Nathan Sethi
ITAM Delivery Team Leader
Here at Softcat we’ve been evolving our ITAM consultancy projects into a range of assessments focussed on providing intelligent recommendations to customers enabling them to optimise and transform their business.
The Evolution
Since inception, our team has been helping customers to understand their current position by delivering licensing baselines. Typically, in the past, these reviews were a reaction to an event of some kind - contact from a vendor perhaps or an impending acquisition. We have provided this discovery assessment to thousands of customers, helping them verify compliance.
Following these initial licensing positions, we started to see opportunities to use the output to really drive cost savings and efficiencies. We pivoted our services, and really focused on ensuring customers had full visibility and control of their software estate and were driving cost savings through optimisation – compliance then became a natural by-product.
Where are we now?
Our Asset Intelligence team has a wealth of experience in identifying optimisation opportunities by consolidating, re-harvesting underutilised software, recommending infrastructure changes, and ensuring organisations make use of the licensing efficiencies available to name a few examples.
We’ve started to concentrate on turning the data generated from the traditional SAM engagements into further opportunities for optimisation, whether it be a cost profiling exercise outlining how much you are spending on SQL licences, or right sizing Office 365 consumption.
One area we have seen great customer engagement is our Long Tail Assessment (LTAS) - the traditional focus has been on top spend high risk vendors, but the remaining ‘software tail’ is at risk of being neglected, or at least, not given enough attention.
By getting a handle on the application tail, organisations can save money and increase security. Identifying exactly what is installed is only the first step. LTAS interrogates inventory data of the entire desktop estate and captures data on installed applications, including what they’re used for and how often they are being used. They are then categorised into technology ‘pillars’, based on the type and category of the software. This identifies applications that may be performing similar roles within an organisation and groups them into these pillars for scrutiny. Additional fields can be included to see whether applications have the latest patch or are out of support.
New Assessments
We have also created new additional assessments to support digital transformation for organisations.
The approach is still the same, we are analysing our customers’ estates through our discovery and optimisation stages, but we are making use of the data to really drive transformation projects and support key business objectives through actionable intelligence.
Let’s look at an example of how we are using the data to help customers explore transformation opportunities for Cloud – currently a hot topic for most organisations:
Public Cloud
We provide several cloud migration assessments that review a server’s current configuration versus resource consumption to map the appropriate server profiles within the different public cloud providers.
Uniquely, once we’ve assessed the infrastructure, we then run application scoring to identify the suitability of migrating certain applications to the cloud.
With these new cloud assessments, along with the pre-existing licensing expertise across the team, we can provide our customers with a comprehensive insight to their potential cloud migration options.
Office 365
The Office365 Profiling Adoption Assessment is designed to provide an in-depth analysis of a customer’s Office 365 subscription requirements. Profiling end users will help identify optimisation and cost saving opportunities when considering purchasing and allocating Office365 subscriptions
Conclusion
As we’ve seen there has been a clear evolution of the traditional software asset management services. What we have found is customers want to not only gain maximum value through visibility and optimisation, but also use that information, that intelligence to drive transformation and progress – and Softcat is perfectly placed to assist
If you are interested in finding out more about any of our ITAM assessments or how we may be able to assist your organisation, please contact your Account Manager, or complete the form below.