Tracking and maintaining software licences can be complex. There's also a balance as businesses need to ensure that only the allowed number of licences are in use, and at the same time, that there are enough licences for everyone using it. Getting it wrong either way can be costly – purchasing software licences beyond your actual usage is often expensive and unnecessary, but complying and optimising licence usage is not always straightforward.

Companies need the right combination of people, processes, governance and technology for a software solution to reach its full potential and to deliver tangible business benefits.

It’s important for all organisations to understand and have a clear view of your Software Asset in order to:

• optimise your software usage and control costs
• put yourself in a stronger position to negotiate/re-negotiate contracts
• migrating to cloud.

Software Asset Management (SAM) helps companies determine what should be migrated to the cloud and how to allocate these costs across the organisation. SAM can also mitigate security risks by reducing the ‘attack surface’ through software portfolio consolidation and help meet compliance with General Data Protection Regulations. If you don’t know what software you own, deploy and use, you open your organisation to risks in these areas.

• Are license entitlement details gathered in a single repository?
• Are software deployments regularly quantified and reconciled with entitlements?
• Do you provide senior management regular reporting on software effective licencing positions?
• Does your business have control of the costs related to software and cloud services?
• Have you considered how software and cloud services fit into your three-five year IT strategy?
• Do you understand what software could expose you to current and/or emerging security risks?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, you could benefit from an increased focus on SAM.

KPMG Australia and Flexera are teaming up to provide an end-to-end Software Asset Management (SAM) solution, leveraging Flexera’s market leading SAM Solution and KPMG’s global specialised software licence management professionals.

KPMG has extensive experience in assessing and enhancing SAM and Software Licence Optimisation solutions, utilizing over 300 subject matter experts in their global team with specific and detailed knowledge of multiple vendors’ licence agreements, models and metrics.

Combining the benefits of KPMG and Flexera:

• reduce licence consumption, which reduces software costs
• lower ongoing spend on software licenses, maintenance and SaaS subscriptions
• lower the risk and cost of software licence audits
• reduce the software footprint through rationalization and consolidation— remove redundant, unused and End-of-Life (EOL) software
• identify security and cyber threats and support their remediation
• identify, assess and support the mitigating strategies to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• gain control of the software estate with repeatable, automated SAM processes
• negotiate favourable contracts by understanding software usage and needs
• provide IT Strategy and Operations groups visibility into software licencing and usage data to help understand how their applications are being consumed, support migration to cloud, and help with cost allocation of software and cloud services across the whole organisation.