ServiceNow launches the industry’s first software asset management solution

ServiceNow has announced the industry’s first software asset management solution that gives businesses the power to fix licensing issues before they affect their bottom line.

Licensed software is now found in every enterprise department and managing compliance to these complex software contracts has become a minefield for IT.

With vendor software audits on the rise, it has become more important than ever to address licensing problems fast or risk facing severe financial penalties.

Software Asset Management combines catalogue, procurement and orchestration all in one system of action. With a few simple clicks, enterprises can quickly and easily allocate and reclaim software licenses to address non-compliance and avoid the pains associated with vendor audits.

IT can also eliminate budget-draining software waste (shelf-ware), resulting in significant cost-savings for the enterprise. Now, enterprises can confidently make the most of their licensed software to move their business faster.

Software license and maintenance costs account for nearly one-third of IT budgets and complexity goes beyond just the software installed on end-user devices. The growth of software-as-a-service means that organisations need to adopt a way to measure and manage consumption of cloud software, especially with the rise of shadow IT.

Adding to the complexity, some software vendors base their licenses on service capacity and other factors, which can be difficult to track when running on an array of public and hybrid clouds. In addition, most companies still manage their software by manually updating spreadsheets and hoping that they do not get audited by their vendors.

“As software drives greater innovation across the enterprise, it also demands more strategic oversight and powerful levers to optimise its use,” said Karel van der Poel, vice president and general manager, ServiceNow.

“With ServiceNow Software Asset Management, CIOs have the means to master the management of software licensing and proactively support the business. They can make vendor audits painless and under reporting of software use a thing of the past.”

ServiceNow Software Asset Management tames complexity by tracking commercial software throughout its entire lifecycle.

This allows enterprises to:

• Automate software license spend. With Software Asset Management on the Now Platform™,  organisations can take control of the software request and allocation process across the global enterprise.
• Get a real-time view of licensed software compliance position. Enterprises now can get a clear picture of all their licensed software and how they are being used. They can perform highly accurate normalisation using more than a million normalisation rules. This helps to identify license-relevant product counts, when for instance, multiple versions apply to the same license. Leverage the ServiceNow confirguratio management database (CMDB) and pre-built Discovery Maps automatically to relate software entitlements to the correct software installations.
• Take a proactive approach to reconciliation and remediation. Software Asset Management reports license compliance issues by reconciling contract information with the discovered inventory of products against the contracts and reporting license compliance issues. If a non-compliance issue is found, the software can initiate remediation activities that continue in the same Now Platform, such as the automated reclamation of a license by uninstalling it from a user’s machine. ServiceNow provides current compliance positions across software publishers through interactive dashboards. Software asset managers always have up-to-date usage information on hand.

• Eliminate software waste and optimise license usage. Now software asset managers gain insight to employees’ actual usage of software. The system can identify when licenses are underutilised to make sure they are re-distributed to users who need them. If an employee leaves the company or changes roles, the system makes it easy to reclaim the license. 

Current products on the market typically can identify licensing issues but do little to help businesses resolve them. ServiceNow Software Asset Management allows organisations to go beyond traditional reporting by providing remediation options to fix non-compliance within a single System of Action.

It leverages data and automation capabilities already found in the Now Platform, including the CMDB, hardware Asset Management and Software Discovery. When combined with ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management, enterprises can expand to manage their home-grown applications, levels of utilisation and cost of maintenance to avoid duplication and ensure that the preferred application and version is being used.