The idea behind RISE with SAP is to give the customer the solutions and services they need to start their business transformation in one simplified package, provided by SAP and supported by a network of SAP partners. The key to the simplicity is that everything is in one place – so all necessary products are bundled together, and customers sign a new single contract to manage all aspects of their SAP landscape.

RISE with SAP includes: 

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud – SAP’s modular cloud ERP solution
• Business Process Intelligence – provides insights into performance through process analytics to help customers quickly understand, innovate and transform business processes.
• Technology Cloud Credits – allows organizations to integrate their technology with other solutions by using the data model and business services on the SAP Business Technology Platform to connect it all
• SAP Business Network Starter Pack – enables customers to create digital connections with all their trading partners
• Embedded Tools and Services – helps customers achieve a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud

The business solution itself is from SAP and companies wishing to adopt RISE with SAP need to partner with a chosen systems integrator or hyperscaler to get specific implementation and administration help.

RISE with SAP offers help to customers looking to transform. By grouping everything together into one offer and under one contract, the solution aims to help reduce the complexity and ease the path to a S/4HANA cloud implementation.

According to Gartner, RISE with SAP may be a valuable proposition for smaller clients, but less so for bigger clients with a more complex IT architecture that require full control of their infrastructure and hosting partners¹.

User Group Response 

Shortly after the launch, in April and May 2020, a joint survey of the Americas’ SAP user group (ASUG) and the German User Group (DSAG) found that adoption of S/4HANA was increasing with more than 40% of organizations either already live with S/4HANA or having started a project to transition.

However, the majority of these adoptions were on-premises deployments (DSAG 57%; ASUG 27%), followed by private cloud (DSAG 23% and ASUG 24%) and managed cloud services (12% DSAG; 19% ASUG) with very few deploying S/4HANA public cloud. As both user groups cited the biggest challenge in using cloud services as licensing models and costs (DSAG: 72%, ASUG: 41%) – it’s not surprising that cloud adoption is lower.

Licensing Considerations

If you’re considering adopting RISE with SAP, having factual data to base your licensing decisions on is critical to avoid overspending. Read on to see how Snow can help you gather some of this information and prepare.

1. Full Use Equivalent Licenses

The calculation of Full Use Equivalent (FUE) is based on the S/4HANA cloud licensing model. For example, one FUE equals: 1 SAP S/4HANA for advanced use, or 5 SAP S/4HANA for core use or 30 SAP S/4HANA for self-service use. 

It’s crucial to know how you are currently using the system and ensure your users are set up to use the most cost-effective license type before entering negotiations for the calculation of FUE licenses required. Snow can help existing SAP customers identify and model scenarios to get the right estimate of FUE licenses to match their licensing needs.

2. Engines

Engine licensing is complex, especially when multiple metrics are in place. Being able to measure and review exact consumption today will help you better understand your organization’s requirements tomorrow.

3. HANA Database

Knowing how many gigabytes are being consumed by the HANA database, which applications are being run and keeping track of consumption is key to managing the costs involved and understanding how much you are likely to need in the future.

4. Digital Documents

Where digital document licensing has been an option for licensing indirect access for legacy customers, under the new licensing methodology it becomes the standard when new contracts are signed. So, it is important to know how many digital documents you are going to create in order to license correctly. If you purchase too many, it may be difficult to adjust the number down in future years. Snow can help organizations estimate the number of digital documents and extrapolate usage into the future to ensure you don’t purchase too many or too few licenses. 

With accurate data to base decisions on, you can be sure you’re making the right decisions for your organization.

At Snow, we believe that having visibility into all your factual licensing data gives you the insights you need to make informed decisions when opportunities, such as RISE with SAP are presented. We pride ourselves on our market-leading solution that gives a single view of licenses and usage across multiple SAP systems.

Understanding what you currently have and use puts you in a great position when it comes to deciding on the best way forward on your journey to S/4HANA. Request a demo to see how Snow can help. 

¹ Gartner, “Quick Answer: What Is RISE with SAP and Why Does it Matter for SAP Partners?” by Fabio Di Capua, Paul Saunders, Chris Pang, David Groombridge. June 14, 2021.

The post Leveraging Factual Data When Considering RISE with SAP appeared first on Snow Software.

• 24 new applications including Access, Bookings, Delve, Forms, GroupMe, Kaizala, Lens, Lists, OneDrive, OneNote Class Notebook, Planner, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Publisher, SharePoint, Staff Hub, Stream, Sway, Teams, To-Do, Visio, Whiteboard and Yammer.
• 1,400 new features and capabilities.

Looking at Microsoft 365’s roadmap and launched improvements, the following products have the most recent enhancements:

The price increase which goes into effect in March 2022, varies 9-25% depending on the offering. While Microsoft certainly is justified with all the functionality improvements, no one really likes price increases. So, what can you do now to avoid increasing your budget for funding your Microsoft stack?

Understand usage to rightsize now

Before paying an even bigger price for your E3 or E5 licenses, now is a great time to determine if everyone with those licenses needs all the functionality included or if some of your staff can downgrade to an E1 license. To make this determination, you will want to understand how your team is accessing these applications (e.g. browser-only or installed) and which application components they are using on a frequent basis.

Understand usage to argue a smaller increase

Within the application stack, is your organization using all the functionality? Have you decided to use Zoom, Slack or Webex and don’t require Team’s functionality to run your business? Has your organization chosen to leverage Tableau instead of Power BI?

Consider further application rationalization

As you can imagine from the many dozens of enhancements, Microsoft has made significant investments in Microsoft 365, and the maturity of some of these applications today is far different than 2 years ago. Now might be the time to look at your application catalog across the board and perform an analysis of redundant applications in your organization. For example, do you need more than one project software, video conferencing technology or file sharing application? In performing this analysis, you might determine it might be worth it to standardize on Microsoft for some of these capabilities since you’ll be paying for them anyway.

Analyze current and projected use of other Microsoft technologies

To get your arms around this, you need visibility to all areas of spend – on-premises software, cloud infrastructure and SaaS application usage.

Maybe you are underutilizing licenses for Microsoft 365 today but have plans to grow your Azure infrastructure footprint in the near term. You might not be able to reduce your overall bill with Microsoft, but you might be able to get more capabilities than you have today, and a bigger bang for your buck.

The post Microsoft 365 Price Increase and How to Prepare for Your Renewal Conversation appeared first on Snow Software.

Organizations tend to overlook software asset management CMDBs since a SAM program is unlikely to need the same data found in a mature IT service management tool’s configuration management database. However, organizations should consider the risk of data duplication between a SAM asset repository and a CMDB and the risk of data either being incomplete or inaccurate. An incomplete, inaccurate CMDB is often referred to as being “dirty.”

The issue with dirty data

While a CMDB is most often associated with an IT service management solution and ITIL requirements, the key to creating a solid and valuable CMDB is populating it with current, complete and accurate information tied to the IT assets and users across the network. 

The requirements for maintaining a clean CMDB are similar to a SAM repository. But, it’s harder to achieve than you might think – take a look at some of the reasons below: 

• Most inventory solutions are not good at covering multiple platforms – meaning you either have holes in your IT inventory or have to use multiple discovery solutions. Using multiple discovery solutions will report assets in different ways.
• Software recognition is often poor in most inventory solutions. This populates the asset repository and/or CMDB with a lot of noise that offers no value to ITSM or other IT functions.
• Limited understanding of how software is installed. For example, an application that is installed stand-alone will be licensed differently than if it were licensed as part of a suite (e.g. Adobe Photoshop vs. Adobe Creative Cloud).
• Limited usage tracking. Knowing if a software application has been deployed is one thing, but understanding if it is actually being used, provides value that helps the decision-making process around cost-saving initiatives such as license reharvesting.

Populating an asset repository or CMDB with dirty data creates more problems than it solves. According to a 2020 Gartner study, 99% of organizations using CMDB tooling that does not confront configuration item data quality gaps will experience visible business disruption. The same study implies that nearly 1/3 of CMDB challenges stem from data completeness or quality concerns.

It’s a matter of trust

The concept of the CMDB is that it should be a single source of truth that is accessed by multiple systems and functions to power effective processes and decision-making across IT and business functions.

However, when CMDB data is bad or dirty, trust in the accuracy and value of the CMDB is quickly eroded, often leading to the failures described above. Unfortunately, once SAM or ITSM provides dirty data to another department or senior management, it is hard for the recipient to trust future data. Even if the data quality is improved, it will still be received with skepticism and perceived as untrustworthy.

Inconsistencies with CMDB data will result in stakeholders not wanting to use the data. It can also lead to your team manually making adjustments, and in turn, creating more data issues from human error.

Having unreliable data can end up costing the organization a lot more time and money than necessary, often requiring managed services or specialized consultants to own and deliver the desired value. Organizations often inefficiently consume resources to improve the quality of the data, instead of trying to find the root cause.

Improving the quality of your data

As a rule of thumb, a common target we see for CMDB and asset repository accuracy is 97%. It is generally accepted that 100% accuracy is near-impossible at any one moment. By having just a 3% margin of error, any inaccurate data will be identified and rectified within a reasonable timeframe with a more realistic risk/reward balance for the organization.

A good place to start when looking to improve the quality and value of the data in the CMDB is to put in place best-of-breed technologies to populate the desired data. Using the example above, in the case of IT assets, this means implementing:

• An inventory solution or suite using a powerful agent and agentless discovery to identify all IT assets in your environment, includingdesktop and server, and also mobile, cloud, virtual devices and SaaS. In the hardware asset management realm, you might also include network devices such as printers, switches, and routers and even IP telephones.
• A software recognition service to accurately identify all commercial software in use across key platforms, such as iOS, Windows, UNIX and Linux. The software recognition engine should be clever enough to automatically group bundled software and suites where appropriate, as well as identifying upgrade and downgrade rights associated with particular licensing schemes.
• Full software usage tracking. Did you know that the average desktop is home to around $300 USD of unused software? Only by tracking the actual use of applications can you implement effective software reharvesting initiatives. Software application usage also provides light to the types of programs employees are using whether at home or in the office. Occasionally, these programs may pose a security risk to an IT environment whether the risk stems from having known vulnerabilities or exposing PII data to other unauthorized systems or users.
• Full “normalization” of data.Whether using one inventory solution or several, it is increasingly important that raw audit data is cleansed and normalized before it is used to populate the CMDB or asset repository. This is critical to avoiding dirty data and ensures that all software is reported in a consistent manner to be managed and assigned more effectively. By having a structured “parent-kid” type hierarchy for software, normalization speeds up the process for the IT help desk to troubleshoot software issues. This hierarchy lets you zoom into specific software versions or stay at the macro-publisher level to diagnose potential problems, like whether the issue is related to a specific release/update or a platform issue.
• Integrations that enhance other systems. By having a clean CMDB, IT technicians can be confident that when they tap into other systems to perform related workflows that the data is good to act on. For example, in the case of reharvesting software, you may rely on the ITSM (i.e. ServiceNow or BMC) or another automation engine (like Snow’s Productivity Optimizer) to trigger a workflow that automatically shuts off access to a license or automatically reassigns a license, etc. Another need may be for a BI team that sits in IT operations to evaluate future technologies that have interdependencies with some of the existing software or replace existing tools. In this situation, the analyst may extract license utilization data to estimate the impact on productivity or capability gaps, etc.

SAM data integration

If all of the requirements outlined above sound familiar, that’s because they are the same requirements that are fundamental to effective software asset management. SAM solutions create and consume this clean multi-platform inventory information every day. But, they can also make that same high-quality inventory data available to third-party systems such as service desks and CMDBs.

Reliable data = improved efficiency 

The service desk relies heavily on having accurate data. IT service managers are customer (employee) facing. The organization relies on them having all the information required for users and associated devices. If the IT help desk uses inaccurate data to support end-users, then the following action they take may be ineffective. Having reliable data within your CMDB, SAM and service management solutions will have a positive impact on your organization that keeps the productivity of the business intact. Remember that IT operations’ core function is to enable organizational productivity that in turn serves the end customer. If a marketing technology goes down, then marketing can’t reach new customers; if sales can’t access their CRM, then they can’t work on opportunities; if finance can’t access reporting, then the company is flying blind.

When the IT service desk is called to act, there is an impact on someone’s productivity. That’s why mean time to repair (MTTR) is a metric that the IT organization tries to keep as low as possible. Having a clean CMDB directly ties to that objective; as well as the other side of the coin of maximizing service availability.

Thanks to reliable data, the service management function can provide an intelligent service to end-users, improving a user’s experience and resolving issues are in an effective and timely manner.

Adding value

Having a proactive relationship between your service management solution and your SAM tool puts you in a prime position to add real value to the organization and align to the CIO’s top transformation goals. With everyone in IT/Infosec’s duty to maintain a secure IT environment, it’s important that the sources of data the organization uses to gain visibility are accurate and trustworthy. 

By using SAM-ready data to populate the CMDB, IT operations reduce the chances of “dirty data” and at the same time extract the value of the CMDB as a single source of truth. Consistent, reliable data moving forward will help banish inconsistencies and prove to other areas of the business that SAM data is king. 

Snow ITSM Enhancer can fuel your CMDB with accurate discovery, inventory and data normalization across more than 700,000 software titles. See how you can put that data into action by integrating it with your ITSM platform, including ServiceNow, BMC, Cherwell, Topdesk and others.

The post Why a Dirty CMDB Is so Bad appeared first on Snow Software.

In this blog, we’ll walk through key features of Snow’s online self-help experience so you can quickly access technical guidance – whenever you need it.

Introducing Snow Globe

Snow Globe is our customer community where you can get help from your peers and Snow employees. It houses our knowledge base, forums, community groups, and support portal. You can ask questions, browse answers, share tips and connect with other Snow users.

How do I get started?

Register for Snow Globe

• Go to Snow Globe
• Click Login in the top right corner
• Click on the new user button
• Fill in the New User Registration Form
• Login to Snow Globe

Already registered?

• Go to Snow Globe
• Click Login in the top right

Search

Do you need answers now? To quickly find advice, a workaround or a fix, searching the combined Snow Globe and Knowledge Base database is the fastest way to find the answers you’re looking for. Make sure to register and log in before you search to have full access to content. The search bar, located in the top right of every page, suggests potential answers as you type. When you submit your search terms, use the filters on the left to amend your query further.

Knowledge Base

Knowledge Base is a self-help portal containing hundreds of articles and best practice guides that go deeper into the various products, solutions and technologies Snow offers. You can search the repository using keywords and filters to ensure you find the information you need quickly and easily.

The Knowledge Base is available 24/7 and regularly updated, so you’ll always have access to the most up-to-date configuration documents, best practice advice, workarounds and fixes for known problems and issues. Join our Knowledge Base updates group to receive notifications when new content is published.

Snow Globe forums and groups

If you can’t find the answer you’re looking for, posting a question to a Snow Globe topic is also a very efficient way to get a response. Many Snow customers, partners and staff are regularly online and active within the community throughout the day, meaning you have immediate access to expert knowledge.

One of the great benefits of our community is that it is driven by users, not just Snow employees. There is a tremendous amount of inspired brainstorming and troubleshooting happening every day. Asking questions in Snow Globe means that you could uncover an unusual use case we haven’t heard of yet. Or, you might inspire a new solution or best practice. This type of creative problem-solving is a great way for you to share your expertise with the community.

Organized around six key categories, these topics provide structure for questions on products and best practices: Software & License Management, Cloud Management, Security & Data Privacy, Data Services & Inventory, ITSM & Automation and Hardware & Device Management.

Support Portal

If you can’t find the answers you’re looking for in Snow Globe or the Knowledge Base, the support team is always available to help. Using our Support Portal gives you the fastest routing to global specialists that can help resolve your problem. When you raise a support case, we recommend that you provide as much pertinent information as possible. You can clarify your issue, see suggested solutions and help accelerate a resolution by including a detailed description, screenshots, potential error codes and log files.

Once you have submitted your case, if your need is urgent, you can also reach one of our agents via the helpline numbers available on Snow Globe.

Proactive groups and notifications

You also have options to receive automated push notifications on Snow Globe. Through Community Groups you can subscribe to groups like Product Releases and News & Updates and follow relevant threads and users. You can also bookmark your favorite community content to find it again quickly in the future.

Want to learn more about Snow online support? Take a look at our “Getting Started with Snow” and “Community Guidelines” articles. We hope that you’ll take full advantage of our online customer support to explore Snow and find the answers to questions you may have. Of course, we also offer several ways for customers to resolve technical issues, including remote control sessions and phone support in multiple languages.

If you have additional suggestions on how we can improve, address any questions or connect quickly with Snow, don’t hesitate to reach out to me personally at david.carey@snowsoftware.com

The post Get Help Fast with Snow Online Customer Portals appeared first on Snow Software.

In the face of a global health crisis, businesses learned the importance of agility. Timely, efficient, flexible, responsive: these attributes are all needed more than ever, particularly when it comes to IT. To improve agility, many IT leaders are looking to implement self-service IT to streamline service delivery and get technology to the business more quickly. At the center of the self-service delivery model is automation.

Why automate IT?

Automation is a powerful tool for IT departments, and businesses in general, who are looking to deliver higher quality service to the business more efficiently. Automation eliminates repetitive tasks, reduces approval cycles and supports strong governance practices by building predictability and best practices into IT service delivery. Regardless of your cloud maturity, your application mix, or the type of infrastructure in your environment, automation can drive increased efficiency and productivity improvements across your IT organization.

By leveraging automation to provide end users with self-service access to technology, IT is able to more quickly deliver the technologies their stakeholders rely on, all while maintaining visibility and control. This creates a flexible but stable technology environment that can quickly respond and adapt to changing business needs, or as we saw in 2020, a rapidly changing global economy.

Efficiency for your hybrid workforce

Automation provides significant value when the tasks being automated are discrete, well-understood, tedious to perform manually and where a high level of standardization or governance is required. But the tasks that can most benefit from automation are those that are repetitive. One area where there are numerous opportunities to automate can be found in granting access to infrastructure and application resources. For automated self-service IT to be most effective, it can and should span the entire lifecycle of the resources your employees request, including the initial service request, approvals, provisioning, resource changes, all the way through to decommissioning.

Each of these tasks is repetitive, prone to error and time consuming for IT administrators. Automating them gets the work done faster and more efficiently, and also allows IT staff who were once consumed by the day-to-day activity of keeping technology running, to instead focus on more strategic business requirements such as innovation.

Efficiency equates to cost savings

Automation allows technology to be served up effectively and efficiently, saving you money. These may not always be the same clear-cut savings you would see with the reduction of a cloud bill, but automation can save you money…and help you prevent overspend. According to Gartner, organizations that don’t have an Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) automation strategy will achieve 70% less savings due to efficiency and productivity than their counterparts who do have clearly defined automation strategies.

For example, policy-based automation that is part of a self-service delivery model can enable users to request services that have been standardized, at a fixed pre-approved cost, with an expiration date, to avoid expensive cost overages. When aligned with resource usage policies, it can also prevent over-allocation. In public cloud environments, overprovisioned instance types mean higher daily costs. And for private cloud workloads, rightsizing your workloads can result in deferred hardware purchase savings over several quarters, years, or even in perpetuity.

Gartner also predicts that by 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% by combining automation technologies with redesigned operational processes. With more remote workers than ever before, this trend will likely only accelerate.

Leveraging automation as part of a self-service IT delivery model will deliver increased business agility and efficiency.

To learn more about how to reap the benefits of self-service IT, download our new eBook, Embracing Self-Service IT with Automation.

The post Empower Your Organization with Automated Self-Service IT appeared first on Snow Software.

As a result, IT teams are left to defend against a growing number of high-priority security threats from newly deployed software and shadow IT. We’re excited to share that our most recent Risk Monitor release, Risk Monitor 2.4, offers expanded capabilities for identifying and separating false positives from real vulnerabilities – making it easier for IT teams to manage risk and save time. From Snow’s reporting alone, Risk Monitor has been able to remove over 274 million false positives.

Security is a top priority

In Snow’s 2021 Priorities Report, 38% of IT leaders surveyed identified one of their top three top priorities as reducing security risks. And, over the past 12 months, 43% said that cybersecurity threats were one of IT’s biggest challenges. 

To address these security concerns, we explored how security teams are currently keeping up with risk.

Security teams use cybersecurity tools to assess where their risk is. But when it comes to vulnerabilities, most of their time is spent addressing actual risk to operations (true positives) and combing through false negatives, which are the ones that sneak by as not posing risk, when in fact, they do.

Managing false positives

Another chunk of vulnerabilities appears in the form of false positives; a false positive is like when your Nest or Alexa alert you there is motion in the room, but the room is empty. Reviewing false positives requires inspecting each alert and signing off. A lot of time is spent going down the list, analyzing it one by one.

Risk Monitor provides complete visibility across the enterprise, making it easy to see how many devices are in use; where they are; which applications are installed and who has access to them across on-premises, cloud and mobile devices.

This powerful inventory data is augmented with data from the National Vulnerability Database and displayed on an intuitive dashboard to pinpoint where critical vulnerabilities reside in your environment.

Vulnerability management that goes above and beyond

In addressing common headaches that stem from Windows 10 vulnerabilities, Windows 10 versions are now recognized as patching previous vulnerabilities. With the deployment of the Windows Update agent script, reports now accurately reflect any applied patches. In a sample of one Windows 10 machine, Risk Monitor consolidated the list of vulnerabilities from 1600 to 12 by reducing the number of false positives identified. This saves time and energy and ensures that IT is only paying attention to the actual risks in the environment.

Additionally, Risk Monitor 2.4 has significantly improved the speed and performance of viewing and filtering the reports. There is also enhanced recognition of software versions in all applications, further reducing the number of false positives reported.

Learn more about how Snow Risk Monitor can help you simplify handling false positives and strengthen your company’s risk management strategy.

The post Addressing Vulnerability False Positives with Risk Monitor 2.4 appeared first on Snow Software.

After a year of continued innovation and investment in Snow Optimizer for SAP Software, this news further showcases Snow’s dedication to helping organizations better manage and optimize their investment in SAP solutions.

“Organizations around the globe rely on SAP solutions as a part of their critical infrastructure. Gaining and maintaining visibility across complex technology systems like SAP is both essential and increasingly challenging.” – Sanjay Castelino, Chief Product Officer at Snow.

In 2020, some of our major milestones included the introduction of the SuperMaster feature, 360° evaluation of SAP solutions with SoftwareONE and re-certification from the ITAM Review. But in order to understand why it’s so important for us to be SAP certified, it’s crucial to have a little more background on Snow’s product.

Snow Optimizer is an SAP add-on, and a native SAP asset management solution. Meaning it runs on the SAP application platform, installed on one SAP system and connected to the relevant satellite systems via RFC, and delivers actionable insights into the SAP ecosystem without having to take data outside the secure SAP environment in order to do so.

“With Snow’s SAP-certified solution, organizations gain the intelligence required to ensure their SAP environment is optimized and driving value for their business. This is the heart of our vision to provide true technology intelligence,” said Sanjay. 

What does certification entail?

Imagine an installed add-on changing data in the DB tables where salaries of all employees are stored or overwriting existing SAP programs with a malicious version. To avoid issues like this, a certified program must live in its own so-called ‘namespace’ in SAP, thereby clearly separating all code and data from SAP’s own and from those of other SAP add-ons.

The program code is then checked for “good” behavior and compliance with the rules established by SAP to avoid potential conflict with already running applications. Using highly specialized scanning tools, the code is examined for less obvious problems (like with security or performance). We’re happy to share that Snow Optimizer has passed all these tests with flying colors.

“Since SOS is an add-on to SAP and is running alongside other potential business-critical applications in the same environment, customers need to be sure that the add-on doesn’t negatively affect the operation of these applications,” Sanjay explains. “That’s what the certification process by SAP checks”.

Why Snow Optimizer?

The reasons why customers prefer an SAP add-on over any externally installed software are manifold. With Snow Optimizer, there are several compelling reasons:

• The customer doesn’t need any additional software or hardware
• The SAP security concept is used
• No interfaces to SAP-external systems necessary
• No data leaves the SAP environment
• Full integration with SAP’s own functions (like user management, batch processing, etc.)
• The user interface is familiar and powerful

All in all, for an SAP customer, an add-on is far superior to any SAP-external software in terms of TCO, maintainability and supportability.

Snow Optimizer provides more detail than the SAP embedded tools. It can analyze user behavior and authorization roles, recommend correct user license type classification, measure engines, analyze indirect/digital access and more. Rules can be defined and automated, greatly reducing the cost and effort required to optimize and continually manage SAP licensing.

Get Started

Talk to us about how we can help you identify your license requirements and current usage. Snow Optimizer for SAP Software provides comprehensive visibility into SAP usage and spend over your SAP estate, enabling you to manage risks, govern processes effectively, right-size your technology investments, reduce unbudgeted costs and be empowered for negotiations with SAP.

The post Snow Optimizer Is Re-Certified by SAP appeared first on Snow Software.

Our 2021 live virtual events will give attendees the opportunity to share experiences, interact with SAP industry experts and learn more about controlling SAP licensing spend — an increasingly critical conversation.

Even though it is one of the most expensive lines on the technology balance sheet, SAP spend often isn’t scrutinized as an IT investment because of its critical role in running essential technology. Due to its size, scale and complexity, it can be incredibly difficult to know which licenses you have, where and how they are used and what they are costing the business. Many organizations may miss the opportunity to optimize costs.

A look back at 2020

During last year’s virtual forum, we polled attendees to understand some of their biggest challenges when it comes to SAP licensing and the limitations that stopped them from addressing these challenges.

Across all regions, 44% of respondents said that a lack of visibility over SAP licensing was their biggest challenge, and this was put in context with the responses to the second question illustrated below.

According to those surveyed, the biggest limitation to addressing SAP license challenges was that license definitions, as well as contract terms and conditions, are difficult to understand. SAP’s tenure in the market and company evolution has impacted contracts and led to a lot of changes and increasingly complex technology and licensing models.

Confusion over Indirect/Digital Access, licensing metrics and licensing model changes have fuelled the underlying issue. Without a clear understanding of entitlements, it is difficult to obtain visibility of actual usage and requirements and optimize SAP licenses.

Visibility is a growing concern

Visibility has become an increasingly hot topic of conversation, and not just in relation to SAP. According to our recent IT Priorities Report, one of the most concerning issues for IT leaders and organizations in 2021 is the impact of technology blind spots. Over the past year as companies have shifted to remote work, technology management has become significantly more challenging. IT leaders are looking for new ways to keep their landscape under control since organizations with blind spots risk soaring IT expenses, unexpected true-up costs, fines, contractual breaches and more.

Save your spot

In this year’s event, we will look at the key challenges facing SAP licensed organizations in 2021. The interactive panel will look at how you can gain visibility of your estate, understand different licensing models, invest in future transformation projects and use Snow Optimizer for SAP to maximize ROI on SAP investments. 

Select your virtual event and register today!

The post Snow for SAP Software Forum: Making the Most of Your SAP License Investment appeared first on Snow Software.

“Feedback from clients on licensing IBM software over hundreds of software acquisitions, combined with regular software audits, led to IBM creating an alternative that seems to have been well-received amongst the global client base,” said Sanjay.

As IBM continues to evolve IASP, we are excited to share that Snow SAM tools can be leveraged to supplement the verification procedures carried out by IBM’s four IASP partners to measure software consumption.

Improving your compliance position

The IASP offering is currently designed for enterprise customers and run on a “by-invitation or client request” basis. Invited organizations need to select one of the four authorized SAM partners – Anglepoint, Deloitte, Ernst and Young or KPMG – to proactively manage their IBM software assets. This provides the customer with a continuous, transparent way of managing license compliance, combined with various other benefits.

How the IASP program works

• A client of IBM software, signs the IASP Agreement with IBM and signs a Statement of Work with its preferred IASP partner after due selection process to receive SAM Managed Services
• The IASP partner establishes the necessary reporting processes, including the setup of eligible sub-capacity measuring tools and assist with SAM Tool configurations and their optimization
• The first report, a baseline report, after due consultation between the IASP and the client, is submitted to IBM, by the client
• Any gaps between license entitlement and software deployments, at this stage, can be remedied by purchasing additional licenses either directly from IBM or from an existing IBM authorized software reseller at standard commercial terms
• The subsequent quarterly periodic reports are submitted to IBM by the client, after the IASP has performed the ongoing SAM Managed Services

What are the benefits?  

While organizations are part of the IASP program they receive significant benefits, including:

• Audit exemption from verification reviews
• The IASP partner ensures that the necessary data collection process is optimized and compliant for Sub-Capacity licensing and eligibility
• Customers receive commercial pricing for any excess use software and they can elect to purchase through their preferred resellers
• Customers have options, with the knowledge & technical support of the selected IASP partner, to use SAM Tools like Snow, and discover areas to optimize the future state of their software environment

According to IBM’s Saxena, “There seems to be an inflection point in the marketplace, as most businesses accelerate their transition to the different models of hybrid cloud, the clients are demanding and expecting more efficient options of verifying consumption of software and the publishers are actively looking at ways to satisfy that demand. The growth of SAM Tools in the market place is a good indicator to underpin the client requirements. It is also important to recognize that not all clients are choosing SAM and would prefer to be audited, once every so often.”

With Snow’s SAM Tools inclusion within this offering, customers can use the Snow technology intelligence platform to its fullest, to supplement the IASP partner’s processes to achieve reliable and predictable results for IBM software consumption, as part of their wider SAM program. We look forward to providing more transparency and flexibility to our customers seeking visibility into their IBM investments.

If you want a better understanding of Snow’s overall technology get in touch with one of Snow’s Solutions Consultants to learn more.

The post IBM’s IASP Partners Can Choose Snow appeared first on Snow Software.

As one of our survey respondents noted, “Nobody had expected a pandemic and we were therefore not prepared for the majority of employees to work in the home office. We had to invest heavily in telephony as well as IT security, especially endpoint security, at short notice.”

Many organizations have also doubled down on core services such as Microsoft, SAP, and Adobe to support their remote workforce, and some even introduced completely new tools to help them weather the pandemic. With new technology adopted across the business and limited visibility, improving endpoint management for employees has become a top priority for IT leaders. That starts with knowing what’s being used and by whom.

Introducing BigFix Inventory

Snow and HCL Technologies have worked closely together to enhance the existing integration between BigFix Inventory and the Snow platform. With a new connector recently introduced, customers can now use raw data collected by the BigFix agent that is then normalized by Snow’s technology to get a far more comprehensive view of their technology assets, and without the hassle of deploying additional agents.

Since it’s a standalone product, you can use BigFix independently or alongside other products in the BigFix family to create a robust inventory data warehouse where you can browse technology asset insights and generate reports. With BigFix and Snow, enterprise teams can better understand what technology is available for their remote workforce, and how to keep users patched and running on the right programs.

How can BigFix Inventory help?

BigFix is a single, intelligent agent that can help you with IT budget planning, license reconciliation, audit defense, migration planning, and security, all with minimal impact on your system performance. No matter the size of the environment, BigFix helps IT and security teams collaborate by monitoring for unauthorized software and removing software which poses a security threat or falls outside of the approved software/applications list.

Maintain an up-to-date inventory of assets

With BigFix, you can identify licensed and unlicensed software to track software usage patterns and trends across Windows, UNIX, Linux and macOS endpoints. It allows customers to maintain an up-to-date inventory of IBM software assets so organizations can see what IBM software they have, where it is, and how it is being used. As it monitors processor value unit (PVU) and resource value unit (RVU) MAPC consumption under full and sub-capacity licensing terms, customers can see their current license consumption and also predict their future usage. This data is critical for organizations looking to maintain or reduce technology spending or avoid a costly audit.

We have several customers with large IBM estates, who are using BigFix Inventory to manage their IBM software assets. Because of the cost and resource implications involved in rolling out and supporting additional agents, these customers prefer to take a “zero agent” approach when it comes to installing and using supplementary technology. BigFix Inventory is an essential part of their technology ecosystem.

Technology intelligence improves endpoint management

Understanding how and why employees use specific technologies, along with a clear understanding of the resources an organization has across its ecosystem is essential. At Snow, we call that technology intelligence. During the pandemic especially, IT teams need end-to-end visibility across their IT ecosystem, especially their endpoints, to optimize spend, maximize value and minimize risk.

With HCL BigFix, you can get more value out of what you already have deployed. Although the BigFix solution is mainly focused on IBM products, our recently released connector allows you to normalize the vendor data beyond just IBM through Snow’s Data Intelligence Service (DIS) database, without deploying additional agents.

Learn how Snow and BigFix work together to keep costs to a minimum and deliver more insight about your endpoint devices.

The post Snow and BigFix Inventory: More Data, Less Agents appeared first on Snow Software.