#SAMISDEAD #LONGLIVESAM #softwareassetmanagement

2020 was a year that none of us imagined was even remotely possible, entire workforces moved from an office centric way of work, to full scale remote working in an unprecedented period of time.

All of the steps taken to enable productivity to continue did not happen easily...

• The rapid adoption of new technologies, Zoom, WebEx, Teams etc...
• Provisioning of additional datacentre capacity either on premise or in the cloud (aha we'll come to that in a little bit..)
• Laptops hurriedly procured and all the standard build software installed (and maybe some non standard too... ;) )

Yes, everything done by IT leaders and their teams to keep the wheels turning upon the on set of the pandemic was done with the best of intentions, quickly and to the best of everyone's abilities, perhaps not much thought was given to whether there were sufficient licenses available, but given the circumstances even Microsoft were being more than flexible to help customers (Microsoft Teams - Covid Response )

Now the rule of unintended consequences starts to kick in coming into 2021

Let's start in the old world of on premise software (yes despite the hype on cloud lot's of stuff still lives and breathes in your datacentres..)

Provisioned additional capacity in your virtualisation clusters? A few thoughts....

How does that impact on your VMware core based licensing?

Those SQL Enterprise 2 core packs aren't cheap...

Maybe you had your VMware affinity rules well configured and locked down to mitigate exposure on that Oracle Enterprise Database you added 2 years ago, but now that host has twice the capacity... Qui Bono

That guy who was pestering you about Oracle Java, who thought you had 1500 cores exposed, what is it now?

Not singling out any particular software vendor, they all come with their specific contractual T&C's , however the flexibility in the face of the pandemic to do whatever was needed and lack of proper governance and control, mixed in with every sales rep chasing their number for 2021 has all the makings of the perfect storm.

Hello software audit central 2021 ;)

Cloudy with a chance of wasted money...

On the other hand you may have made the leap to Azure / AWS / GCP for your primary datacentre workloads and not much remains on premise. So we're all gravy and there's no commercial audit risk?

Hmm not quite, leveraging Hybrid Use Rights to lower your Azure subscription costs, great, you absolutely should, but have you verified that you actually have the correct base license and active software assurance to enable this to actually happen? If not someone else might be asking you that question...

Perhaps you are a global operation and your workloads are critical and need to be available 365x24/7, but does Bob in DevOps new trial BI app with a SQL backend need to be as well?

Or could that be automated to power down after 6pm every night and not on at weekends? The meter is running just like your electricity or gas...

Or perhaps you think you don't need SAM because you've moved to Office365, this little gem is truly priceless..

• You've ensured that the correct O365 media has been used for every single Office install across the organisation?
• You have regular updates from HR around your actual employee starters / movers and leavers and are adjusting your O365 subscriptions accordingly?

So maybe you do need SAM after all?

It might not be so much of an inconvenience to start putting in place the right people, processes and technology to ensure that you have sufficient governance and control over your software spend and cloud consumption...

Just some food for thought, if you would like to have a chat about any of this please feel free to get in touch by message on here :)

Thank you for reading and hopefully you found it useful

Jonny