Has your organization bought any Computer Aided Design software recently? Or high-end data science tools such as SPSS or SAS? If so, you’ll know that their licenses are expensive. And such examples are far from unique. Specialist high-end software is costly to acquire. But here’s another question. Is your organization buying such high-value applications cost-effectively? Because our guess is that the answer is ‘no.’ Time and again, we see expensive high-value applications deployed in a fragmented and inefficient manner across organizations’ IT estates. To the rescue: Software Portfolio Rationalization.

Is This Your Organization?

Do any of the following scenarios chime with your organizations’ experience?

• High-value applications bought over a period of time, in a fragmented manner, driven by individual users’ and functions’ needs. No central register of exactly who is using the high-value applications in question, or why, and with high-value applications installed at different version levels.
• High-value application purchases driven by individual users preferences, resulting in a proliferation of similar packages. In Computer Aided Design, you might find AutoCAD and SolidWorks to be in use at adjacent workstations—and in data analytics, SPSS and SAS might be in use at adjacent workstations.
• Multiple high value applications solutions and duplicated expense as the organization grew through acquisition, resulting in a proliferation of software tools and agreements with multiple vendors.

Software Portfolio Rationalization

The opportunity here is simply stated. Through software portfolio rationalization, it’s possible to greatly simplify the IT landscape in respect of these high-value applications.

Instead of multiple software tools all doing much the same thing, with high levels of overlap, a smarter policy is to standardize on a smaller number of tools, with less overlap—and possibly even standardizing on one single high-value application for a particular requirement.

And instead of multiple versions of a given high-value application, why not standardize on a single version—the latest, most up-to-date, and most capable, perhaps? Again, it’s the smarter thing to do.

Yet the prize here isn’t just simplification. By consolidating usage across fewer high-value applications, it’s possible to derive significant economies of scale, and drive harder bargains with software vendors.

The savings can be significant—very significant indeed.

The Facts You Need

The trick lies in understanding exactly which high-value applications are in use across the IT estate.

And here, Scalable Software’s Asset Vision can help. Asset Vision, Scalable Software’s intelligent agentless discovery tool, finds and catalogues hardware and software assets across the IT estate, irrespective of platform or location.

The result: you get the data with which to make meaningful software portfolio rationalization decisions.

With a couple of clicks, IT administrators can survey the entire IT estate, seeing not only every piece of software and metadata such as version number, but also data such as:

• Which software packages are installed
• Its publisher
• Its version number
• Who is using it
• At which precise workstation

Understanding what license rights the organization has purchased, how many instances of software are deployed on what type of devices is only part of the picture.

The key is to finding sizable cost savings and build a foundation of visibility that will provide ongoing support for IT cost management is to capture accurate, granular usage intelligence that gives details on how intensively users are using the software applications assigned to them. This doesn’t mean ‘did they launch an application?’ It requires usage data at the keystroke level to provide an understand as to how intensively they use the application.

The Right Software, the Right Decisions

In short, if the software is there, Asset Vision will find it. And won’t just find it, but will also discover and normalize all the data, and combine it with granular usage analytics to ensure you have the accurate insights that you need in order to make the correct software portfolio rationalization decisions, and drive down the cost of high-value application deployments.

In short, when a business needs facts about its IT estate, Asset Vision provides them—rapidly, accurately, and with low impact.

For intelligent, agentless discovery, and granular usage data, Asset Vision leads the pack. To learn more, request a demo of Asset Vision today.