Changed software market dynamics mean the focus of SAM must respond to altered priorities

The provider lead shift of application business and delivery models to SaaS, in turn leads to a substantial change in software provider / client relationship, becomes stickier and alters the nature of risk.

As we reported last year – the myth that it is impossible to be out of compliance with SaaS needs to be addressed. The role SAM plays becomes even more vital when considering requirements to address cost escalation challenges, whilst also establishing if adoption of a cloud service will be, or is, successful.
In essence the view of SAM’s role must switch from a practice of managing license compliance, to measuring and managing consumption of provisioned services and functions.

First, in the context of not only SaaS, SAM provides the astute with a vehicle to understand which users or user groups will consume the functions being evaluated in advance of adoption.

Second, we should consider also that given SaaS providers are prone to withhold functionality for measuring consumption of their solution, it is essential that SAM tools are capable of effectively metering usage, thereby enabling both an actions to understanding of value derived and address any lag in adoption.

Thirdly, given potential for escalating cost our organization may incur, we should be mindful to identify value extracted through consumption and enable excessive subscriptions and shelfware to be eliminated.

Accordingly, we should see SaaS not as a measure to eliminate need for SAM as a governance function. We should however choose to strategically invest in the SAM function, ensuring the means for managing functional and quantitative usage of each SaaS solution adopted is in place to regulate and report on consumption.