Investment Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/investment/ Software Asset Management. Simplified. Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:28:23 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://easysam.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/easysam_icon-60x60.png Investment Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/investment/ 32 32 Oracle plans $5bn investment in the UK https://easysam.co.uk/news/oracle-plans-5bn-investment-in-the-uk/ Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:26:36 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=34778 The funding will enable a range of UK organisations to access Oracle's suite of AI and cloud computing services.

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The funding will enable a range of UK organisations to access Oracle's suite of AI and cloud computing services.

Published on 21st March 2025

Tech major Oracle has pledged $5bn investment over the next five years to expand its AI-driven cloud services in the UK.

This investment aims to augment Oracle Cloud infrastructure’s presence in the UK, facilitating the UK government’s ambition to foster AI innovation and adoption across various sectors.

UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle said: “This $5bn investment will accelerate our AI ambitions, providing businesses and public services with cutting-edge cloud infrastructure to drive productivity, enhance security, and unlock new opportunities for growth – driving forward our Plan for Change.

“By working with global tech leaders like Oracle, we’re cementing the UK’s position at the forefront of the AI revolution, creating high-skilled jobs, fuelling innovation, and securing our place as a world-leading tech powerhouse.”

The funding will enable a broad range of UK organisations to access Oracle’s extensive suite of AI and cloud computing services.

These services include sovereign AI, multi-cloud solutions, and the latest in generative AI technologies.

Oracle said its initiative will support both public and private sector entities in sectors such as healthcare, financial services, defence, retail, and manufacturing.

It will focus on assisting these organisations in migrating various workloads to the cloud, modernising applications, and driving innovation through AI.

Oracle added that it recently launched more than 50 AI agents within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite.

These AI agents are designed to streamline routine tasks in areas such as finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and service.

With the new investment, Oracle aims to extend these AI capabilities to more UK organisations.

Oracle UK senior vice president and country leader Siobhan Wilson said: “The UK Government’s vision is clear: use AI to help power the UK’s future.

“Our cloud investment will help ensure that customers can use AI to achieve new levels of productivity, unlock growth, and benefit from superior performance and security, all with improved cost savings.”

Source

https://www.verdict.co.uk/oracle-5bn-ai-cloud-uk/?cf-view

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Nuthawut Somsuk via Vecteezy

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]]> Unlocking the full potential of your SaaS investments through SAM maturity https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/unlocking-the-full-potential-of-your-saas-investments-through-sam-maturity/ Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:12:52 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=30111 With 32% of SaaS spend estimated to be underutilised or wasted, discover how a mature SAM program can help avoid any unnecessary overspend.

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With 32% of SaaS spend estimated to be underutilised or wasted, discover how a mature SAM program can help avoid any unnecessary overspend.

Published on 29th April 2024

No matter where you are in your SAM program maturity, you’re likely focusing on optimizing your software vendor relationship. According to the latest Flexera 2023 State of ITAM Report, negotiating contract terms with software vendors is a key practice for half of organizations in managing their SaaS. As asset managers prepare for renewals and major contracts, it’s crucial they highlight user adoption and identify optimization opportunities, while also developing strategies focused on reporting and governance to maximize their investments.

A whopping 32% of SaaS spend is estimated to be underutilized or wasted (Flexera 2023 State of ITAM Report). With SaaS solutions from Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Adobe ranking among the top ten vendors by spend, SaaS contracts are focus points attention for SAM teams.

Myth buster: SaaS contracts are un-optimizable?

One misconception among SAM professionals is that SaaS contracts are inflexible. However, by closely managing these contracts you can gain significant value, creating cost savings or cost avoidance. Sometimes, there’s a lack of support from management or executive sponsorship where SAM teams identify optimization potential or see there can be something improved—in order to gain executive buy-in and build your SaaS optimization muscles, it’s important to show the value your program can deliver.

Main challenges SaaS management addresses

Two key issues in SaaS management are wasted or underutilized spend and shadow IT. On average, a third of your SaaS licenses are underutilized or unused. Instead of aiming to save 30% on SaaS, a more realistic starting point is saving five or ten percent, as these savings will compound over time.

Shadow IT is a term that refers to the proliferation of SaaS applications, where the IT asset management teams haven’t identified all used applications within their environments. Enterprise organizations can average eight to ten new SaaS apps monthly. With that influx, how do you see all the apps that users are actually using?

Shadow IT creates additional issues, such as connecting to some of the security cloud app brokers to show all the SaaS apps that users are logging into. Shadow IT also creates complications into seeing SaaS applications that may have been expensed on a credit card or freemium applications (that IT asset managers don’t have visibility into). Lastly, many employees can still log into their SaaS applications after they’ve left the organization, presenting a huge security risk to organizations.

Navigating the complexity of SaaS ecosystems

SaaS platforms have evolved into a complex ecosystems, with licensing and contracting differing for each and every version and vendor. This complexity requires asset managers in various platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, and Adobe, while also interpreting complicated commercial terms. Manual analysis of contractual and legal facets, coupled with data extracted from SaaS platforms, is nearly impossible. Additionally, there’s no standard for the data SaaS vendors report in their API, complicating subscription allocations and usage tracking.

SaaS maturity evolution

Organizations struggle with SaaS management not due to a lack of understanding, but because each organization is at a different point in its management and ITAM journey.

Some are just getting started with ITAM, with a heavy focus on on-premises software and hardware and haven’t yet thought about managing their SaaS applications. Others have been doing it for years and they have a more advanced understanding of their capabilities. Below is a SaaS maturity model that can be used as a simple view into where your organization is and the steps to achieve the next level of growth.

Incremental steps (aiming for 5-10 percent savings) toward delivering business outcomes, rather than aiming for significant cost recoupment (aiming upwards of 30 or more percent), are crucial for realizing early value realization.

Companies new to SaaS management typically operate at the ad hoc level, employing inconsistent approaches across major SaaS vendors. However, with potential value becoming evident, organizations can save money through manual processes. As executive sponsorship increases and processes streamline, you can start to see real value in managing SaaS effectively.

As your organization matures their SaaS management, you can easily identify licenses that are on the shelf, and licenses that are seldom used or never used. Automation enables constant optimization, by having licenses in the available pool when new hires or other team members require a license. Your SAM program can go to an even deeper level of determining licenses in use that can qualify to be downgraded to a lower cost license, recouping investment. Additionally, organizations can start identifying overlapping SaaS functionality used throughout the various business units, and either eliminate redundant applications or realize improved license economics through volume-based pricing and consolidation of contracts.

At the highest level of this value-driven model, ITAM is delivering investment and value back to the business units by making commitments to confidently lower the costs year-over-year by a certain percentage. This is possible by having policy-driven activities that are measured through quantifiable business outcomes you can demonstrate and repeat over time.

Accelerating SaaS management maturity

Let’s recap: optimizing the software vendor relationship is essential to any ITAM organization. SaaS platforms have evolved into a complex ecosystems, with licensing and contracting differing for each and every version and vendor; by closely managing these contracts you can gain significant value, creating cost savings or cost avoidance. Organizations often struggle with SaaS management not due to a lack of understanding, but because each organization is at a different point in its management and ITAM journey; as your organization matures their SaaS management, you will more easily identify licenses that are on the shelf, and licenses that are seldom used or never used.

Source

https://www.flexera.com/blog/it-asset-management/unlock-the-full-potential-of-your-saas-investments-through-sam-maturity/

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Flexera

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]]> IT leaders need to invest in AI – could ITAM and FinOps be the solution? https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/it-leaders-need-to-invest-in-ai-could-itam-and-finops-be-the-solution/ Tue, 06 Feb 2024 09:16:20 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=29469 89% of leaders surveyed admitted that their employees would need to improve their skill sets to best leverage AI capabilities.

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89% of leaders surveyed admitted that their employees would need to improve their skill sets to best leverage AI capabilities.

Published on 6th February 2024

Artificial intelligence will be the top investment area for CIOs in 2024. IT leaders see in generative AI an opportunity to accelerate innovation, improve employee productivity, and gain a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, investing in AI is not cheap. CIOs will need to find a significant budget to make traction in their AI roadmap, but good IT asset management (ITAM) and FinOps may help them find those dollars.

Snow Software recently released its 2024 IT Priorities Report, an annual poll of more than 800 global IT leaders to understand their priorities and challenges for the coming year. Given all the hype surrounding AI in 2023, it was no surprise that integrating AI into their business operations was listed as the top priority for IT leaders (35%) going into 2024, followed by reducing IT costs (28%) and reducing security risks (28%).

Between these three priorities, the unspoken challenge for CIOs becomes: how do you find the budget for competing initiatives?

This conundrum is mirrored in the delicate budget balance every CIO faces: money is needed to run the business, grow the business, and secure the business. The budget for daily operations to run the business must be reduced to meet new demands for innovation to grow the business, and the dollars for growth must be balanced with the increasing budgetary needs tied to securing the business.

As catalogued in the IT Priorities Report, 82% of IT leaders stated they were completely prepared to leverage generative AI, with 62% already seeing increased investment in tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard. But 21% say they are already overspending on generative AI tools. Additionally, 89% of leaders surveyed admitted their employees would need to improve their skillsets to best leverage AI capabilities.

In summary, innovation in AI is going to require significant investment for enterprises to get it off the ground. Whether it’s building new products leveraging AI, rearchitecting data models, investing in employee training, recruiting new hires, or upgrading to premium software licenses (in the vein of Microsoft Copilot, only available for Microsoft’s top-tier license), IT innovation budgets need to increase to support AI development.

So where are organizations going to find the budget to balance these competing priorities?

AI and budget are two separate conversations.

Investing in AI is not a question for CIOs, especially those in large enterprises. Their CEOs understand the importance of AI and fear the risk of being left behind by competitors who invest early or startups that lack governance concerns that make it costlier for larger organizations to fully adopt AI technologies. These CEO concerns are not unfounded. The IT Priorities Report survey reported a higher number of IT leaders in smaller companies (less than 1,000 employees) saying they were ready to implement AI versus their IT peers at larger organizations.

For CIOs, the last few years have been incredibly challenging. Budgets for security and running the business were increased to facilitate remote work during the pandemic. These same budgets were then brought back down at the onset of the economic downturn in late 2022. These budget decreases have continued into 2023, leaving CIOs with little wiggle room for large investments in AI.

Unfortunately, innovating, developing, or modifying generative AI technologies for organizations cannot be conflated with budgetary pressure, as the time is now to build a foundation of AI knowledge within enterprises. From embedding AI within products, using AI tooling to improve speed in solving customer issues, or leveraging copilots to complement engineering efforts, the possibilities for AI are endless for those willing to invest in them early.

How to Fund Innovation with ITAM and FinOps

IT asset management (ITAM) and FinOps tools can be used by the organization to reduce its budgetary “run the business” spend to fund investment in AI. ITAM and FinOps tools help CIOs reduce spend in their organization—unused licenses, SaaS sprawl, unnecessary cloud spend, and other forms of waste.

Most organizations, even large enterprises, use spreadsheets and, at best, limited tooling to manage the millions of dollars they spend on their technology budgets. A complete view of everything at play within the IT tech stack, including metering, usage, licenses, SaaS, cloud, hardware, software, and everything in between, is critical for gaining the necessary understanding to make meaningful budgetary cuts to find savings for AI investment.

The savings are there. Realizing the savings takes work, and preventing overspending that eats at AI budgets requires discipline. Our survey respondents stated that 67% of IT leaders believed business units were spending more on SaaS and cloud services than needed. With rising vendor costs and increased cloud pricing on the horizon, technology budgets are going to get even harder to manage.

Even credit ratings rely on ITAM. The global credit ratings agency Standard & Poor released a report earlier this year exploring the financial risk from cybersecurity threats for organizations that do not have a proper ITAM practice in place. This lack, and the subsequent increase in not just cybersecurity vulnerabilities but also the costs to respond to such a crisis, can result in the downgrading of organizational credit ratings.

In addition to risk, the ability to find cost savings is paramount and can be found in multiple ways. Finding efficiency is a huge driver and allows for better consolidation. This is especially important for leaders, as 88% of leaders surveyed for the IT Priorities Report stated they were moving toward platforms and away from point tools. Redundant and duplicate SaaS applications are a common issue in large organizations, as individual business units often procure applications without understanding IT procurement practices and policies.

Establishing an innovative environment

With tighter budgets in 2024, CIOs will need to optimize in order to innovate. For organizations to fully invest in AI and see proper returns, reducing their spend on non-AI-related software and cloud services is critical. One-off exercises to clean up costs and technology usage data will not yield the necessary savings to fund investment in AI. Organizations must leverage continuous programs and tooling such as ITAM and FinOps to solve the problem of finding money for AI budgets by rightsizing licenses, reducing unnecessary cloud spend, and getting control over SaaS application sprawl.

Source

https://cionews.co.in/it-leaders-need-to-invest-in-ai/

Image Credit

Igor Omilaev via Unsplash

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]]> Increase in audits makes software asset management a solid investment https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/increase-in-audits-makes-software-asset-management-a-solid-investment/ Mon, 15 Jan 2018 10:41:00 +0000 https://wptest.easysam.co.uk/?p=17933 Software audit protects the relationship between the vendors and users.

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Software audit protects the relationship between the vendors and users.

Published on 15th January 2018

If your company uses software, you are virtually guaranteed to be targeted for a software audit at some point. In fact, according to some experts, it’s not necessarily a question of “if,” but “when” you will be tapped to provide evidence of compliance with the terms of your agreement with the software vendor. The only questions are how in-depth the audit will be and when it will take place? And, if you aren’t in compliance, how much it’s going to cost you?

In an era when software piracy runs rampant, and industry groups like the Business Software Alliance (BSA) strive to ensure that businesses are using authentic software—and paying developers what they are rightly entitled to—the increase in software audits makes sense. You’d be hard-pressed to find a business that doesn’t agree that any organization has a right to the money it has earned. However, there is also speculation that software audits have become a tool used by software and hardware companies to squeeze as much revenue out of customers as possible even after the initial sale. Fees and surcharges for inappropriate or unauthorized use of software and hardware can easily skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands of dollars even for a small business, and it’s possible that especially egregious offenses can lead to the cancellation of contracts altogether.

For many companies, software asset management tools have become a vital part of doing business and limiting the impact of vendor audits on their business. As more enterprises migrate to the cloud and invest in SaaS and virtualization services, the need to keep track of their hardware and software throughout the entire life cycle is more important than ever. In fact, according to research by Transparency Market research, the IT asset management software market is expected to grow exponentially over the next six years; at a CAGR of 6.9 percent each year, the market is projected to reach $1.3 billion, up $708.9 million since 2015.

Why software usage goes wrong

In many cases, organizations aren’t deliberately misusing their software or trying to twist the terms of their contracts with software vendors. The problem often stems from license contract terms that aren’t entirely clear, or from resources that have been mismanaged to the point where IT doesn’t have a handle on what machines are running which software, which licenses have expired, or who has been using what.

Because of the differences in how licensing contracts are set up, and because companies may use software from a variety of vendors, keeping track of all of the different metrics and managing compliance can become complicated. For example, where one software vendor may issue a license based on the number of CPUs, another might license a specific number of users, while still another may charge based on transaction costs. When you add in virtualized servers, the waters become even muddier.

And those muddy waters are expensive. According to one study, 44 percent of the companies that have been audited since 2016 had to pay “true up” costs of $100,000 or more—and 20 percent have had to pay more than $1 million. And those numbers are rising. As software vendors become more aggressive, the percentage of companies that will owe money for their software licenses is only expected to increase.

Software designed to manage IT assets can help reduce the amount that companies pay out in fees to vendors by giving them insight into everything that is in use within the company throughout its lifecycle. Not only does it reveal the software that is installed and in-use to ensure compliance with contract terms, but it also increases the efficiency of IT investments by identifying underutilized resources so as to avoid overspending.

These programs can also reduce spending by ensuring that companies do not purchase excess entitlements in an effort to avoid running afoul of licensing contracts. Vendors are not going to come to a company and tell them that they have spent too much money on licensing—for example, they purchased a developer’s license when they only needed a user license—so keeping track of the assets in use can avoid this level of waste.

The bottom line is that software licensing and IT asset management are complex, and without a tool in place to keep track of everything, the outcome could be disastrous and expensive. As the cloud increases the complexity of these agreements, even small companies that may not have previously needed such an IT asset management tool are deploying them, making this sector one that’s worth exploring.

Source

https://born2invest.com/articles/audits-software-asset-management-investment/

Image Credit

Pexels

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