As part of this month’s SAMPanel debate, we are very happy to welcome back to the SAMPanel Rory Canavan, Owner of SAMCharter, who we asked, “Looking ahead, what are your predictions for the SAM market?”
Below was his response;
This is a great question – with the advent of the cloud, some folks had ideas that this was the end of SAM; I don’t think we are there yet, but I do think there will come a shift away from counting installs and a move towards counting services.
Equally, I don’t think it will be the software vendors who will be calling for vendor audits – over time I fully expect companies/end user organisations to take software vendors/providers to task for down time and failures in delivery of service.
That though, will be preceded by an ever dizzying spiral of vendor audits used to drive clients away from on premise installs to cloud provision.
The days of cloud will also be an interesting time for Software Vendors, as once customers have made the switch to as-a-service (in whatever format it may be) the lucrative spectre of a vendor audit will be no more, so software vendors will have to think of alternative means to make up the revenues that these once-profitable forays generated.
I also think SAM will start to morph into adjacent IT disciplines; service management and information security being the two most obvious choices. So that when certification and education is revised to accommodate this step, conducting SAM activities won’t be primarily driven through licence compliance, but rather the service management and information security benefits that best practice SAM can generate.
The internet of things also promises to offer interesting food for thought. Returning to how software vendors might look to recoup vendor audit revenue, I suspect clauses will start to be added to contracts that will stipulate financial levies are due if IoT devices are bought on premise and are then caught interacting with an as-a-service offering – whether the end user/company was aware of it or not.
Finally, I will expect to see plenty of articles and blogs about how to exit the cloud!
About the Author:
Rory Canavan | Owner of SAM Charter | Twitter | LinkedIn
With a technical background in business and systems analysis, Rory has a wide range of first-hand experience advising numerous companies and organisations on the best practices and principles pertaining to software asset management. This experience has been gained in both military and civil organisations, including the Royal Navy, Compaq, HP, the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) and several software vendors.
I agree with Rory’s point of view. Especially when he says we’ll see a crescent spiral of vendors using audits to push customers to the cloud model. Adobe is already doing this in Brazil. I’ve assessed some customers here in Brazil and this position is very clear and crystal as a Adobe strategy.