A recent software asset management survey reported that almost half of participants do not have a software asset management (SAM)  tool in place.

The SAM Charter – Global Report 2018 found that 49% of the organisations that took part in the study did not use any SAM tools to track software licence usage.

According to Rory Canavan, who wrote the report, the organisations that tend not to have SAM tools are generally those that tend to use a complex Excel spreadsheet, which often requires many hours running to process macros. A huge amount of effort is then needed to massage the data so that senior management are presented with SAM data in a format they understand.

“Some people have their head in the sand and do not manage SAM at all,” he said.

The report noted: “These will also be the same companies that view software vendor audits as an occupational hazard, and can’t progress with IT projects because meagre resources are diverted to answering numerous questions from those same audits.”

Analyst Gartner described SAM tools as software management entitlements from enterprise licence agreements, purchases and other records to automatically determine and optimise licence position against discovered software.

In its latest Magic Quadrant, Gartner said IT departments tend to use SAM tools for managing software entitlement, instead of using spreadsheets, because of the rising complexity of software-licensing schemes. But it warned: “SAM tools are evolving rapidly and offer a broad spectrum of features and functionality.”

For instance, as software providers adopt licensing models that account for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), virtualisation and mobility, many SAM tool suppliers, such as Flexera and Snow, now support browser-based SaaS and web applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce or Workday.