Software asset management is so yesterday, says Liken

That's the top line finding of an online survey by of senior IT personnel, by software efficiency and IT Audit consultancy group Liken, which it blames on the current economic climate. Says Liken CEO James Rowlands: ""In the future, even with the prospect of a recovery in sight, SAM must now re-focus on how it can reduce costs. The new message is not just 'be legal' but rather be 'lean and legal'." Liken finds 58% of respondents have already switched away from adopting the latest SAM standards and are looking instead at IT usage and software licences, with a view to reviewing open source alternatives. That contrasts with those who stated that their primary focus remains performance improvement (18%), or achieving a return on investment (24%). However, despite the altered focus, most (64%) still feel that the importance of SAM investments is to ensure compliance. Nearly one third of respondents (31%) feel that formal SAM programmes such as ISO 19770, SAM Advantage and FAST fail to provide clear business benefits. Also, 28% say they don't currently possess the budgetary resources to implement the standards. Rowlands believes the findings suggest that what started as a movement to build best practice is now seen as a millstone for compliance. "Over the last 10 years a whole industry has grown up around supporting organisations to meet SAM standards. However, because of the dramatic economic volte face, IT management clearly equates SAM programmes with compliance," he observes. "Cost savings are not seen to be a key deliverable of SAM standards and consequently they are seen as onerous and resource intensive… Many companies are starting to question whether they have over-licensed to ensure compliance, or whether they are under-utilising the software they already have licenses for." Rowlands reckons the way forward is to change the goal of SAM to reduce the amount and types of software in use, so automatically driving towards the most cost-efficient usage possible. "Regular software efficiency auditing and software usage metering would help achieve this in the meantime and it would surely be good practice to build these processes into software management from now forwards," he says.