Oracle Fusion Middleware Verification

Snow is proud to announce that its on-premises datacenter management offering has been verified by the Oracle Global License Advisory Services (GLAS) program as a third-party tool vendor for Oracle Fusion Middleware. This builds on the Oracle Database and Oracle Database Options verification Snow received in 2022.

This verification means Snow data is trusted by Oracle auditors. As a result, software asset managers can be audit-ready with the click of a button and continuously optimize their license allocations. This capability is more important than ever as organizations are getting squeezed by price increases and licensing changes such as the recent change for Oracle Java SE.

For more information on Snow’s Oracle management capabilities, be sure to check out the videos below on Snow’s designation as a Oracle Database certified vendor and Java visibility.

Cloud Management

Snow Commander enables VM provisioning and workflow orchestration.  New features strengthen workflow configuration and improve internal cost allocation.

Make workflows easier to configure.

• Users can now create workflow variables to store custom metadata.
• Metadata can be retrieved at a later step or in a subsequent workflow within the same service request.

Improved chargeback/showback reporting

• Simplify and automate reporting with unified chargeback or showback for private and public cloud resources.

Cloud Financial Management

Snow Cloud Cost is a FinOps-certified platform that enables visibility, monitoring, collaboration and cost optimization for the public cloud. Recent improvements further support cross-functional collaboration, forecast transparency and understanding the impact to cloud service provider rates over time.

Easily share insights with colleagues

• Cloud and FinOps Managers can analyze data, create a custom view and generate a link to share with colleagues.

• Create a dashboard, save it as a template so others can use as their personal dashboard.

Track progress toward goals

• Create a personalized view, then set a cost-based “goal”, which is overlayed on the graph for easy monitoring of progress over time.

Manage costs by rate

• Easily verify your cost reduction efforts and see if your Cloud Service Provider has altered Opex charges over time.

Click here to learn more about how Snow Cloud Cost helps optimize public cloud costs.

New Snow Partner capabilities

New capabilities on Snow Atlas give partners efficient and secure access to their customers’ systems to provide services with tighter collaboration and faster value realization.  

Partners can easily create inventory agents and share scripts with customers, driving faster solution deployment, adoption and customization. 

What’s next?

You can follow Snow product updates and our latest innovations on our blog and LinkedIn.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: February 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) involves gathering the information you need to make effective use of and run your digital technology. The first step towards building effective ITAM within your organization is understanding what you want to achieve. To identify that, it’s useful to look at some of the reasons why companies have ITAM capabilities in the first place. For the most part, these fall into three main categories:

1. Risk management: With a rise in global cybersecurity attacks, protecting customer and company data is top-of-mind for IT leaders. They also need to protect themselves from risk associated with unanticipated and unaccounted for software, cloud, SaaS or hardware spend.
   
2. Cost management: Cost reduction is always a key to an organization’s success, especially during times of global economic uncertainty. Organizations need to spend wisely, so they can allocate more of their funds to innovation and be more competitive in a tough market.
   
3. Growth and innovation: Quickly delivering new innovations and responding to employee and customer requirements are now fundamental to surviving in today’s economy. Fostering innovation starts by optimizing your current technology stack.

Some other event-based priorities can drive ITAM programs, including a large merger & acquisition (M&A), an audit or compliance event (sometimes triggered by an M&A), or the need to report on technology ROI to a board or C-suite.

Building a governance framework for your ITAM program

If ITAM’s role is to allow the organization to maximize the value from their technology assets while minimizing risk, then it is important to provide a framework within which this should happen. There is little value on reporting on opportunities to save, or compliance issues, if the business implications are not understood and the mechanisms for resolving issues, or taking advantage of opportunities, are not in place and accessible.

Every ITAM practice should include these elements:

• Mission statement: This statement articulates the goal of ITAM and should show a clear link between ITAM and your organization’s goals.
• Charter: The charter or roadmap sets out roles, responsibilities, accountabilities and reporting mechanisms. It also provides the ITAM function with a mandate.
• Policy: The policy will make it clear to everyone in the organization what the basic rules are around the way in which technology assets are managed throughout their lifecycle and why. This document should be accessible to everyone in the organization, not just ITAM or IT teams, so it needs to be clear, concise, easy to translate (if in a multilingual organization) and free from jargon. The policy does not dictate the details of how people work but what they need to take into account when dealing with technology assets.
• Standards: These are the mandatory standards or any relevant regulation (whether financial, industry-specific, environmental etc.), as well as standards the organization is aligned or compliant with (e.g. ISO 27001, ISO 14001, GDPR, HIPAA, etc.).
• Processes: This is where many people get ITAM wrong and try to include all the processes that touch on the IT Asset Lifecycle within ITAM’s scope. Most of these processes are owned elsewhere. ITAM is concerned with the oversight of the asset lifecycle and as such, ITAM processes are those that gather the relevant data about the assets and investigate and analyze it to identify where exceptions to policy are occurring and why. Processes should be documented at a high level, and need to be generic as they should apply to the full range of technology assets across the organization, and all the various data sources required to support the data analysis.
• Procedures: These are the more detailed activities that ITAM practitioners will undertake on a daily basis to support the processes and may be asset, vendor or system specific. They tend to be more technical in nature and are not designed for general distribution.
• Reporting: Provide evidence that your policies and processes are achieving expected results.

Selecting your supporting cast of people

In order to achieve successful outcomes, ITAM functions need people and technology to support the governance framework and carry out the supporting activities. One of the biggest mistakes we see is when organizations unrealistically put their ITAM program on one person’s shoulders. The size of your eventual organization will be dependent on the scope of services you provide and the size of the larger organization you are supporting.

While there is no easy answer to ‘how many people do I need’, as this will vary based on the size and complexity of the organization and the technology that is in use within it, it is important that there is someone accountable for the success of ITAM, and that the activities associated with ITAM are assigned to appropriate individuals either as their primary role or as a key part of their wider responsibilities.

Here are a few checkpoints as you select people to assist in your ITAM program:

• Estimate the number of resources it will take to develop and manage your ITAM tool along with your policies and processes.
• Decide if you’re supporting one geography or one department at the onset, or if this will be an organization-wide operation.
• Identify your realistic staffing costs and evaluate your current team’s internal expertise to choose one of these options:
  — In-house staff and software
  — Extended staff with partners for specific projects/expertise
  — In-house staff with partner-hosted software
  — Partner-based managed services

There is no magic formula for successful ITAM, but by starting with clear goals and objectives and putting in place the supporting governance, processes, people and technology, it is possible to build an effective ITAM capability that has real relevance to your business stakeholders.

The post Getting Started: How to Build an Effective ITAM Program appeared first on Snow Software.

We have continued to build out our REST API capabilities to enable new and deeper integrations.

• High availability REST and messaging API for querying: contracts, users, computers, custom-objects, mobile devices, and licenses
• Ability to use API data in PowerBI or other business intelligence applications for in-depth analysis and sharing within your organization
• Authenticated and authorized access to API endpoints enables administrators to better manage and stay secure by assigning user-specific permissions

Self-Service Agent Creation

Snow customers can now save time and move faster while gaining more control of their agent configurations.

• Create and configure inventory agent packages in a self-service portal
• Eliminate the dependency upon Snow Support to create new agent packages
• Gain greater control over the process and end-to-end delivery time

IT Service Management Connectors: Continuous Improvements

Also new in December are incremental product improvements, modernization, performance, and user experience improvements (including to back-end technologies such as our ITSM connectors).

Snow integration: BMC Helix for enhanced Service Desk team performance

• BMC Helix ITSM connector
  • Expanded attributes are now available (Category, Type, Item)
  • Better data control through a new operation system filter
  • Enhanced data aggregation flow from expanded timeout parameters

• BMC Helix Remedyforce connector
  • More intuitive aggregation date by using latest device scan date
  • Improved data aggregation stability via expanded timeout settings
  • Enhanced logging: data aggregation statistics now gathered

Managing Risk: Identify “Known Exploited” Vulnerabilities

Snow Risk Monitor’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog integration now gives you even more control in handling critical vulnerabilities in your IT landscape.

• Activating this one-click filter allows you to pinpoint all vulnerabilities in your IT environment that have already been exploited across the globe.
• The KEV catalog—currently including 850+ entries—is continuously updated by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
• Combine the exploited and critical vulnerability filters to identify the highest risk items in your IT landscape.

Be sure to check out our recent What’s New at Snow Software video featuring Risk Monitor detailing how to prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities.

Hybrid Cloud Management

Snow Commander’s new features and enhancements simplify hybrid cloud management for IT teams.

Enhance business agility, oversight, and efficiency

• Report Authorization option restricts report access to authorized users only.
• Build more powerful integrations with new REST API enhancements including capabilities such as:
  • Create/configure rightsizing groups
  • Manage custom attributes
  • Store/retrieve credentials
  • Retrieve change request definitions

Leverage additional flexibility with custom attributes on an organization        

• Custom attributes now provide additional flexibility by allowing users to define organization-related metadata and assign them to workflows.
• Query organization metadata by setting appropriate filters.

Monitor and reduce Microsoft^®Azure spending 

• Generate an Azure reserved instances (RI) recommendations report by one- or three-year intervals to help monitor and reduce spending.
• Configure reports to include a generation schedule, scope of provided cloud account regions, and a display of supported currencies.

Be sure to check out our recent What’s New at Snow Software video featuring Snow Commander detailing new features.

Configuration Improvements for Oracle^® Inventory

Two recent enhancements have been made to our Oracle^® Inventory scanning capability for custom environments.

• DBA group name configuration: In response to an enhancement request from our customers, we’ve made it possible to configure the name of the dba group in the newly introduced sios.config file. Sometimes for security reasons, customers will use a different dba group name than the standard Oracle configuration.
• Scanner execution mode configuration: With some large enterprise customers, custom behavior changes the current working directory to a different operating system user. To account for these custom environments, we’ve added a new file – sios.config – to improve execution mode configuration.

For more information on Snow’s recent designation as a Oracle-certified vendor, watch this video.

New Adobe Creative Cloud User Views

The following Snow improvements for Adobe Creative Cloud provide more accurate and improved visibility to your subscription usage:

• Adobe user details page: The new user details page now provides a month over month graph of total, active and inactive users; a list of all users and their associated SaaS subscription plans, including Adobe Creative Cloud.
• Adobe user linking page: To reduce administrative time, we have made improvements in the UI to easily connect your known Adobe portal users to any discovered, yet unlinked Snow License Manager user accounts. Administrators can insert the username they wish to link and may link multiple devices by separating each user with a comma.

Be sure to check out this video detailing Snow’s recent redesign of our Adobe Creative Cloud management solution.

What’s next?

We’re always posting updates on our latest innovations. You can follow Snow product updates on our blog and stay up-to-date on the latest Snow news on LinkedIn.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: December 2022 appeared first on Snow Software.

You can read the full report here, but throughout the findings, we found three key actions CIOs and IT leaders should consider as they close out 2022 and prepare to start the year off right.

1. Get ahead of your priorities and stay disciplined.

With the current macroeconomic environment (rising inflation, economic uncertainty, geopolitical uncertainty, etc.), it is no surprise that the #1 IT priority for 2023 is reducing IT costs followed by delivering digital transformation and minimizing security risks. But delivering digital transformation and reducing IT costs can be conflicting actions as digital transformation and innovation often require investment and resources.

With 94% of IT leaders noting that innovation remains a top priority, and 85% of respondents saying there is an expectation to innovate faster and demonstrate ROI, CIOs are being pulled in a million directions. They are juggling many timely problems and priorities, all while ensuring they are meeting individual goals and expectations.

Want to start 2023 strong? Now is the time to hone in on what your priorities are for 2023 and specifically Q1. Between now and the end of the year, clearly define your IT priorities and ensure you and your stakeholders are aligned. IT leaders will need discipline and focus entering 2023 but that must start now to make true impact.

Here’s the full list of what those IT leaders surveyed indicated as their top priorities for 2023:

2. Figure out what you don’t know. Visibility is imperative.

At Snow, we often talk about visibility, and we often say, “You can’t protect/control what you can’t see.” Throughout the 2023 IT Priorities Report, we discuss visibility because of the huge impact it can have on IT leaders’ priorities. If controlling cost and security risks are in the top priorities of the year, IT leaders must also prioritize visibility.

In fact, 76% of survey respondents say business units are procuring far more cloud and SaaS than IT knows about. Technology procurement is no longer controlled by IT, and organizations need to embrace this reality and put into place processes to gain a line of sight into what is being added to the organization’s technology landscape. A couple of key steps are:

• Ensure it’s easy for employees to get what they need, so they  work in tandem with IT to get the tools they need for their jobs.
  • Consider easily accessible, approved-use lists and policies. Software or SaaS application portals are even better.
• Leverage technology to discover applications in use.
• Educate and collaborate with business units, so employees and department leaders understand the impact of technology procurement.

For other ideas on how to gain more visibility, check out this blog.

3. Determine what data you need and make it actionable.

We live in a data-driven age, where every aspect of a business can be tracked from how many people enter the building to how many times someone visits a particular page on the Intranet. But trying to understand blind spots due to siloed data and identify the right data are still huge challenges for IT leaders to overcome in 2023.

While 96% of IT leaders said their managers and/or direct reports have the data they need to make good business decisions, this doesn’t mean they have actionable insights to determine what to do next. In fact, nearly nine in ten (89%) IT leaders say IT must invest in tools and technologies to extract value from their data and turn it into actionable intelligence.

If you don’t have a tool to gain actionable intelligence, now is the time. Data-driven decisions will be essential for CIOs given the challenging landscape ahead.

To view the full 2023 IT Priorities Report, download it here.

Additionally, if you are like many IT leaders and facing mounting pressures to identify cost-management drivers for 2023, get a head start by:

• Registering for this free, on-demand webinar on executive challenges in 2023, cost optimization, and avoidance strategies across cloud spend, hardware, SaaS, sustainability and more.  
• Additionally, tune in to a conversation with Becky Trevino, Snow EVP of Product, and AJ Witt, ITAM Review Analyst as they discuss ways to reduce waste and increase spend efficiency in this newest podcast episode.

The post New Snow 2023 IT Priorities Report: 3 Actions CIOs Should Take Now to Prepare for the New Year appeared first on Snow Software.

From the moment he got to the City Council, he recognized a group of very capable people with strong skill sets. But they were so busy just making things work, they had no strategic visibility of assets, no clear understanding of who was doing what or what contracts they had in place and zero insight into the total value or cost of IT to the organization.

“It was clear to me that the biggest problem was no visibility,” Lawrence says. “If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it. Nothing you do will make any big change until you get visibility.”

We sat down with Lawrence to talk about his career journey and how he modernized Christchurch City Council IT.

How did Christchurch get here?

In 2010 and 2011, Christchurch, population 380,000, suffered widespread devastation from a series of earthquakes. Buildings and homes were destroyed, and infrastructure collapsed; 185 people were killed and thousands more were injured. New Zealand declared a national civil defense emergency and response to the natural disaster became a herculean effort. This included lasting support from Christchurch City Council.

The City Council serves the community’s citizens with essential public services with an annual budget of approximately NZ$1.14 billion and just over 2,400 employees. In response to the catastrophic quakes, the entire agency moved into emergency mode to aid the community’s massive rebuild. In the months and even years that followed, the City Council continued to operate that way – doing what they could to make things work. Fast forward five years though and the City Council was still operating under such a premise. Until Lawrence got there.

For nearly forty years, Lawrence worked in ambulance service and management. In 2020, he was hired by the local government agency to support their IT efforts. Thanks to his clinical training as an advanced care paramedic, Lawrence was adept at walking into a situation and quickly evaluating the scene. He knew how to understand the context of that scene and assess what actions needed to be taken to maintain the status quo, or preferably, improve upon it. For City Council leaders, improvement was the goal in the form of delivering better services to the community at a lower cost.

Modernization to the rescue

Soon after Lawrence was hired, the Council began their first-ever IT asset management plan to provide a comprehensive record of IT infrastructure, assets, and performance. This information could then be used for strategy development and assessing IT efficacy. Under Lawrence’s direction, an extensive review of IT asset management solutions and internal evaluation of both software and systems integrators was devised along with a roadmap for a more strategic IT in the future.

At the end of this process, Christchurch City Council chose Snow Software for full visibility of assets, users, and IT consumption.

“Snow gave us visibility into things we knew about, and revealed much more, too…For the first time, we obtained accurate totals for on-premises devices, software and cloud subscriptions, and we could see who used which software and services.”

– Colin Lawrence, Team Leader, IT Asset Management, Christchurch City Council

Learn the benefits Christchurch City Council realized using Snow Software in the full case study.

Team is everything

For Christchurch City Council, strategic IT decisions fueled by visibility were an entirely new concept. Going through such a shift was a process only made possible with good tools and even better communication. Bringing people along through the culture change took willingness and plenty of communication from everyone involved. For Lawrence, it would have been impossible without solid teamwork.

“Teamwork is everything; you will get nowhere by yourself.”

At the City Council, my team listened, he says, and likewise, he listened to them and the problems they were encountering. In this way, the organization was able to come to an aggregated view of what needed to be done and as a result, a roadmap for how to get there with the budget available.

Remodeling software licenses, uncovering inappropriate software and automation, in general, provided significant cost avoidances and allowed the City Council to make strategic decisions in support of service delivery.

Lawrence also built a performance system that reflects on the work people do so that people could understand when and how they make progress. In this way, they know they are contributing and adding value to the organization. Problem resolution is much more effective, and people feel rewarded for their efforts. People sense they are listened to and that their ideas benefit the organization, he says.

Suggestions for success

For Lawrence, it’s important everyone understands the vision, buys into it and works toward it. When asked about his advice to other practitioners looking to make a difference in their organization, teamwork comes out on top. “Getting it right means listening to each other and collaborating. When you support your team and acknowledge their work, the entire organization benefits.” He has felt strongly about teamwork since working in ambulatory services. “I have a duty of care to my team.”

Secondly, always be open to new ideas, he suggests. “Be willing to look around you because your environment changes. And with that change comes a need for you to change. Be aware of institutionalization. Don’t get wrapped up in an organization so much that your thought processes and your actions limit your vision and your ability to see what actually needs to be done.”

This post is part of a series of blogs that highlight IT practitioners and their on-the-job experiences, diverse backgrounds and what it means to work in IT today. Look for more posts coming in the new year. 

If you’d like to share your story with Snow readers or nominate an ITAM/SAM star to tell theirs, please send an email to kathleen.shepherd@snowsoftware.com.

The post Ambulance Services Manager Drives Teamwork and IT Modernization at Christchurch City Council appeared first on Snow Software.

To understand how IT has handled this ongoing disruption, what they’ve learned along the way and how they plan to propel their organizations forward in the ‘new normal,’ Snow Software surveyed 1,000 IT leaders in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and India. We are excited to share the results, now available in the 2022 IT Priorities Report.

Confidently cautious

Companies that chose to amplify their digital transformation efforts through challenging times have excelled. They are now better fortified for whatever the future may bring, and 87% of IT leaders say their organization is prepared to weather global events. Budgets are forecast to increase, and new technologies and staff will be added in 2022.

But, there is also concern. While modernization efforts will continue at an accelerated pace, uncertainty remains on how to efficiently manage a proliferating technology estate and mounting professional responsibility. The results show IT leaders are confident yet cautious. With plenty of new-found experiences and reshaped perspective, 2022 will be the year for IT to take all that has been learned, set new baselines and drive toward new levels of growth.

Key findings

1. More IT leaders have an influential seat at the executive’s table today. 90% say they are a trusted advisor to the business instead of a one-stop-shop for technology. With this heightened leadership role, IT has increased responsibility and 92% have more financial accountability for their investments.

2. Hybrid work is here to stay and IT leaders are confident in their strategy. 90% feel their organization is now able to deal with hybrid work efficiently, yet it does come with worry. IT leaders have had to change a great deal (90%) as a result, and they predict it may become a burden for IT (78%).

3. Dual IT initiatives of driving accelerated digital transformation and managing an expanding technology estate to healthy ROI is daunting. 93% of IT leaders say the pace of digital transformation dramatically increased in 2021 and 94% say their organization became more innovative, yet 71% say they spend too much time reacting to problems.

4. Organizations put their money where their mouth is and increased technology budgets overall. Notably, security and cloud saw the largest increases in 2021.

5. In 2022, top priorities are challenging, but leaders are optimistic. Top priorities are (1) adopting new technology to improve day-to-day operations (30%), (2) reducing IT costs (28%) and (3) improving customer service and satisfaction. To balance these priorities moving forward, CIOs will need a more advanced approach for managing their technology environment.

In the year to come, as IT teams plan for more, rather than less, change over the status quo, how can IT manage such innovation and evolution? A larger technology landscape means the datasphere will continue to multiply too, yet how can all that data drive more actionable insights? 72% of IT leaders are unsure about how to get meaningful insights out of the wealth of data now at their fingertips. 93% say IT must invest in tools and technologies to extract value from their data and turn it into actionable intelligence.

The results demonstrate why technology intelligence has become critical to modern organizations. Leaders need full visibility into their current technology investments to adequately inform future priorities, plans and budgets. This is also how they fuel further innovation while maintaining control over their sprawling technology estate.

To learn more about the trends identified in the new 2022 IT Priorities Report, download your copy here. We’ll provide additional analysis and data breakdowns on the blog as we dig even deeper into the findings over the next couple months.

For additional help with your 2022 planning process, you can also check out our Software Savings Calculator, Cloud Savings Calculator and SAP Optimization Calculator for a personalized look at your environment.

The post New Snow 2022 IT Priorities Report Reveals Changing Role and Expectations of Today’s IT Leaders appeared first on Snow Software.

To learn more, Snow’s latest survey polled more than 500 IT leaders from organizations with over 500 employees in the United States and United Kingdom. We found that while 68% of IT leaders have a hybrid cloud strategy consisting of both public and private clouds, these organizations are now experiencing an array of cloud and infrastructure management challenges as the reality of these investments’ kicks in. While cloud was positioned as a faster, more secure and ultimately more affordable alternative to on-prem infrastructure, IT leaders are quickly realizing that cloud is just one piece of the IT management puzzle and not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Cloud is a growing necessity

Over the last 12 months, nearly seven out of 10 (71%) of all respondents had increased overall cloud spend. This figure rose to 72% in the US while only marginally lower in UK at 68%. This is a 26.7% increase compared to the 2020 findings, with 56% of IT leaders in 2020 expecting to increase their cloud spend. And it is no wonder, as nearly half of all IT leaders (46%) claim cloud services have been critical to operations during the pandemic.

Another 70% of IT leaders have increased the use of public cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, while one-third of IT leaders (33%) have added an additional 26-50% capacity to their organizations’ cloud resources in the past year. This figure rose to 35% when looking at the UK alone.

When asked about the main reasons for relying on cloud computing, scalability and flexibility was cited by 22% of organizations, with another 17% of IT executives stating it is the best environment to develop, test and launch products and services.

Meanwhile, 44% of IT leaders believe they will add to cloud services to support demand as hybrid working becomes the norm. This figure was significantly higher in the US (52% of organizations) compared to 36% in the UK.

Additionally, IT leaders plan to move less workloads to private cloud in 2021 compared to last year. In 2020, 21% of respondents said they were bringing cloud workloads back on-premises whereas this year only three percent of US IT leaders and less than one percent of UK IT leaders plan to move workloads to private cloud.

But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Despite the hype surrounding the promise of cloud, many organizations are struggling to reap the full benefits.

Expectation vs. reality

Indeed, it seems that the expectation of cloud investments is not quite matching the reality, and there is more to be done to unlock the power of cloud. One area where this is particularly apparent is when it comes to cybersecurity. While 11% of IT executives rely on cloud computing for built-in and tested cybersecurity protections, approximately one-third (33%) of IT leaders stated that mounting cybersecurity threats are their greatest infrastructure management challenge. This disparity highlights that despite being a core driver for cloud adoption, cybersecurity protection is also a key concern for those integrating cloud. After all, applications are where vulnerabilities are most likely to occur. Many IT departments are not equipped with the right staff/skillset to adapt their security approach accordingly.

Lack of integration between new and old infrastructure technologies (26%), meeting governance and compliance requirements (25%) and managing spend (24%) closely followed as additional challenges. For the UK, in particular, managing spend was reported by 28% as a key challenge. Perhaps unsurprisingly, mitigating concerns about cybersecurity protections (24%) is at the top of IT leaders’ list of cloud management challenges they’d wish to solve in the blink of an eye – along with a lack of skilled IT staff (18%) and lack of cloud standardization (14%).

Could knowledge gaps be stifling cloud success?

It is clear the sheer acceleration of cloud infrastructure over the last 12 months has unearthed several management challenges for organizations, and a lack of skills and knowledge gaps between business leaders and IT management could be adding to this. There are some notable disparities when it comes to knowledge levels across the enterprise. Our research found C-level IT executives to be the most confident in their knowledge of cloud. In fact, 63% of those in this category rated themselves as experts in their knowledge of the different types of cloud (private, public and hybrid), along with three-quarters of company owners.

On the flip side, only 20% of IT managers, and just under one-third of IT directors (32%), rated themselves as experts – highlighting that greater education is needed for mid-level executives in order for them to manage cloud infrastructure effectively.

These figures become even more worrying when it comes to managing spend. While 71% of respondents claimed leadership is familiar with cloud investment, a quarter (25%) say leadership gets updates but do not question spend. Although there is no need for leadership to get involved if cloud spend is coming in within budget, we’ve often seen, cloud investments can sometimes bring unexpected (and pricey) costs. At that stage, leadership will jump in to understand the budget demands, but this can be tricky if they haven’t previously been engaged.

Cloud investments are showing no sign of slowing down, and while the benefits cannot be denied, without the necessary training, education and visibility to effectively implement and manage cloud, organizations could be limiting their ROI.

Learn more about how IT leaders can gain transparency surrounding cloud investments with Snow Commander.

The post Study: Reaping the Benefits of Cloud Begins With Facing the Realities appeared first on Snow Software.

Gartner’s latest Market Guide for Software Asset Management Tools¹ offers a detailed look at SAM tools currently on the market, with the aim of helping IT leaders select the right tools to support their strategy.

Gartner defines these tools as “products that help optimize software and SaaS spend while supporting the automation of tasks required to maintain compliance with software license and SaaS subscription use rights.” The market, however, is changing. The variety and complexity of technology that needs to be managed is increasing, there are more SAM tools than ever before and automating SAM has become increasingly challenging due to licensing complexity.

Read on to discover how the market is changing, what you should look for in a SAM tool and what we believe, are four of the top findings from the guide.

The DINRGOS Framework

The Gartner Market Guide identifies 10 key activities that a SAM tool should offer in 2021. The DINRGOS framework, illustrated and explained below, can be used as a baseline to plan improvements, understand current SAM capabilities and compare different software asset management tools.

1. Platform discovery – Interrogate to find physical, virtual and cloud platforms

2. Entitlement discovery – Integrate with vendor portals, sourcing and vendor management systems to find software contract, purchase and procurement records

3. Identify consumption – Extract a list of all software and software consumption

4. Identify entitlements – Decode software contracts, purchases and procurement

5. Normalize consumption data – Resolve duplicated or conflicting records and data collected by multiple tools

6. Normalize entitlement data – Produce a single, accurate, organized and categorized inventory of entitlements

7. Reconcile – Harmonize contract, purchase and entitlement information with normalized inventory data to produce effective license position

8. Govern – Allocate licenses, identify remediation actions for noncompliance and over-licensing, and automate workflows

9. Optimize – Balancing software spending with usage

10. Share – Provide information for use throughout the IT ecosystem

Managing emerging technology

One of the important trends in SAM that is captured in the market guide is the increasing variety and complexity of technology that is expected to be covered by SAM managers. Much of this is driven by an increase in cloud spending.

• In 2021, SaaS spend is expected to reach $147.7B, a YoY increase of 19.9%
• Also in 2021, IaaS spend is expected to increase YoY by 42.3%, to $92.1B

Despite these increases, the responsibility for managing these technologies varies across organizations. Only 41% of SAM teams own SaaS application management and just 34% cover public cloud spend. Moving forward, organizations will have to determine whether their current processes for tracking and managing this cloud spending are adequate.

Automating SAM

The increase in the variety of technologies that some expect SAM teams to manage compounds a long-standing challenge for SAM and IT teams: manual processes for importing entitlements. When vendors primarily sold based on “one license, one machine,” this level of manual effort was manageable. However, new technology has introduced an exploding variety of license and entitlement models, including:

• Bundles and subscription levels
• Multiple metrics
• Subcapacity calculations
• Hybrid use/BYOL models

According to Gartner, “The complexity of licensing doesn’t stop with the diverse licensing types and infrastructure; in fact, it’s just the beginning. Organizations are increasingly reliant on software, which requires them to add more software publishers and applications. With each of these publishers and products, management can become exponentially more challenging …”

Integrating SAM data into the wider IT ecosystem

Leading SAM teams have long recognized that they possess the most complete, most current source of software, hardware and usage information across the enterprise. They also acknowledge that many other enterprise teams can use this data, including:

• Sourcing/Procurement – Detailed usage information can help drive better renewal contracts and save money
• Finance/IT Finance – This data can help create a holistic picture of spend across the organization
• Enterprise Architecture – Software and hardware details help drive efficient refresh rates

Though a SAM team may have the best insights into data and asset usage in an organization, they are not the only teams to benefit from them. Groups across an enterprise can make better, more informed decisions and realize positive outcomes from the data.

Lack of resourcing holds SAM back

Even organizations that follow best practices of defining areas of management, creating a SAM charter and investing in leading technology are sometimes hobbled by inadequate SAM staffing. While the automation mentioned earlier is key, it doesn’t eliminate the need for skilled personal to understand complex licensing, define and implement governance and communicate with other IT stakeholders.

As noted by Gartner, lack of resourcing can be addressed with a SAM Managed Services Program (MSP), but it still doesn’t bring resourcing need to zero: “While SAM MSPs offer a solution to the scarce supply of skills, enterprises must see the MSP as an extension of their staff, ensuring they still hold the overall accountability for their SAM discipline. Therefore, the internal organization must have an overall SAM process owner, accountable for governing the discipline while working with the SAM MSP on the daily operational tasks and their internal network of supporters.”

We’ll also provide additional analysis and perspectives on the blog as we dig even deeper into these findings over the next couple months.

¹ Gartner, “Market Guide for Software Asset Management Tools” by Ryan Stefani. September 20, 2021.

² This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Snow. Gartner Disclosure:

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The post Top 4 Findings From Gartner's Market Guide for Software Asset Management Tools appeared first on Snow Software.

Control SAP spend, regardless of deployment method

We have seen SAP continuing to focus its efforts on increasing adoption of its Cloud products, with SAP reporting a $366M increase in cloud revenue for the first half of their financial year, and encouraging companies to move to S/4HANA, where they have seen a 17% adoption increase this year.

Snow Optimizer for SAP Software 3.1 offers expanded depth and breadth of functionality to help customers reduce manual effort and ensure they are not paying more than necessary for their software licenses. Explore some of the key features from the release below.

Increasing S/4HANA public cloud visibility

Many customers deploy a hybrid deployment of their SAP ERP landscape, where they run most of their large and important ERP business processes on-premises, using ECC or S/4HANA, and other processes in the cloud. In this latest version, customers also have visibility into the S/4HANA cloud licensing data, giving them insights into their licensing data, regardless of the deployment method adopted.

Role-based licensing and authorizations

Many customers have a requirement to not just be able to change their user master data but to change their authorization roles as well. With Snow Optimizer for SAP Software 3.1, customers can change access rights from within Snow Optimizer. Administrators can see which roles have been assigned to a user, and what functionality is actually used, allowing them to easily remove access to all the functionality that is not being used and deliver value from a security perspective.

At Snow, we believe that SAP may choose to audit based on roles and authorizations in the future. With this new functionality, customers will be able to easily control access rights assigned to users and validate the assignment of users against what has been assigned in the system.

Enhanced contract management

With Snow Optimizer for SAP Software 3.1, customers will now be able to build metrics to model when multiple engine metrics are in use, as is the case for some standard engines, improving accuracy, reducing reliance on external consultants and saving the time it takes to manually calculate engine measurements.

Visibility of applications running on the HANA database

If a customer has bought a runtime license, they are able to run S/4HANA on the HANA database, but to run other native applications a full use license is required. This could lead to potential compliance risk. Snow Optimizer for SAP Software 3.1 can show you which native applications have been installed and measure the results of these applications so you can ensure you have the right balance of runtime and full use licensing.

Advanced compliance analysis functionality

Allow customers to retain, analyze and compare historical compliance data giving them improved, long-term visibility of their compliance position.

Take control of Oracle Java licensing

Before Oracle changed the licensing rules for Java in 2019, many companies used this technology to run their applications because it was essentially free.

However, in 2019, Oracle changed the licensing metric and made it so that any version after 8u202 required a commercial license when using Java for business, commercial or production use. The license metric is based on Oracle’s Named User Plus (NUP) licensing type and its processor licensing. NUP licensing is fairly simple to calculate as it’s based on the number of individuals who have access to Java, but customers are still struggling to understand the number of licenses actually required in their organization.

When we look at datacenter usage and processor licensing, understanding license requirements becomes far more complex and the costs can ramp up significantly, especially when applying Oracle’s virtualization rules to Java. For larger companies, it would be easy to ramp up costs into the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars annually.

For customers who do not use Oracle databases, these metrics will be new to them and understanding them is even more complicated.

To ensure they get their licensing right, organizations need to identify where Java is deployed, what infrastructure it’s deployed on and whether it’s virtualized.

With Snow’s latest technical preview release, we can now provide an accurate overview of the entire Java estate including chargeable commercial features, enabling customers to understand their maximum liability under the Oracle licensing rules. Join our upcoming webinar for a deeper dive into the Oracle Java licensing model and to see how Snow provides better visibility into usage. 

Leading through new challenges

At Snow, we believe that IT leaders who are empowered with end-to-end visibility of their technology consumption and resulting spend are better prepared to make strategic decisions and keep their organization resilient during these times of change and uncertainty.

Request a demo to see how these new features can help your organization today and into the future.

The post New at Snow: SAP 3.1 and Oracle Java Management Releases appeared first on Snow Software.

In a recent webinar that discussed the results of the TEI study, we joined Sruti Pegatraju (Forrester senior consultant) and Beth Kaminski (Managing partner at Kaminski Specialty Consulting) to examine the three-year impact Snow’s SAM solution delivers in detail. The results are eye-opening:

• Benefits of nearly $5 million versus costs of $942,000
• Net present value of over $4 million
• ROI of 428%
• Payback period of six months

Breaking down a 428% ROI

To better understand the benefits, costs and risks associated with such an investment, Forrester interviewed four Snow customers in the U.S. and Europe with experience using Snow’s SAM solution. Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization for this study. Take a look at some of the highlights below.

• Reduced software spend by more than $4 million over three years. With Snow’s SAM solution, organizations were able to see what software they needed and how many licenses were used, which led to more effective license management. The organizations could then streamline and standardize the software they make available to end-users. On average, Snow’s SAM solution reduced overall licensing costs by 5%.
• Productivity and software management efficiencies saved more than $359,000 over three years. Snow’s unified dashboards, workflow automation and intuitive reporting, saved SAM team members’ time. It also helped SAM and IT teams respond faster, more efficiently and utilize time savings for improvements and innovation. Before Snow’s SAM solution, the composite organization had to dedicate 2.5 full-time employees (FTEs) to manually report on its SAM environment and produce the same level of insights or visualizations that the Snow SAM solution could provide.
• Improved audit efficiency saved more than $520,000 over three years. Improved accuracy, compliance, internal controls and chain of custody trails gave auditors at the interviewees’ organizations a more straightforward task to verify results. As opposed to fragmented data or manual processes, the Snow SAM solution produces immediate validation for the composite organization’s auditors and internal compliance FTEs, saving on average 50% of the time previously required per audit case.

Additional SAM benefits

Beyond these quantifiable benefits, the study also revealed that organizations using Snow’s SAM solution gained several other important benefits including smoother vendor contract negotiations and renewals, enhanced business agility and significantly stronger compliance and security posture. In addition, more flexibility was also discovered, including improved SaaS governance and tighter alignment between IT and the business.

If you’re considering a shift to a formal SAM solution but would first like more information on the ROI it can bring, download the Forrester Total Economic Impact Study of Snow Software Asset Management.

You can also listen in as Forrester walks through the compelling results in the full webinar.

The post New Forrester Research Reveals the High ROI of Software Asset Management appeared first on Snow Software.