Current economic conditions are forcing many IT leaders to take stock of their existing inventory of software and find ways to optimize its usage. Optimization of software assets may be part of larger technical debt reduction or application rationalization programs, which help reduce costs, drive utilization of resources, and the freeing up of investments for other projects. Software asset management (SAM) tools play a vital role in tracking and optimizing software entitlements, reducing or mitigating audit risks, and improving efficiency.

Over the years, these tools have matured from just being systems of records to systems of innovation or systems of differentiation. Businesses no longer use SAM just for recording licenses and entitlement, however, but also for budgeting and reporting, simulations, compliance management, and vendor management.

There is a lot of activity in this space. SAM tools now integrate with other IT financial management tools, as well as ITSM and ESM tools. This provides an integrated view of all the assets and their configuration, deployment, usage, support cases logged per asset, time spent on managing and monitoring each asset, and overall spend on every asset. FinOps tools have grown to also include on-premises licenses, thus transgressing the thin boundary between software asset management and SaaS management tools.

Read our latest report, The Software Asset Management Solutions Landscape, Q3 2023, to know about the main trends, top disruptors, market dynamics, top use cases, and top vendors in the space.