Increased role of SAM in corporate governance


Johannesburg, 07 Mar 2019

With the evolution of software asset management (SAM) over the past five years, corporate South Africa has increasingly turned to Blue Turtle and its managed service offering on Flexera FNMS (FlexNet Management System).

Customers are viewing it as a solution to support improved corporate governance through comprehensive licence management to ensure better alignment of process, practice and business. In short, it is able to manage and control extreme complexities in both licensing and infrastructure.

"SAM has grown past its initial promise of asset management and is today being used by the vast majority of our corporate clients as a means to better get ahead of their software audits, as a means to reduce their risk appetite and better highlight process control shortfalls," states Nico Erasmus, Senior SAM Consultant at Blue Turtle Technologies.

"While the original idea behind investing in a SAM solution is that it can help to lower software costs in a business (and while this is still a factor), it can also identify areas where organisations need to spend more in order to be compliant. The real benefit of an effective SAM solution can be evidenced in its ability to proactively manage software and drive down costs by ensuring effective use of the applications within your business, for example, the ability to audit desktop software and provide compliance views of 'high-cost' data centre software.

According to Erasmus, most of the top South African banking groups and top financial services groups are either already using Flexera FNMS or are in the process of deployment and adoption of the solution. These organisations have chosen to implement a SAM solution to help address their unbudgeted software spend and reduce compliance risk.

Customers initially want the solution out of concern of regulatory indiscretions and/or loss of control of their IT estate, which they want to understand before an auditor comes through the door. Key to deploying a successful SAM solution is helping customers to uncover the unknowns in a business and then put them in the know.

SAM solutions with Flexera help a business to identify what it can do/procure better, provides insights into how asset acquisition can be improved, and highlights how business processes can be implemented so future manual mistakes don't creep in. Key functionality built into Flexera FNMS includes: IT asset discovery and inventory, software inventory normalisation, purchased versus installed/consumed licence reconciliation, licence optimisation for desktop software and a management dashboard and reporting.

"Our customers are doing some incredible things with Flexera FNMS and are gaining a better understanding of their licence entitlements and deployed software estates. It allows them to have a record of and visibility into their risk, because if you don't have accurate record-keeping, you don't have true visibility, which is a real risk," ends Erasmus.

Blue Turtle currently boasts the largest and most skilled SAM team in the region and is able to assist with architecting, designing, deploying and maintaining the Flexera FNMS solution.

Share

Editorial contacts

Samantha Griffiths
Blue Turtle Technologies
(011) 206 5600
samanthag@blueturtle.co.za