SAM Best Practices Workshop Like No Other

If you could have your software asset management (SAM) program analyzed for effectiveness by some of the world’s most knowledgeable SAM experts, what might they find?

 Is your SAM program’s scope too ambitious, are you lacking resources, are your tools up-to-date?

 Attendees at our Compliance Manager Summit, March 12-13, in San Francisco, will have such an opportunity in a two-hour-long workshop with Matt Marnell, director of enterprise solutions strategy at Flexera.

No, he’s not going to try to sell you on hiring Flexera to audit your SAM program. He’s going to share what Flexera has learned about SAM programs after more than 30 years and thousands of customers. Marnell’s expertise is on creating SAM strategies that are uniquely tailored to individual companies.

Learn from Flexera’s challenges and successes

“I want to go through a series of key learning points with this Compliance Manager Summit audience,” says Marnell. “Things like how to structure your project, how to provide the right level of reporting, what data is important and what’s not. The workshop is driven based on the group’s specific needs.”

A lot of Flexera’s SAM best practices are centered on building a realistic plan. But what’s realistic? “It’s a loaded term in a way,” Marnell admits. “It’s not so much that people have unrealistic expectations about what’s possible with SAM, it’s just that they often don’t fully appreciate that an effective SAM program is about what’s possible for them, given their resources, their scope and their needs.”

For example, SAM isn’t going to be front-of-mind for a small company with 100 seats, even though they will be hurt just as much when it comes to an audit or unbudgeted expense, says Marnell. “They may not care about certain vendors, they may not care about optimizing their licensing to the nth degree. Our best practices are focused on how companies can structure a SAM project that enables them to show continuous progress and show, very transparently, to stakeholders what it can accomplish and what it can’t accomplish and why.”

 Knowing why your SAM program is not successful—or not as successful as you’d like—is critical in defending your value proposition to upper management. Being able to point to specific gaps in staff, tools, expertise and more can make that audit conversation or that unexpected spend conversation less cringeworthy, says Marnell.

 “Whatever the outcomes are for your SAM program, with proper planning you’ll be able to show that you’re managing that initiative responsibly, reporting back regularly, highlighting any gaps and getting them closed, and not biting off more than you can chew,” he adds.

Join us in March at the Compliance Manager Summit for this unique workshop focused on your SAM program, and you can accurately manage and report license entitlements and inventory in the real world.   

 More than 40 sessions on everything from Oracle cloud licensing to effective contract negotiation await you at the Compliance Manager Summit. View the full agenda and register here.