their license and determine which are software reclamation candidates with no or low usage, to whom these allocations are assigned and where, and whether new licensing should be granted and purchased when a net new software request comes in. A centralized platform that connects your SAM process to your procurement and contract management process lets you associate software entitlements to purchasing contracts, increasing visibility into software contract renewals, so departments can proactively plan for annual true-ups or new contract negotiations.

SAM can also seamlessly tie into your security operations, Hardware Asset Management (HAM) & worker lifecycle processes so that you are notified about offboarding activities and security-related concerns, so you can proactively uninstall software or revoke the individual’s access. To create responsibility and accountability, frameworks should be identified to establish an operating model and collaboration across the organization.

AI & Automation for Software Asset Operations:

Organizations with ITSM + SAM in place can centralize their software request catalog, leverage virtual agents to action workflow, and reduce the overall time to resolve and respond to requests with built-in AI and automation capabilities.

ServiceNow’s Now Assist for Software Asset Management leverages Generative AI agents to increase user productivity through prompted conversations and proactive experiences. These capabilities allow you to rapidly gain insights into your software publisher estate by providing a comprehensive summary of publisher compliance, issues, deployment highlights, and optimization suggestions.

SAM continues to remain a critical function within organizations to mitigate security threats, remain compliant with publishers, control costs, and adhere to regulatory requirements. Operating a SAM practice is a journey that requires ongoing care, consideration, and cross-team collaboration. SoftwareOne’s domain and technical experts are here to help.