What does Software Asset Management mean
SAM (Software Asset Management) is the administration of software assets, related processes and procedures. It is the part of IT asset management.
- Software asset management software (SAM Software) is used to document and manage the software licenses used by a business.
- SAM software manages the entire life cycle of the software which means the procurement, deployment, use, maintenance and disposal of software applications within an organization.
- Traditionally used to track software licences on local computers, many SAM tools have broadened their scope to include tracking SaaS assets as well.
Main features of Software Asset Management tool
License management
- Track and organize the number of licenses or subscription (SaaS) available to the organization
- Licence renewal management: Monitoring license validity dates, manage and track the licence renewal process for various apps, software, subscriptions, contracts, or licenses
- SaaS Subscription Management: Process of managing subscription lifecycle for a recurring SaaS
- Software inventory including software information, vendor, developer, version, path, and other
Software inventory, entitlement & assignment management
- Software entitlement and assignment process during employee onboarding
- Optimizing entitlements and consumption: The solution enables organizations to right-size their technology investments by aligning spend with business needs across software, cloud services, data center and mobile. Detailed technology use is mined to identify unused accounts, duplicate users and unnecessary, expensive subscriptions. Automatic categorization of hundreds of thousands of applications drives application rationalization by identifying overlapping technologies
- Software cost tracking
Contract management and compliance, software vendor relations
- Licence contracts
- SaaS Subscription Management
Software Patch & Maintenance Management
- Software maintenance
- Automates the deployment of software patches.
- The goal is to ensure that all computers and software are up to date and compliant with organizational security standards.
User access management
- Application control: Managing who and what can access certain software or certain areas of software.