Spiraling Software Costs

Licenses/software costs are escalating. Organizations are purchasing more and more software and its costs are eating into business’s yearly IT budget. Today’s challenge for CIOs and IT Asset Managers is not only to manage license compliance, but also to monitor and control top-tier vendor spend, as well as tail end spend. In fact, Gartner research shows that software costs have grown twice as fast as any other IT expenditure in the last few years and that trend is set to continue.

Excel nightmare?

It is not uncommon to gather information from several sources and compile it in to one Excel spreadsheet that only you, and a handful of others can understand. Whilst this feels primitive, Excel file utilization for many business scenarios is still widespread. Usually companies have several tools to manage data, but it needs to be represented in to one single source of truth to analyze it and verify its reliability and therefore effectively use the information to make business decisions.  In many cases, data established on an Excel spreadsheet becomes old as soon as it’s typed in.

Managing Software Cost

Today, the method of centrally recording data related to license agreements, and associated costs, could be facilitated in Excel worksheets, CMDB or maybe another tool. These are static numbers that present an approximate overview of what is being spent, and on which cross-section of software. Useful analysis of software spend can only be achieved when Spend is compared to Actual Usage – especially when the software is expensive. For example, if you purchase a car with a loan that costs $500 USD a month and you don’t use the car, it’s expensive! But if the vehicle is a taxi and you are using it for 10 hours a day whilst earning a living, it’s sound investment. Therefore, establishing usage is key in determining the effectiveness of your software license estate.

There are several leading software asset management tools on the market. However, whilst most of them will charge for the feature, the data provided isn’t a true depiction of “usage”, rather it’s an indication of software that has been “accessed”.

Xensam Active Usage

Xensam’s highly automated software has built-in RRP prices and has the power to display real-time usage metrics for various timeframes, on each vendor and application- for both devices and users. To get a sense of the real cost of deployed software within your environment, simply dig deeper into the automated data. Naturally, prices purporting to your organization can be included.

Xensam will show Cost Per Active Minute, Cost Per Run, cost over a specified timeframe or Total Cost. In short, Xensam software will allow you to fully-evaluate whether:

• The license can be downgraded to lesser version of the software
• The software can be rescinded & license re-harvested
• The user needs further training to use the software more effectively
• The software is becoming too expensive to retain within your environment
  
  

This unprecedented level of detail is exclusively available to Xensam customers and comes as a standard feature with every Xensam license.

Organizational Structuring & Internal invoicing

Xensam allows you to categorize your organization into different sections. The classifications include Compliance, Geographical and Cost Center. Through these three different independent structures, you will have full control over your assets and costs, and you can begin easily automating internal cost allocations and cross-charges. Xensam’s Dynamic grouping ensures that ensuing classifications can be set up to take account of Domains, IP-addresses, Computer Names or AD-groups.



With Xensam, you can ascertain, with a great degree of accuracy, the value of deployed software to your business. Identifying which vendor to focus on for cost savings or further investment on, is now decipherable from one real-time view in the deliberately user-friendly “Xupervisor” console. What’s more, with Xensam, the cumbersome and laborious task of Internal cost allocation becomes simple and intuitive.



Contact us now for a full demonstration or to learn more.