Software spending is projected to grow 9.4 percent in 2018 to total $387 billion. Many organisations can cut spending on software by as much as 30 percent by implementing three software license optimisation best practices, according to research from Gartner, Inc.
One of three best practises suggested by Gartner can help you to cut software spending is recycling software licenses. Recycling is the recovery of unused license rights for reuse to avoid new license purchases. License recycling will reduce software spending as well as support and maintenance costs.
Recycling requires metering to spot unused, underused or misused software. For example, a user may have a piece of software installed but never actually use it — or perhaps the user only requires a viewer. SAM tools, and some client management tools, can provide this functionality.
Software License Recycling
But it’s well known that recycling requires strong process control. However, with many IT organisations at low maturity levels, most could cut their software spending by maturing their recycling and license optimisation processes and building them into their daily IT operational activities. They can prepare recycle software licenses by following six simple but important housekeeping activities:
- Know what software you have actually installed. To do this you will need an accurate inventory of your hardware and software assets.
- Match your installs against the licensing arrangements that you have in place with your software suppliers.
- Measure how many software licenses are actually used by your users (not what has been deployed).
- Compare the usage to the number of licenses you pay for and then run an optimisation calculation to ensure you are getting the most appropriate licensing model.
- Identify and uninstall the software that is not used.
- Renegotiate your software supply contracts based on what you need not what the software suppliers want you to buy.
IT professionals admit these six steps are not easy to implement and involve major amounts of manual processing and a complex exercise, but the potential savings are too large to ignore.
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