The creation of an effective license position (ELP) is only the first step on your SAM journey. Whilst the ELP will help you maintain compliance, it will not actively help you reduce licensing costs, which is an important factor in ensuring a ROI on your SAM activities.

Software license optimization (or SLO as it is referred to by Gartner) helps ensure the maximum utilization of your licenses by minimizing license consumption whilst remaining compliant. This will allow you to reduce costs and ensure that in the event of a software vendor audit you will have no nasty surprises.

Product use rights

Two key components in optimizing your license position are understanding your user rights and monitoring the usage of installed software across your estate. Let’s start by looking at user rights.

The right to use your software derives from the license agreement. This will detail specifically how you are allowed to use it in different scenarios. Although there are many different use cases, there are a number of standard ones that are common across the major vendors like Microsoft and Adobe.

SOURCE: certero.com