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Overview
License Recycling is becoming an increasingly popular, proactive strategy for reducing future software license fees. License Recycling, sometimes refereed to as License Harvesting, is simple in concept but tricky to implement for both political and technical reasons. Essentially, License Recycling is the process of identifying copies of software, within the managed estate, that are underused and making those copies available to individuals, or environments where genuine need can be established – thereby avoiding the cost of an additional license to support the genuine need. Recycling licenses in this way obviously reduces the amount of money spent on new licenses for any particular software title; even in medium sized estates the scale of this saving is regularly measured in millions of dollars. The challenges to effective License Recycling are as follows:
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Accurately identifying copies of software that are genuinely not being used |
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Automating the process of recycling to the point where the savings are materially greater than the cost to recycle |
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Managing the cross-charging/reimbursement issues for recycling across departmental budget boundaries |
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Cost-effectively distinguishing between low-use and limited use of titles to identify downgrade opportunities |
How Survey™ Helps
Survey provides unique software usage tracking technology that can unambiguously identify whether the licensed users are effectively using their enabled software applications. Survey can do this for all classes of application; traditional rich-client tools, web-based applications, and applications delivered via Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Traditional methods of identifying usage, such as manual surveys or usage extracted from Asset Management tools can be costly to implement and dangerously inaccurate.
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Survey’s raw data capture of application usage information, is augmented by integration with software purchase history and sophisticated data analysis techniques designed to present the information in a manner that rapidly identifies the areas where license recycling can be most effective.
Survey can quickly pinpoint those users of ‘Professional’ class suites than only need ‘Standard’ versions, and also users of full suites that need only ‘readers’ or ‘reporting’ versions.
Integration with Active Directory enables the information to be mapped to the organizational structure with no effort and support for configuration management tools such as Scalable’s WinINSTALL and Microsoft’s SCCM, complete the recycling process.
Microsoft’s has embraced License Recycling as part of the SAM Optimized component of its Infrastructure Optimization initiative. Details of how Survey can help move companies towards getting an Infrastructure Optimization classification of ‘dynamic’ with the SAM Optimized sub-category can be found here.
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