Software Asset Management Best Practices—Policy, Process and Hardware Asset Management

Software asset management (SAM) best practice principles that companies should adopt include: Manage hardware assets effectively throughout the full asset life-cycle Define software application requirements (i.e. which applications, versions and editions should be purchased) Centralize purchasing and maintain a central license repository Collect hardware and software inventory (including physical and virtual machines) Reconcile installations aga…

March 25, 2011 Flexera

Software Asset Management Best Practices—Measuring Maturity

By Jill Powell To implement an optimized software asset management program, it is necessary to understand the maturity and effectiveness of your existing asset management processes. By reviewing the policies and processes already in place, an organization will be able to identify areas for improvement and/or resource gaps. This in turn will facilitate corrective action to reduce the costs and risks associated with the management of IT assets and …

March 18, 2011 Flexera

Oracle’s Magic Ratio

I was perusing Oracle’s global online price list1 for their Enterprise Edition products, and a few things jumped out. The Oracle Enterprise Edition database product and Enterprise Edition Options are priced in a ratio of 50 to 1 for processor based licenses to Named User Plus (“NUP”) licenses. This means that any combination of the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and multiple Enterprise Edition Options will also maintain this “Magic Ratio”. Th…

January 25, 2011 Flexera

Why a SKU is important to Software Asset Management

Background of the SKU Most folks are familiar with bar codes. Every time we go to the grocery store and check out, the cashier scans our groceries one at a time and the register automatically knows what we purchased, how much it is, and they probably even trigger when they need to reorder that item. Part of that bar code is the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit), which is a uniform method of tracking products sold. As the name implies, the SKU is intended …

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