Enhancing SMS with Eracent Products


The Demands of Software Asset Management

The demands on inventory data for software asset management are detailed and complex. One of the greatest challenges facing any IT asset manager is reconciling collected inventory information against ownership records, budget plans and security documents. While reconciling hardware is relatively simple (use of standards like WMI has greatly reduced the complexity of this task), reconciling software inventory against software purchase records is a much more complex task. Quite often, raw software inventory results do not match well against purchasing records, requiring extensive effort to “scrub the data clean” before any software asset management analysis can occur. This manual “scrubbing” effort is time consuming and cumbersome, creating a roadblock between the SMS inventory and the use of that data for software asset management functions. Software license audit deadlines are missed while software asset managers struggle to manage even 1/10 of the software inventory, resulting in millions of dollars wasted in either truing up post-compliance audit or in over-purchasing software licenses.