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The adoption of cloud-based and SaaS applications has skyrocketed, leaving legacy on-premises software behind. These cloud software solutions are pivotal in managing various business operations.
However, the widespread availability and universal usage of these assets are driving many organizations into a precarious situation.
The absence of a robust procurement approval framework has resulted in unilateral software license purchases by employees, leading to inefficiencies and potential compliance concerns.
This is where Software Asset Management (SAM) becomes invaluable.
SAM is particularly crucial for large organizations that use a larger SaaS application stack. By implementing SaaS asset management best practices, businesses can easily manage their software assets, and optimize their SaaS spend.
Why is IT Asset Management Software necessary?
For companies that rely heavily on SaaS applications, Software Asset Management is an indispensable component of the overall IT strategy. The structured approach to software monitoring and optimization benefits such organizations in several ways.
A good SAM program begins with unraveling the intricate complexities lurking within the IT infrastructure. This involves conducting a full sweep of your existing applications, their features, pricing, renewal dates, and usage across the organization.
SAM can help you identify the number of licenses you have for each software vendor, pinpoint software redundancies, and uncover empty or unused features of each application.
The visibility that Software Asset Management tools provide allows you to make well-informed and strategic decisions regarding each application in your IT ecosystem.
With all the information gleaned from your SAM process, you can effortlessly eliminate duplicate licenses, renegotiate favorable agreements with vendors, and plan a budget for license renewals.
SAM is crucial for organizations to effectively mitigate compliance risks, which can otherwise result in hefty penalties and legal consequences.
By implementing a robust software asset management strategy, businesses can track their software usage, licenses, terms and conditions, and external compliance obligations.
This enables key stakeholders to proactively address gaps or discrepancies, reducing the risk of financial or reputational damage.
Asset maintenance
IT asset management software will help you manage your software assets like licenses, contracts, and renewals easily. You can identify the license utilization, keep your contracts secured and renew your contracts on time using the right SAM solution.
We have compiled a list of the best tools to help streamline your Software Asset Management process.
6 best Software Asset Management tools in 2023
CloudEagle
CloudEagle tops the software asset management list with an arguably robust offering of SaaS application, license, and renewal management features. The CloudEagle platform incorporates a genius AI-centric approach that seamlessly takes care of every aspect of IT management.
CloudEagle’s integration library enables the platform to provide 100% visibility into your SaaS applications and the licenses you purchased for each application.
You can check and identify the usage for each license, harness unused licenses, and re-allocate them to users who may utilize them better.
Everything you need to track and manage licenses is available on a single dashboard for easy asset management.
Cost optimization
One of the standout features of the CloudEagle SAM tool is its AI-powered analytic capabilities. Leveraging machine learning algorithms, it analyzes software usage patterns and helps you reduce costs by eliminating duplicate and redundant apps.
CloudEagle can also help you with compliance management through 100% SaaS visibility, ensuring your organization complies with licensing agreements and industry regulations.
It provides real-time visibility into license usage and expiration dates, enabling you to address any compliance issue before it becomes problematic.
Sophie Wang at Wefunder shares how CloudEagle helped her team save on SaaS spending through effective negotiations and daily spend management. The dashboard provides detailed spending insights and automated tracking, supported by expert negotiators for vendor discussions and tool recommendations. Know the full story here.
Contract and vendor management
Another notable aspect of CloudEagle is its contract and vendor management module. The platform provides a centralized repository for managing software contracts and vendors. This makes it easier for the team to verify the contracts and make the right optimization decisions quickly.
Get rid of your spreadsheets, use CloudEagle as your source of truth, and keep your contracts secure.
CloudEagle can extract all the necessary contract metadata, including renewal dates, and create a renewal calendar. You can set up the renewal workflows to send reminders 90 days ahead of renewal deadline.
Use workflows to stay ahead of your renewals and track all renewals at a single point. Collect necessary usage data and pricing benchmarks, renegotiate with the vendors to right-size your licenses, and renew your contract on time using CloudEagle.
Due to missed SaaS contract deadlines, Falkonry faced unnecessary costs and app downtime. As their app portfolio grew, they chose CloudEagle to automate renewals, replacing their inefficient spreadsheet system.
CloudEagle's reminders ensured prompt renewals, leading to cost savings and improved operational efficiency.
Read the inspiring success story here.
Additional features
- Automate user provisioning and deprovisioning
- Simplify SaaS buying with procurement workflows
- Custom reports for easy app and financial analysis
- Expert negotiation services to streamline software assets
- AI-powered vendor recommendation engine
- Pricing benchmarks.
Pricing
The Starter pack is priced at $1000 per month. The pricing varies based on your annual software spend.
Flexera
Flexera stands out as the best asset management software, consistently holding its own in the competitive landscape. What sets Flexera apart is its impressive range of features, complemented by unbeatable reporting functionalities.
Flexera One enables you to oversee your entire software repository, spanning both on-premises and SaaS cloud applications. Encompassed within this package are groundbreaking features like consolidated spend analytics, precise software spend waste calculations, assisted cloud migration and integration, and workable negotiation strategies.
Pricing
Flexera offers custom priced packages based on your specific requirements.
Snow Software
Snow Software’s feature-packed platform is supported by one of the largest software discovery databases on the market.
Snow's key strength lies in its data-backed insights, which help reduce complexity and prevent application sprawl. The platform offers comprehensive tech visibility and optimizes cloud costs by seamlessly combining agentless and agent-based methods. These powerful approaches are designed to simplify and streamline your IaaS and SaaS operations.
Snow Software uses a combination of a software discovery database, automated discovery capabilities, and diverse data collection methods to ensure that you have a comprehensive understanding of your software assets.
Pricing
Snow Software offers a range of products, including Spend Optimizer, Adoption Tracker, and Risk Monitor. Prices can be requested on their website.
Certero
The Certero Enterprise Management System streamlines your SaaS and cloud-based assets as well as your hardware resources. Comprehensive visibility into your SaaS assets enables you to track and monitor their usage, costs, and compliance.
Certero offers a truly unified SAM platform to cater to every organizational need: it garners valuable insights into your license positions, streamlines the audit process with automation, reduces shadow IT, and optimizes your technology spend.
Pricing
Contact the team.
Infraon
Infraon's software asset management solution provides organizations with a centralized platform to monitor, manage and optimize their IT infrastructure effectively.
From network devices and servers to storage systems and virtual environments, Infraon's platform covers a wide range of infrastructure components, ensuring comprehensive visibility and control.
With its advanced capabilities, the Infraon platform offers real-time monitoring of hardware components, giving analytics on performance, availability, and resource utilization.
This proactive monitoring approach allows organizations to identify and address issues before they impact critical business operations.
Pricing
A free trial is available. Contact the team to learn more about pricing.
Freshservice
Freshservice is regarded as one of the best asset management software as it boasts an impeccable array of features designed to right-size your tech management and keep it running without constant manual intervention.
The Freshservice experience is geared towards ensuring that each department in your organization has its software dependencies mapped and optimized for maximum ROI. The platform has a rigorous security and incident management protocol that steps in when you encounter a bug.
Features like workflow management, a unified service catalog, and smart integrations make Freshservice a worthy contender for your SAM requirements.
Pricing
The starter plan costs $17.00 per agent per month, and the enterprise plan costs $107 per agent per month. They have an extensive pricing structure. Visit their website to learn more.
Conclusion
There you go. We've listed some of the best software asset management tools to help manage your software assets. Use these tools to right-size your licenses and streamline your contract management process effectively.
CloudEagle tops the list because of its comprehensive features covering the entire SaaS lifecycle, not just the software assets. Flexera and Freshservice are a few more IT asset management software options to explore if managing software assets is your only objective.
So, what do you think about the list? Did we miss any software asset management tools?
To start managing your software assets right away, book a demo now!
Frequently asked questions
1. What are software assets?
Software assets encompass the digital components of an organization’s technology infrastructure. Some common examples of software assets include software programs, software licenses, data rights, contracts, software development agreements, applications, libraries, scripts, plugins, and modules.
2. What is Software Asset Management (SAM)?
Software Asset Management (SAM) is a tool that manages and optimizes the acquisition, integration, usage, maintenance, and elimination of software assets within a business organization. SAM is a subset of IT asset management, an integral cost optimization process, and the strategic governance of a business’s entire technology lifecycle.
3. How do I choose the best software asset management tool?
To choose the best software asset management tool, consider factors like the size of your company, the number of software licenses, the complexity of your IT infrastructure, and, most of all, the tool's ability to integrate with your existing ecosystem seamlessly.
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