HOW THE INDUSTRY HAS CREATED A SAM MERRY-GO-ROUND
It is true that the industry has created a SAM merry-go-round. It is right that the effective software asset management requires a combination of technology and process. They require it in the form of services which can be delivered by the skilled resources (either external or internal). The key issue that needs to be looked upon is the identifying and agreeing the ideal balancing point.
This is a proven fact that only one thing that any Software Asset Management provider must focus on is, first, delivering the value for money and second, is complete satisfaction. Unfortunately, this general view is not the case with most industry commentators and due to this, their customers keep losing out. Such a thing is completely unacceptable in the industry. With such an environment, it seems that the SAM industry has created a merry-go-round and time has come to help our customers get off this thing.
There are various examples of service providers which deliver SAM managed services underpinned by a particular tool. In such a case, the services don’t come close to be fully utilized. While the services provided by most companies include providing the customers with access to the tool, the purpose of the same is often superficial. Whenever it comes to the key service deliverables, the provider always prefers to use their own time-consuming and manually intensive processes to analyze the data in spreadsheets, produce cost saving reports etc. This situation becomes more extreme when it comes to the delivery of timely projects, where the specialist providers rely on even more heavily manual process and complex set of activities.
But the question still remains, why does this happen? A cynical view to this might be that it’s because the service provider revenues are majorly dependent on the skilled workers required to deliver their solutions. The more resources are utilized, the higher will become the cost which is later passed on to the customer. But then, why would a service provider be willing to take the time to understand and utilize the high levels of automation available from an advanced SAM tool?
On the contrary, another generalized view is that the tools are simply not up to the mark of the job. Yet it is true that some of the claims by “leading” tool vendors is said to be “mis-leading”. It has become an alarming issue that most of the tools out there which profess to be highly automated actually depend on the back office teams manually, crunching the data with a simple aim to populate and hand-crank the system. In addition to the same, there are also challenges of implementation.
Deploying the SAM tools has traditionally been a very frustrating yet lengthy and complex process, which does not always make them an ideal tool for delivering one-off projects. Sometimes, the service providers might have some valid points after all.
