Ensuring Positive Business Outcomes With Snow Services
With today’s easily available cloud offerings, software asset management strategies and objectives are changing. Over the last decade, SAM has been focused on compliance, driven by heavy audit activities of the large Independent software vendors. Companies have expended much energy and time investigating issues around incorrect licensing or under-licensing. Now, with cloud strategies and implementations becoming a core focus for today’s CIOs and IT Directors, SAM is maturing to provide technology intelligence for software and cloud consumption. The focus has shifted from compliance to cost transparency and optimization.
This shift requires the SAM organization to review the technology and processes used to ensure that relevant new data is captured and understood. That is why we built a world-class Services organization at Snow. Our services are designed to support and advise on your SAM journey, whether you are just getting started with Snow or have been a customer for many years. The journey starts with a plan to understand technology and commercial data.
Snow Business Health Check
Your initial technical implementation of Snow will quickly provide an awareness of incomplete visibility of technology use. That alone can make planning and budgeting easier, but this lack of visibility could also mean that you’re unprepared for vendor negotiations and may run the risk of audit penalties which can cause reputational and financial damage.
So this is just the starting point.
The Snow Business Health Check is a service designed to help you successfully overcome these challenges by not only providing clear transparency on areas of risk but by also presenting a well-described set of prioritized actions and recommendations to mitigate against these risks. Addressing these actions and recommendations will ensure that you have reliable visibility of the technology in use, no matter if this is on-premise or in the cloud. This visibility is the baseline for SAM readiness as it outlines the actual consumption and license requirements, therefore providing you with accurate, actionable data.
A Business Health Check is the very best way to assess your “current state” and to receive recommendations that help map out a path to an improved “future state”. This map can include programmatic Snow Services expert contributions over a one- to three-year timeline. There are four tiers of prescriptive help, described below, or the services can be taken ad-hoc if preferred.
Snow Business Consulting Tiered Packages
Effectively, Snow’s Business Consulting Tiered Packages provide the guardrails for success. They help ensure value realization through focus on best practises and continuous improvement. The four tiers are described in the following figure and are designed as a progressive process with each new tier building on the success of the last.
Snow Success Program
Further to the Business Health Check and the Business Consulting Packages, the Snow Success Program is designed for enterprise organizations with strategic SAM initiatives. The program provides a very close partnership with Snow to ensure these SAM initiatives are highly successful in optimizing technology spend, enabling governance, minimizing risk and increasing business performance. The Snow Success Program incorporates the chosen Business Consulting Tiered Package (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum), described above, but also includes an aligned Customer Success Manager (CSM). The CSM will:
- Orchestrate Snow’s technical and business consulting activities
- Facilitate cross-functional involvement within Snow that provides privileged access to Snow Product Management and R&D plus beta-testing opportunities
- Organize dedicated round table opportunities for customer networking
- Host regular business reviews with your senior stakeholders
- Maintain a Customer Success Plan which serves as a working document for mutually tracking progress
At the end of each 12-month period, a Success Book is prepared by Snow and presented to you. Lessons learned, key milestones reached and benefits achieved over the year are all documented along with recommendations for the future. These recommendations might include thoughts on
- Strategy
- Governance
- Organization
- Policy and process
- Data and analytics
- Technology
The Success Book is a valuable document detailing how your investment in Snow’s solutions can help you achieve and stretch your business goals.
Licensing Consulting
Snow offers expert advice, guidance and hands-on assistance with recording, managing and reconciling license entitlements in Snow License Manager and for optimization recommendations thereafter.
Snow’s Import and Assignment Licensing Consulting Service covers best practise for data gathering, preparation, import, assignment and validation for software vendors such as Microsoft, VMWare, Adobe and Redhat to name but a few. This service helps create a licence position within the Snow platform and is critical in supporting the identification of what software is actually deployed in your IT estate. It highlights what is being used versus what you are entitled to use, under the terms of your vendor licence agreements. The Import and Assignment Service will help uncover not only potential compliance risks for recognized software but also any under-utilization of software deployments, allowing you to maximize your technology investments.
Snow’s Vendor Compliance Review Licensing Consulting Service is more comprehensive. It incorporates the Import and Assignment Service and builds upon it with supplemental Optimization Licensing Consulting. Snow‘s Licensing Consultant will analyse the data visible within the Snow platform and prepare a report that summarizes the findings. These are then presented to you. The report will include detailed recommendations for further action plus optimization opportunities. Recommendations could help in future software agreement negotiations with your software vendors and with any identified risk mitigation and risk avoidance strategies. This will also place you in a more informed position to proceed with any identified licensing optimization activities.
Services for Snow Optimizer for SAP Software
Many SAM projects start with a focus on Microsoft and other desktop vendors, but too few organizations go on to add SAP to the SAM initiative. Since organizations typically have tens, hundreds or even thousands of SAP systems deployed within their environment, it is imperative to have a consolidated view of all these systems. With its SAP Optimizer Software, Snow offers the best in class License Management tool for SAP software. To ensure value is realized from this software investment, Snow offers a set of associated services ranging from Implementation and Configuration support to “Baseline to Audit” and “Digital Access Assessment Projects”.
Please contact your Snow Account Manager to further discuss how the Snow team can help address your specific needs and introduce you to key Snow consulting personnel as required. Similarly, if you work closely with one of Snow’s business partners, their Account Manager should also be able to discuss how the best complementary blended team of experts, from across the partner and Snow teams, can be utilized to positively influence your desired business outcomes. Alternatively, click here and we’ll be in touch.