With the worldwide spend on software due to hit $356 billion in 2017 (according to Gartner), the need to properly control and manage this expense is paramount. In the past IT departments have typically focussed on managing the hardware as this has been a much bigger proportion of their annual spend than software. Now, the pendulum has swung the other way and the software on a desktop or laptop device is usually worth much more than the device itself.

For a lot organizations managing their software is a new experience and many will follow the same path. Firstly, they set about understanding what they have got installed on their estate manually – after all if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. But, they soon discover that this is a laborious and time consuming task that will, in all likelihood, require information being collected from all over the organization. In fact it has been estimated that this can take up to 70% of the time.

Licensing information is immediately out of date

Collecting information from across the organization will be likely to give you many different sources of the truth and make it a complex task to analyze and reconcile this information enabling you to produce a base line and an Effective License Position (ELP). In many cases this will take months to complete and will be immediately out of date.

SOURCE: certero.com