How to prove ITAM & SAM value to your organization

Proving ITAM value means translating operational data—such as license usage and compliance—into measurable business outcomes like cost savings, risk reduction and improved efficiency.

Many teams focus on reporting data rather than presenting insights in business terms. Executives care about financial outcomes, not operational metrics.

A Value Discovery Assessment uses your organization’s data to identify optimization opportunities, quantify value and highlight actions required to realize it.

By proactively managing compliance, monitoring entitlements and preparing for audits, ITAM teams can avoid costly penalties and demonstrate value through cost avoidance.

A value realization plan outlines the steps required to turn value opportunities into measurable outcomes—prioritizing actions, assigning ownership and tracking progress over time.

Nathan Stevens 00:04 - 04:31

Alright. Welcome everyone that is joining us today.

So just give a couple of seconds for everyone to get familiar with, navigating Goldcast and getting into the session today. As everyone is joining us, just a reminder, we encourage questions during this event today.

So please post your questions in the chat, and we'll answer those as we go through and in flight as well. And at the end, we'll cover up some of the questions with the guest speakers today as well.

So, once again, thank you everybody for joining us today. It's lovely to have, you all here into today's topic, ITAM SAM value, and also about one of those things quite commonly asked that is how to elevate the conversation, making that impact visible, to the c level, to the director level, within your businesses to understand that this this valuable piece of, you know, capability, you know, the work that you guys are doing day in, day out, is incredibly important and valuable to your business.

Today, I'm joined by Patrick and Winnie, some very intelligent people from our customer outcome organization who are going to talk about this topic. So, I'm gonna go through, just introduce us today, hand it over to them, and then cover that with the questions at the end.

For those that are joining us for the first time, you may not have known, but this is actually the eleventh in this series. So, we've done a whole range of different topics over the last ten months.

Ash is gonna put those within the chat for you today, so if you are keen on catching up these thirty minute bite sized chunks from the previous ten months, please feel free to engage with that content, and a fantastic set of guest speakers throughout, those particular sessions. Now just looking at the next three months today, obviously, proven ITAM value.

So, you know, getting down to why the value matters and how to transform that into a leadership level impact, and that's what we're all here to learn more about today. Next month, we're gonna focus in on FinOps and, in particular, the metrics that matter.

So how do we go through and identify as part of your FinOps, program of work, what are the things that are relevant to report on, to measure, to show improvements and benchmarking across that particular program of work? As we push into August, we're going to the biggest topic of them all, but prompt pay repeat. So, I've started to look at the economics of tokenomics and really dig into AI and AI cost management.

So as always, if there's topics that you are particularly interested in, please do reach out, suggest something that you may wanna see on the agenda, and we can get the right people in to talk to you, throughout the Flexera business and cover that in these bite sized thirty-minute chunks. All right.

So just to preempt, the session today, as always, we're in this market at the moment where cloud cost is on the rise. So, whether that's cloud spend, SaaS spend, AI, these three are the main categories of increased spend.

You know, we've called this the tipping point last year, but we're really into this phase now where, you know, 47 , 51% increase across, the those traditional cloud domains, if I can call them that now, into the AI spend, which is absolutely exploding. So, this is where we focus on a lot of the content that you see in this webinar series, focus on how we improve and manage this and help you, the customers, really get control of the spend associated in each of these categories.

Now today's a little bit different in terms of where we're going to cover in terms of the platform. It's a little bit more conceptual than abstract in terms of not really in particular touching a point, but they're fundamental tools on how to drive value and have that value conversation.

And it's gonna touch on multiple areas of the platform, but I won't dive into this too much. What I will do, though, is hand over to our first case speaker, Patrick.

There we go. Fantastic transition.

Thank you, Patrick, and take you through what this means for you.

Patrick Phillips 04:31 - 11:19

Thank you very much, Nathan, and welcome, everyone. I'm gonna pose a question, and it's probably a question that you've had in the past.

And it's often it comes from your CFO. So, imagine if your CFO calls you right now and asks that question, what value did our technology investment deliver last year? Now we all know that, you know, yourself and your teams, you're creating value every day , but often that's buried in the minutiae.

It's buried in the dashboards. It's the operational detail that your CF, your CTO, your CIO and your CEO are not interested in.

So today, what we're gonna be focusing on is how do you actually raise up the work that you're doing to present it back to the people that need to understand the value that you're generating day in and day out within the organization. So hopefully, by the end of this time for both myself and Winnie, drawing on our experience, sharing our experience with customers, you'll be able to answer the question, how can I create value? How can I create impact for the customers? So, if we move to the next slide and this is where I think this is more of a why question.

So, these are pretty big numbers, but if you think about it, this represents almost one in two customers we've identified have paid more than $1,000,000 in software audit fines in the last year. Now the source of that is the Flexera State of ITAM report.

We publish it every year. If you don't get access to it, please reach out because there's very important information that's shared there.

But for those organizations that are taking a proactive approach and managing these audits, that's a real way that you can demonstrate the value because you're proving ITAM value by your avoiding. So maybe you're part of that 55% that didn't get the million-dollar fine.

So, again, it's about how do you create impact for you to your C level, your C suite, the executive level as well. And today, we're gonna cover that.

So, if we move to the next slide, Nathan, how do we turn data into wisdom? How do we make sure we can prove it? How do you make sure we can repeat it? You know, it's creating the impact that your team is doing and working hard to do every single day. You may have a team.

It may be you as an individual. So how do you make sure you earn your seat at the table, that you're talking the language of the C level? Because the C level don't want the minutiae.

They wanna see in very concise, descriptive language in their language. So, CFO, it's about money.

They wanna see it in their language on how you've created value. So that's what we're gonna attempt to do today, data information knowledge wisdom, value discovery assessment and the value realization plan.

So let's start with data, information, knowledge and wisdom and maybe talk a little bit about why most ITAM programs stop at information. So if we think about what this is and we'll go into a little bit more detail in this next slide.

Sorry, Nathan. If we can move to the next slide.

Thank you. If you think about each of those components as a hierarchy, so data is the raw signal.

So, it's the bits, it's the bytes, it's the numbers, it's entitlements. It's all these little pieces of info of data that you need to actually interpret.

Now this is where our platform does a great job. It actually puts context to that data.

It actually gives you insights and discovers trends and gaps, optimization and that sort of stuff. Our platform also can actually enhance the knowledge aspects of bringing your own knowledge, but also the inbuilt knowledge within our platform.

But as Nathan said, today isn't about talking about each of the different pieces of our platform. It's about, again, you being able to create impact.

So why do we stop at information? Because I think that's where our comfort zone is. And the way I like to describe it, and I heard this today and I'm sure you've heard it before, but it really resonated with me.

Information is where we're comfortable because we're comfortable reporting the news. But if you think about it, if we go and apply our knowledge and experience and the insights that we have, we start moving to wisdom.

And wisdom is where your insights provide the right decision at the right time to unlock value. So instead of reporting the news, you're creating the news.

You're translating that information into something that can be digested and understood by the people that can make decisions. So again, often in my experience, when I'm talking to ITAM teams, regardless of maturity, they feel comfortable at the information stage.

Here's a dashboard. You know, here's a report.

But how do you actually recommend? How do you actually take that information and act on it? So that's the four layers, the climb that we're gonna do as a team. So, let's have a look at a practical example, and this is a real case.

So, the data, I've got 12,400 licenses across 38 vendors sitting in my platform. That's a lot of data.

Through normalization you know, the contextualization of the data, you start saying, okay. Well, there's 3,100 unused pieces of software for the last ninety days.

I know as an experienced ITAM person, there's optimization concentrate on my top three vendors for the upcoming renewals. I'm gonna be prepared.

I'm gonna have all the information I need to be in the best position to negotiate for that renewal. So, I use my knowledge.

I use my experience on how I can actually take that information and use it to my advantage. That unlocked a $4,200,000 removal of costs and renewals over those three vendors.

So if I'm a CFO, I want to hear that message. I wanna hear the $4,200,000.

I don't need to understand that we've got 3,100 unused pieces of software in the system. I wanna understand what you've recommended and what you've been able to achieve.

And I'm sure you as your team have got plenty of examples of where you've actually shown that value. How do you ensure that you keep that, impact or that, you're visible? It's about making sure you communicate the story back to those c levels so you have that seat at the table and you're seen as a valuable contributor.

So that's sort of a speed run through data information knowledge wisdom. There's a lot more around that, but I think that conceptually, this is something that is gonna support your ability.

What we're gonna do now, I'm gonna ask Winnie to come on screen, and she's gonna talk about value discovery assessment. Over to you, Winnie.

Wenny Ong 11:19 - 16:08

Thank you, Patrick. So, yes, let's now move from concept into action.

And this is where value discovery assessment or VDA is going to come into the picture. So to start with, let's think of FDA, FDA as your first thirty days that's going to, shape your entire value realization journey.

And the idea of FDA is to answer one question, which is where is the value in your environment, and how do we prove it? And in order to do that, we are going to follow a simple framework. I call it DRIVE.

And this is also the differentiator of VDA. Why it is different? It's because, well, first, it is data driven.

We are incurring the EDA based on your number, what we see in your environment. So when we are going to talk about a potential of cost saving of 20%, for example, it's not based on a generic benchmark.

It's going to be based on the data that we see from your environment. The second one is relatable.

So we are going to translate the insights into what matters to you, your business priorities, right, in terms of cost, risk, compliance. And then I is illustrative.

So, as we know, like, the data, we have a lot of data. Sometimes it can be overwhelming.

So, with VDA, we are trying to make it into clear visuals that can clearly highlight or call out, the story that we would like to tell. And then value focus, where we are going to quantify each of the insights, whether it's an outcome in dollar value in terms of, cost saving or maybe, time efficiency.

And then last but not least, this is the most important, actually, is really the idea of EDA is really to leave you better equipped. So, by, with the EDA, you will be able to, tell where the value potential are, what kind of action that you will need to do, and then how to realize the value eventually.

So if we're going to the next slide, this is one of one example of the value discovery assessment, that we deliver. So as you can see over here, we are trying to stitch that story from what you have, in terms of visibility.

Like, for example, over here, we can see the inventory, the application, and then we use the charts to make it, easy to understand, and we choose the chart that will actually highlights the things which is important for the stakeholders. Other than that, you will also be seeing that we are highlighting things that can be an action items, things such as devices that are still not inventoried, virtual machines that are not mapped to the host because it's going to impact your, compliance calculation, for example.

So we highlight the action items. And then eventually, we are going to translate it into, the insights of the potential value.

For example, on the lower right hand, you can see the rationalization potential. We are highlighting things like, oh, we have, 2,000 applications installed in your environment, but each of them only have less than 25 installation.

Then we can talk about what does that means. If you are an organization with, let's say, 9,000 or 10,000 employees, having these installations, which is only, like, maybe one or two, most likely, it will mean that these installations are randomly downloaded.

It's not an enterprise approved applications. Someone just download it.

Or it is an application, like a leftover application that's supposed to be clean up, but it's still staying there. So VDA is going to highlight all of this thing, and then we are going to enrich it with the recommendations to paint the whole value journey for you.

So, the next slide. This is what it looks like in practice.

So, we did a recent value discovery assessment for one of Australian healthcare customers. And in that assessment, we surfaced a potential optimization of $21,000,000 So while the number may catch your attention, the important thing that we would like to highlight over here is that we are using their own data.

It is aligned to their own business priorities, and we are focusing this on the value realization. We don't just stop by showing the data.

We, we go and highlight what are the things that they can follow-up with to realize those value. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Patrick again.

Patrick Phillips 16:08 - 23:48

Hi. It's me again.

Look. Thank you very much for that, Winnie.

And I think understanding the value potential is the first step because understanding the potential facilitates action. So, I'm sure that, health organizations seeing that opportunity of $21,000,000 there's a lot of action tied to that now.

So, what we're gonna talk about now is the value realization plan. This is something that you'd work with your solution success manager or your digital customer success manager to actually turn that potential into realized value.

It's actually putting dates around when you're going to actually achieve it. So, it's from discovery, the potential, to delivery of the realization.

So, if we move to the next slide. So, if you wanna conceptualize this, everybody knows thirty, sixty, ninety days, but this is about prioritization.

Another concept that sorry, Nathan.

But trigger happy there.

So, this is about, you know, setting some priorities for yourself. And another concept that people often use is the Moscow approach, must have, should have, could have, won't have now because our time is finite.

So, what is the most important thing? So, once you've got the value potential identified through the value discovery assessment, it allows you to prioritize. And here's some examples.

Maybe you stabilize by identifying what are the top three risks. What about big five vendors that we need to focus on? What are the quick wins I can deliver back to the CIO or the CFO to facilitate my seat at the table? Maybe optimize is the next step.

You know, taking that example of 21,000,000, identifying where waste can be removed, making sure that everyone in your organization that touches that is informed and they understand the reasons that you're reharvesting and all those, wonderful, operational activities, which then transitions into the final piece. Now your value realization plan will be unique to you, but there will be some consistencies.

There will be some things around cost avoidance, cost savings, risk mitigation. All of those are standard input into the security organization.

All of these are what is important to you, what are your priorities, and then you put a plan around that with expected dates of delivery. So that's an important piece.

So how do you measure that success? So, if we move to the next slide. So, there's two ways of measuring things.

So, when you think about, the KPIs you have, think about are they a leading indicator or are they a lagging indicator? So, if you think if you look at each of these and I think that the guiding principle for all of us in ITAM is you only pay for software when you need it and you don't pay for any more than you don't use. So that's an important aspect.

So, if you think about if I'm measuring compliance risk trending, I'm doing my regular internal ELP effective license position audit runs as a preventative. You know that you can see your compliance position improving.

But if all you measure at the end of it is how much have I paid in audit fines and hopefully you're not part of that 45% and paid over a million dollar, if you're paying audit fines, it's too late. Renewal readiness, you know, ensuring your procurement team has all the information in front of them so they're only gonna pay for what you're currently using.

If you're measuring that and you're doing optimization and making sure, you know, your app rationalization approach is happening within this process, that's an important leading indicator. Renewal overruns.

If you paid more than you expected to pay because you were underprepared, you know, that overpaying is confirmed. Again, a lagging indicator.

Savings identified and that can be through app rationalization. You know, I've got a 100 PDF type products.

I'm gonna standardize on two. I can save on these others.

And there's many, many examples I'm sure you have in your own organization where you have this SaaS explosion where you've got so many different billable, payable, services that may be underutilized, and they're doing the same job of other, software that you are standardized. So have a look at that.

Measure that before it actually happens. Because if it's unused license spend, you know, that's a missed opportunity.

Optimization actions underway. You wanna make sure you're signaling about the activity that you're doing to create value.

So, you're taking yourself from that information stage, applying knowledge to open that wisdom and unlock value instead of having to justify ROI on a piece of software that you spent money on, but you can't quantify the return on investment. So that's a very important aspect.

So how do we actually work this? And if we move to the next slide. So, part of our commitment as Flexera is we have this continuous engagement with our customer.

It's the customer engagement framework where we will be there to support you right through this. But I wanna look at it slightly differently.

I wanna look at it from the from your perspective as the customer. So, if you think about discover to validate, to succeed, to agree, it's a continuum.

It's continuous. It's repeatable.

It's all about proving value at all times. It's not a one off project.

What you do day in, day out is about creating value every day and being able to report that back to those people that need to understand because that's the impact that you can create. So, by wrapping data information, knowledge, and wisdom, the value discovery assessment, the value realization plans all within this loop, you're gonna be visible to leadership on a continuous basis.

It's sustained alignment. You know, the fact that you're aligning your output around value is gonna align very closely to what the leadership is trying to achieve as an organization.

So here, it's all about demonstrated value, predictable rhythm, clear, credible, hard to underestimate. That's the message for ITAM because, as I said, you want to be creating the headlines.

You don't want to be reporting the headlines. So, if we move to the next slide.

So, in summary, our platform is very capable, but the product is not the be all and end all. It's software isn't the deliverable.

Wisdom is the product is the platform for the outcome. The outcome is what justifies the work that you do, and that's the thing that you need to understand.

With our tools and your knowledge and experience, you open up the opportunity to create wisdom which unlocks value. So, thank you.

So, to the next slide, we have an offer for you. And I'll give everyone a moment to get their phones out and scan that, and I know we're gonna share the link as well.

So, the offer is to provide you with a free of charge value discovery assessment and share with you and as, Wenny has shared the drive. So, using your own data to provide, an insight to value potential within your organization and then working with your solution success manager or your digital customer success managers to help you build out that value realization plan.

And then that will set you on the path to continuously demonstrating value within your organization. So please take us up on the offer.

Scan that. It'll take you to a Microsoft form, fill out the details, and then we'll be in contact with you over the next weeks to book in your time, to do the value discovery assessment.

So, on that note, I'm gonna hand back to Nathan. Thank you very much for your time.

Nathan Stevens 23:48 - 24:41

Thank you, Patrick, and thank you, Wendy, for the insightful session. I might just get both of you back on stage and we can, go through some questions as well.

Please feel free to reach out. The QR codes, they're linked to each of our LinkedIn profiles.

Please feel free to connect with us and engage on the topics today or something that you wanna see because, more than happy to talk through, the space that we're in, the excitement that's, coming up in the future as well. So just on that, if there are any other questions, please send them through now.

It's not too late, but I've got a couple questions that I do wanna ask, Patrick and Wendy here. But, you know, we spoke about the BDA.

This is a great initiative and something very valuable, for our customers to engage with us. What do you see some of the prerequisites for getting prepared for such an activity?

Patrick Phillips 24:41 - 24:47

Look, I think that's a Winnie question. Winnie, if you can come off mute, you can handle that one, I think.

Wenny Ong 24:47 - 25:18

Yes. So, the way we build the value discovery assessment, again, we're using your data.

So we will need to get or extract some of the information from your platform. It can be, like, in a form of exported report.

Depending on which platform that you're using, we will have a list of, reports that we will need to build the value discovery assessment. I think I'll probably, share the list, after the session as well.

And then,.

Patrick Phillips 25:18 - 25:19

Yeah.

Wenny Ong 25:19 - 25:35

We are basically going to use your reports and then we feed it into, like, this Power BI. So, it is easy for you.

You can also play around with the dashboard, check more details about the information that we are highlighting.

Nathan Stevens 25:35 - 25:39

Awesome. Patrick, anything else to add on that one?

Patrick Phillips 25:39 - 26:07

Look. I think the key thing is how does it become a repeatable process? So, Winnie's invested a lot of time building this value discovery assessment and every customer that we've run this with, it's been very positive feedback because it's surfaced information that they didn't they didn't know.

And, again, you know, to harp on it, it's that value potential that really unlocks, you know, the next steps, the actions required. So, and Wendy's done a great job with those value discovery assessments.

Nathan Stevens 26:07 - 26:29

Yeah. It's too good of an offer to pass up.

So, you know, I think everyone will appreciate the opportunity to engage on it. Okay.

Another question from me. So, we spoke, briefly at the end there about the VRP.

So, Patrick, can you just describe to us how do our current customers engage in in one of these?

Patrick Phillips 26:29 - 28:28

Yeah. And, look, for those that have a solution success manager, I'm sure you've already had conversations around the value realization plan, but it's a very programmatic approach.

The first thing that we wanna understand is the reasons you've bought this, solution is to solve problems. And in our terminology, you've got some targeted outcomes that you're trying to achieve that you've used to justify the budget to invest in Flexera.

We take those targeted outcomes and we make sure they're still a priority for you. So when we're delivering the solution to you, we visit the targeted outcomes again.

But the step that we take in the value realization plan is, okay, so the targeted outcomes are the future state that you're aiming for. What's your current state? What are the problems you're currently facing today? And what are what's required to get you from that current state to that future state of value? And the tasks and steps between current state to future state is what forms the value realization plan.

And as I said, your value realizing realization plan will be unique to you, but there's a lot of consistencies that we see. And sometimes if you miss something, we can bring to bear our experience and say, well, have you considered this as an option? So it is a collaborative approach to build out that value realization plan.

So we take the targeted outcomes or the value potential and actually put action and effort around it. Now depending on your own capability or your own capacity, you can work with, your nominated partners.

We have a very strong partner network we cooperate with. They help our customers day in and day out to realize value, or you can work with my team as well in the deliver and the succeed, aspects of our organization.

So the VRP living document, it doesn't sit there. It should be revisited on a regular basis and your solution success managers are engaged to talk to you about your VRP on a regular basis.

Nathan Stevens 28:28 - 29:25

Awesome. I appreciate that, Patrick.

So just as a reminder, just to wrap up today, please look out for the registration links for our next session in July, FinOps metrics that matter. And also shortly following that one, probably the topic on everybody, you know, after the FinOps x announcement last week around AI cost management.

So we're gonna take the opportunity on the August 20 there to dive into the detail around that topic and go through the economics and tokenomics and look at, you know, large language models, tokens, spend and then contribute to what users wear and how those are consumed. So please watch this space, and thank you once again to Patrick and Wendy for joining me today.

And if you need anything, please do reach out. We're always happy to engage and talk through, the space that we all live and breathe.

So thank you very much, everyone.

Patrick Phillips 29:25 - 29:26

Thank you.