SaaS Management

Exciting new product family capabilities for Adobe Creative Cloud

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas now lets you filter for related products within Adobe’s family of applications and subscriptions.

 IT/ITAM Managers can:

• Easily query Adobe and its sub-products to understand the usage and optimize costs (e.g. aggregated view of Adobe Creative Cloud or down to applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat, etc.).
• Quickly see charts with application and subscription KPIs such as purchased or free, unassigned or over assigned, usage and costs, active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.

IT, Finance, and Procurement Managers can make faster, better decisions around costs, app rationalization, and vendor negotiation.

Improvements to applications tables for better SaaS management 

We’ve updated the SaaS Management applications page to include more granular details to help you gain more visibility into your SaaS estate and optimize your spend.

We’ve added new data, such as:

• Discovery date: This information displays the date when the application was first discovered in your SaaS estate, allowing you to focus on the most recently discovered applications.
• Active users: This information displays the number of users that used this application in the last 30 days, allowing you to track its usage.

Cloud Capabilities

Cloud License Management: Key features added to improve your Azure Hybrid Benefit’s (BYOL) usage

In your cloud license management (CLM) dashboard, you can now see:

• Potential savings in licensing costs if all eligible resources (VMs) are converted to bring-your-own-licenses (BYOL) (Azure Hybrid Benefit).
• The realized savings from your existing BYOL configured resources. We can do this as we have exposed the price for Windows Server licenses in a BYOL and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) configuration in the Snow Atlas UI.
• The number of Windows Server licenses required for BYOL-eligible resources. By automatically calculating the license requirement, you can now quickly confirm that licenses are correctly applied while simultaneously optimizing costs.

Refer to the documentation here.

We have more enhancements lined up for March. As a Snow Atlas customer, we invite you to join the beta program for this application. Speak to your account manager to get started.

Access Snow Cloud Cost application using single sign-on (SSO)

Snow Atlas customers with a Snow Cloud Cost subscription can now access this application directly from the Snow Atlas UI using SSO. To enable this, configure your access on the Snow Cloud Cost page in the Snow Atlas settings. You only need your client ID and the name of your identity provider for Snow Cloud Cost to set this up. Follow the instructions here.

Snow Cloud Cost

New anomaly detection features

We introduce two impactful features that elevate the anomaly detection experience: root cause presentation and anomaly graph visualization along with the anomaly baseline.

With our new root cause presentation feature, you gain deeper insights into the factors contributing to anomalies in your data.

Revamped budget page

Introducing an enhanced look and upgraded capabilities to elevate your cost management, you can now:

• Budget 6 months daily and monthly granularity forecast presentation.
• Easily create budgets based on amortized/net amortized/unblended costs.
• You can now configure your budget setting with all available Cost and Usage filters.
• Seamlessly browse between monthly and daily views along with a detailed table.
• The triggered budget alert is now visible on the budget level.
• New and informative budget alert email.
• Save the budget chart and information as a dashboard panel.

For more information review our documentation. Note: This option is not available for EA accounts.

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing. 

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 2024 appeared first on Snow Software.

Overview 

Impacts 

• Senior executives are starting to challenge the value of digital transformation, having encountered dramatic growth in software and cloud usage without adequate management and optimization. 
• Where software asset management (SAM) and FinOps do exist, they have limited influence or authority to optimize consumption and value across a growing, increasingly complex set of environments. 
• Despite their interdependencies, SAM and FinOps often operate independently, in different silos and with limited resources, eroding their value-maximization potential. 

Recommendations 

Executive leaders responsible for maturing software and cloud governance disciplines should: 

• Consolidate and mandate SAM and FinOps disciplines to drive enhanced visibility and understanding that maximizes value and opportunity while minimizing cost and risk. 
• Create an integrated unit that profits from the synergy of both disciplines to deliver optimum benefit across an increasingly complex technology environment. 
• Check that the consolidated functions are adequately staffed with skilled team members to work with key stakeholders to eliminate unproductive cost overruns. 

Strategic Planning Assumption 

By 2025, 50% of organizations will unify SAM and FinOps into a consolidated discipline delivering portfolio cost management and governance. 

Impacts and Recommendations 

Mandate SAM and FinOps to Optimize Cost and Value 

 
FinOps and SAM are kindred spirits; although founded from different eras of technology adoption, their disciplines share objectives. Both represent coordinated, continuous undertakings to realize value from evolving investments and expenditures. Their frameworks exploit many of the same cost-efficiency principles and capabilities, incorporating a combination of consumption, rightsizing, optimization and mitigation management fundamentals. 

Rightsize SaaS With SAM 

As the organization becomes dependent on each cloud service and its features, buyer bargaining power is eroded (see Predicts 2023: Inflation’s Permanent Impact on SaaS/Software Costs, Commercials and Business Practices). While procurement experts earnestly attempt to resolve these issues, they are often frustrated by their inability to limit cost increases at each contract renewal. 
 
Options to switch to an alternative may be limited and/or costly to execute (see Identify and Mitigate SaaS Switching Costs), while cost increases are most dramatic in monopolistic scenarios. Therefore, organizations require consumption management to offset or limit cost increases in advance of renewal, with estimates of unused applications ranging from 30% to 50%.² Execution requires a well-resourced, adept SAM team with the directive to manage consumption and eradicate waste. 
 

Confront CIPS Wastage With FinOps  

As a core contributor to the cloud center of excellence (CCOE), FinOps fills a key role in reducing waste and costs. In parallel with SAM processes, FinOps-driven optimization will minimize waste.³ For example: 

• Scale back or retire services provisioned without ongoing use cases that remain unutilized. 
• Scale down valid yet underutilized services, including; underutilized CPU, memory, storage, backup or bandwidth, triggering actions to rightsize and reprovision the relevant instances. 
• Deprovision services that served a useful term but have since remained running without any delivered value. Switch off or reassign services accordingly. 

Without effective SAM and FinOps disciplines, waste is inevitable, with the majority of applications and environments significantly underutilized. Meanwhile, unplanned consumption growth in CIPS environments can turn into toxic overconsumption if left unchecked, resulting in significant, ongoing unproductive costs. The combined SAM and FinOps functions must be tasked with eliminating growth of unnecessary costs as one of their key goals. 

Recommendations for Executive Leaders: 

• Establish budget risks by reviewing software and cloud cost escalation rates. 
• Create a mandate for investing in SAM and FinOps as key mechanisms to offset material risks of continually escalating costs. 
• Establish an expectation that both disciplines operate with a shared understanding of what assets and resources are used within each environment or platform. 
• Create authorization, empowerment and a culture that drives action and realization from SAM and FinOps optimization and mitigation recommendations executed throughout IT. 

SAM and FinOps Role in Delivering Business Value From Cloud Adoption 

Cloud services and software both deliver significant value to the organization and its customers, thus representing high-value business capabilities that necessitate management. Executive leaders seek to ensure they’re not only benefiting from rapid adoption, but also seeing broader benefits including understanding costs and leveraging robust processes, particularly in regulated industries. 

SAM plays a critical role in advancing cloud adoption and providing a platform for driving optimization maturity, laying the platform for forecasting future requirements and the resulting costs. Assessing consumption against projections while identifying underutilized licenses must be incorporated into the organization’s overall cloud strategy. Unlike predictable costs of preinvested assets, cloud services scale rapidly, requiring continuous management. SAM professionals have previously addressed virtual server sprawl and its impacts, however, unlike the virtual on-premises data center, cloud services are an unlimited, direct and immediate cost. Accordingly, continuous discipline is required to drive value (see Figure 3). 
 

Ephemeral cloud systems are subject to consumption spikes where costs may rapidly erode expected benefits; accordingly, anomaly detection and management are fundamental to protecting business value. The key is being able to tell the difference between bad growth, creating unnecessary cost and good growth that delivers business value. Therein lies the role of FinOps in underpinning value. For example, alerts for consumption growth trigger investigation to validate authentic spikes in consumption, finding that the spike was driven by onboarding a large new client, supporting validation of valuable use rather than unproductive use. 

Detailed usage data collection and reporting and effective use of analytics depend on asset life cycle management processes, interpreting data and executing the actions they inform. For example, by implementing effective provisioning and metering processes, SAM can align the licensable functionality of an application to appropriate use cases, reducing the likelihood of inflated costs. 

Recommendations for Executive Leaders: 

• Sponsor the governance mandate for software and cloud services management, with clear roles and responsibilities across consolidated SAM and FinOps teams. 
• Verify that SAM and FinOps teams have the skills, resources and processes needed to manage cloud service consumption. 

Conclusion 

In conclusion, the integration of SAM and FinOps is essential for organizations to navigate the complexities of software and cloud governance. By leveraging the synergies between these disciplines, organizations can achieve enhanced visibility, cost optimization, and value maximization across their technology portfolios. With the right resources and strategic direction, SAM and FinOps will continue to play pivotal roles in driving business value and ensuring cost containment in an ever-evolving technological landscape. 

Attributions and Disclaimers: 

¹Gartner, “Target Software and Cloud Costs by Uniting Software Asset Management and FinOps” by analysts Stephen White, Yoann Bianic, Stewart Buchanan, 6 April 2023.   

²Unused application rates from Flexera’s October 2022 survey data: desktop, 38%; data center, 34%; SaaS, 33%. According to Nexthink 49% of all software is unused, and according to Zylo, 40% of software licenses are wasted. 

³Reducing Waste Opportunities, FinOps Foundation, and State of ITAM Report, Flexera, which reports that 33% of integration-as-a-service/platform-as-a-service spending is underutilized or wasted. 

³Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment, Oracle, and Microsoft Product Terms for Azure Services, Microsoft. 

Disclaimer:  
These graphics were 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 Software. 

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.   

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.   

The post How To Target Software and Cloud Costs by Uniting Software Asset Management and FinOps: Insights from Gartner® appeared first on Snow Software.

According to the 2024 IT Priorities Report, 75% of IT leaders felt there was a risk of visibility gaps within their IT ecosystem. But a lack of visibility isn’t the only obstacle facing IT executives: Decentralized purchasing patterns, the rise of generative AI tools — like ChatGPT — and black holes created by SaaS sprawl all present their own unique challenges.  

It’s not that IT leaders are unaware of these dynamic forces. In fact, integrating AI into their operations was the top priority for IT leaders in 2024 (35%), alongside reducing IT costs (28%) and security risks (28%).² Nonetheless, they make it harder for decision-makers to plot a clear course ahead.  

To make sense of today’s extragalactic technology landscape, we created three roadmaps to help IT leaders:  

• Expand the remit of IT asset management (ITAM)  
• Make cloud adoption a central part of their strategy  
• Navigate the meteoric rise of SaaS applications  

Let’s lift off. 

The year of ITAM expansion  

Can ITAM deliver greater value in an always-evolving market? With the ITAM universe projected to reach a value of $1.3bn (USD) by 2024, there’s a clear opportunity within reach.³ 

However, uncertainty caused by trends such as GenAI, predictions of mergers and acquisitions spiking, and lengthy implementation timelines for SAM tools are giving IT leaders pause for thought — no matter the potential benefits of ITAM expansion.⁴ 

If you’re looking to rewrite the role of ITAM within your organization and deliver enhanced cost transparency and risk mitigation, download our 2024 ITAM Roadmap.  

A SaaS supernova  

When it comes to SaaS, IT leaders will need to take proactive, confident steps if they are to balance application sprawl with security and innovation goals.  

This might seem like having a destination without a map, when you consider that two-thirds (67%) of IT leaders suspect employees are buying more cloud and SaaS than IT knows about.² However, IT leaders can’t afford to be complacent; Gartner® predicts that businesses will overspend by 25% if they do not have visibility into their SaaS lifecycles.³  

Our 2024 SaaS Roadmap gives you the intel you need to create a team to manage SaaS adoption, governance and education – and select the right tool to empower them.  

Ending cloud cost combustion  

Although SAM and FinOps can work in “magnificent desolation”⁴, integrating these teams will empower organizations to speed ahead as cloud becomes an increasingly strategic IT play. In fact, according to Gartner, “by 2026, organizations that merge SAM and FinOps into a central function will report 60% less financial waste from software and cloud investments”.⁵ 

Do you want to reduce wasted cloud spend and optimize your strategy through a unified view of SAM and FinOps? Our 2024 Cloud Roadmap will show you the way.  

Achieving holistic visibility of your entire technology infrastructure can help your organization chart a course to a brave new world, one that mitigates the risks of visibility gaps, reduces wasted cost and creates more space for IT to innovate.  

It’s been a long way, but you’re here.⁶   

Attributions/ Disclaimers:  

1. Paraphrased from John Swigert, Apollo 13 Mission, 1970. 

2. “New Release: 2024 IT Priorities Report.” Snow Software, 14 Dec. 2023, www.snowsoftware.com/resource/it-priorities-report/  

3. Cipolla, Tom; Kalay, Jaswant; Mariano, Joe and Dan Wilson. “Gartner® Market Guide for SaaS Management Platforms.” Gartner, 2022. 

4. Paraphrased from Buzz Aldrin, 1969 

5. Transparency Market Research. “It Asset Management (ITAM) Software Market Is Projected to Reach a Value of US$1.3 Bn by 2024.” Digital Journal, 23 May 2022, www.digitaljournal.com/pr/it-asset-management-itam-software-market-is-projected-to-reach-a-value-of-us1-3-bn-by-2024#ixzz8QVJUmkAa.  

6. Paraphrased from Alan Shepard, Apollo 14 Mission, 1971.  

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.   

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

The post IT Visibility: Mission-Critical for 2024   appeared first on Snow Software.

“Flexera and Snow share the same mission to maximize the value of technology for our customers,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. “By joining forces, we bring together unrivaled domain expertise, unmatched technology data and intelligence, and the ability to deliver even more business outcomes for our joint customer base. Flexera’s acquisition of Snow unlocks new opportunities for hybrid ITAM and FinOps. We are excited to broaden the capabilities for customers and partners of both companies.”

Flexera will continue to innovate, enhance, maintain, and support both Flexera and Snow solutions. Partners will have even more support as Flexera will continue to work with partners of both Flexera and Snow, including those that offer hosted options to serve their customers.

With this acquisition, Flexera expands its ability to help organizations manage spend and mitigate risk, generating unified views and actionable insights across the technology landscape. Customers of both Flexera and Snow will have more ways to reduce risk and optimize spend with advanced support for hybrid environments built for every size organization, from large-scale enterprises to mid-size and smaller companies. The combined entity provides both customers and partners an expanded ecosystem and community to help them navigate inflating costs and unquantified risks across cloud, SaaS, containers, on-premises, and AI technologies.

“As global organizations continue to navigate ongoing cost increases, a precarious security landscape, the accelerating pace of AI and uncertain market conditions, they require new levels of support, scale and innovation from their IT partners,” said Vishal Rao, President and CEO at Snow. “Flexera and Snow bringing their considerable domain and technology know-how together means we can tackle these issues head on; all while providing improved customer experiences, an expanded partner ecosystem, and innovative technology across ITAM, SaaS Management, FinOps and beyond. This is the beginning of a new and exciting chapter for Snow, our customers, our partners, and our employees. One we believe is essential to helping organizations fully realize the power of understanding, managing and demonstrating the value of their technology investments.”

Flexera is delighted to welcome Snow customers and partners into our Flexera family. Flexera has long admired Snow’s great products, customer value realization, talented employees, partner ecosystem, and active customer community. Flexera and Snow share harmonious company cultures, missions, and long-term strategies.  

Together, we will continue to deliver market leading ITAM and FinOps solutions that solve our customers’ most complex technology problems.

If you’re a customer or partner, we encourage you to continue the journey with us and learn more here.

The post Flexera Completes Acquisition of Snow Software, Broadening its Portfolio for Technology Value Optimization appeared first on Snow Software.

While common audit triggers include a reduction in spend and recent M&A, not all vendor audits look alike. Some are disguised as free ITAM/license assessments (e.g. Microsoft^® SAM Assessment, Adobe Software Insights Review) to help organizations get more value and stay secure.

Another type of audit is a cybersecurity audit. These are often triggered by your internal audit team or by commercial requirements to have a security certification (e.g. ISO27001, SOC2, etc.). We also find that organizations who’ve encountered a significant security incident conduct third-party audits to identify gaps.

While audits are time-consuming and can be expensive, they can be a blessing in disguise if organizations heed the wake-up call and get their software asset management house in order. Here are three benefits of being audit-ready.

1. Eliminate the practice of paying for software your organization isn’t using.

When you take a look at your effective license position, you are understanding what you’ve purchased against what’s installed and licenses allocated or assigned. If you’re not compliant, then the next question is the software actually being used, and can it be uninstalled? If you perform this activity >90 days before your next audit and are able to get to a positive position, your risk of being fined reduces significantly.

The side benefit of understanding usage data is your organization has one more lever in renewal negotiations if you aren’t using the licenses you’ve purchased. Here are a couple of examples of customers who leveraged usage data to mitigate risk, and reduce license costs.

• Sasol was able to identify license compliance violations to the tune of $28.6M. On top of that, they’ve been able to save an additional $5.4M by optimizing licenses and rationalizing their application portfolio with other vendors including Prometheus GWOS, K2, OMADA, Autodesk, AirWatch, OpenText, Acquire Sentinel, Cloudera, and VMware.
  
• Telkomsel was able to identify $740,000 in license compliance risk. Additionally, they’ve been able to find savings of 10% of their Oracle license costs in addition to $74,000 in potential savings for Microsoft subscriptions.

2. Improve your cyber-security posture.

If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it. Fortunately, many organizations are now seeking to follow this advice, especially with guidance from the United States federal government for all agencies to obtain a complete software inventory.

Organizations can improve security and visibility of IT assets by:

• Identifying the use of unauthorized applications and blocking use (as Max Life Insurance did)
• Identifying free and unauthorized SaaS applications not known by IT (as Christchurch City Council found more than 200 unknown applications in use)
• Locating applications with vulnerabilities and applications end-of-life and end-of-support that are at risk because they are no longer eligible for patching

3. Minimize interruptions and get more value from your team.

The time spent preparing for a vendor audit can consume your team for weeks with all the manual processes involved. With automated reporting of application usage against entitlements, organizations can get near-real-time visibility into how licenses are used to ensure compliance. For instance:

• Telkomsel was able to reduce the time to prepare for audits by 90%.
• Dorset Council used spreadsheets to report on installations of applications and servers. By having all these details in Snow, they were able to reduce processing and analysis time from 2-3 days to 5 or 10 minutes.
• Investec saved an estimated 200 hours by pulling in-depth reports on demand, eliminating the need for time-consuming and complex manual work and the expense of external consultants.

We often hear that organizations only have enough time to proactively manage the top 3-5 vendors. What impact could you drive if you had data for your next 50 vendors at your fingertips?

The post 3 Reasons to Love Software Audits appeared first on Snow Software.

Mature organizations are excited about the multitude of ways they can help their organizations with the intelligence they have on their technology assets. Here are a few examples:

• Understanding how technology is actually being used so they can buy the right amount of licenses
• Reporting on application versions to identify devices that need to be updated
• Determining where there are overlapping technologies used in the organization and where some applications and costs can be eliminated
• Finding applications that are end-of-life or soon to be deprecated
• Identifying applications in use that haven’t been vetted by security
• Quickly reporting on effective license position

Less mature organizations understand the potential value of their IT asset database but find getting other departments to leverage their data repository is like pulling teeth.

The least mature organizations are typically using an ITAM tool for one use case. These organizations don’t have a good owner of the tool (it’s often someone’s part-time job) and resulting data. The potential for using this data set never sees the light of day.

“Data and analytics leaders who share data externally generate three times more measurable economic benefit than those who do not.”

data sharing is a key digital transformation capability by Gartner^®

6 ways to advocate for your data

So, how should less mature organizations advocate for their data? Here are a few tips:

• Communicate the quality of your data. How is the data collected, how often, how is it normalized, and enriched? How will you validate the data accuracy?
• Understand the process others are using for capturing data today. It is possible your colleagues are ignoring you because they think they already have the answers? Have a sit down and get a detailed understanding of how they capture the IT data to do their jobs. It’s likely they are doing a lot of manual work or have big gaps in their data that you could help them with.
• Use tools for sharing data already familiar to the organization. Many of our customers feed their IT asset data into their analytics tool of choice (PowerBI, Tableau, etc.) where most in the organization already have access. The other benefit of this approach is users can join technology data with other datasets to solve additional problems (e.g. reporting on sustainability initiatives, etc.).
• Leverage AI. With generative AI technologies, there are now more ways to further democratize data insights. Now, your colleagues can simply ask your dataset questions like, “Are there any inactive computers in our inventory?” Or, “How many new servers have been discovered in the last 90 days compared to the prior 90 days?” You can experiment with these sorts of innovations with Snow Copilot, an AI assistant, that will allow customers to query their details on Software Asset Management (SAM) computer data securely, receiving insights and conversational responses directly within the Snow Atlas platform.
• Make data actionable. Provide the data in a format that can be used by your stakeholders. For instance, it would be best to provide data via API if your stakeholder is planning to use this information in automating processes.
• Leverage forums owned by your leadership. Your leadership likely has an all-hands meeting, newsletter, or some other kind of forum where you can communicate the rich dataset your organization has, its accuracy and some examples of how it could be leveraged by various stakeholders. Involve your leadership to understand what they think are the most impactful use cases you should pursue with others in the organization.

You can learn more about how other customers are using Technology Intelligence and the benefits they are realizing through our case studies.

The post How to Advocate for Your Data appeared first on Snow Software.

Batch editing of agreements and agreement filtering

In response to customer feedback, Snow has released (in Snow License Manager v9.33) the enhancement to edit multiple agreements of the same type at once from the Agreements page. Snow has also improved the filtering options on the Agreement list page, and now all columns can be filtered. Additionally, we’ve added three new columns to the Column Selector that you can filter. These include:

• Valid from (date)
• Valid to (date)
• Active (yes/no)

SaaS Management

Improved home page

We’ve updated the organization of information on the SaaS Management home page, so that it’s easier for users to find the information most relevant to them.

The Overview tab includes key performance indicators and trends for your subscriptions, including:

• The count of all your SaaS subscription types
• Your monthly cost of all subscriptions
• Your monthly potential savings across all your SaaS subscriptions
• The number of SaaS subscriptions expiring in the next 60 days to help you manage your SaaS renewals
• A timeline showing your top 5 upcoming renewal term costs by vendor

The Get Started tab helps users quickly find new and existing value with their SaaS Management solution:

• Guidance to key areas of value
• Embedded videos
• Links to key information and documentation

The News tab highlights new releases and capabilities within SaaS Management.

Improved subscription family view

The Insights tab helps users see potential cost savings across SaaS subscriptions:

• Users can select the insights to see only the list of the users that can be optimized
• A dynamic table allows the user to view more than one insight on the dashboard

The Users tab presents user-based information relating to the SaaS subscription family:

• KPIs highlight the total number of users in the family and the total number of active, inactive, and never active users
• A dynamic table shows users of that subscription family with pertinent details like department, monthly cost, and potential savings per user, among others

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing. 

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

The post What’s New at Snow Software: January 2024 appeared first on Snow Software.

• Creating IT asset visibility across the enterprise 
• Public cloud visibility and cost optimization 
• SAP license management 

Innovation area: Enterprise-wide asset visibility, insights and risk mitigation

ITAM for end-user computing 

Do more with Snow Agents with a new package builder feature 

Get more from your Snow Agents and add files and scripts using this new capability in the Snow Agent Package Builder. This feature is available in Snow Atlas and is in early access for on-premises Snow License Manager customers. 

Additionally, the Snow Agents team has improved agent documentation including agent default behavior and a change log. The new documentation repository for agents can be found on GitHub. 

SAM on Snow Atlas: Bulk archive and delete of computers 

We’ve improved the customer workflow and made it easier to manage your computers in SAM on Snow Atlas with the ability to archive and delete computers in bulk. 

We heard from users that the process for archiving and deleting computers was tedious and time-consuming, requiring users to select and edit computers one-by-one. 

With this new release, users can save time and improve productivity with the ability to edit computers in larger quantities. 

SaaS Management 

New: Recommended actions 

Within SaaS Management on Snow Atlas, we’ve organized the homepage to make it easier for users to know what to do to get more value from their Snow solution. The page is structured with a status page and recommendations, details on how to get started, and an overview of what is new. 

• Recommended actions highlights to-do actions within the system, including missing items such as billing, connectors, configurations and subscription-related metrics. 
• Get started – offers users help on how to configure and set up for maximum value. 
• News – summarizes our latest features and enhancements that are regularly released. 

We’ll be continually enhancing the user experience, so check back here for future updates! 

New product family view for Microsoft 365 

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas is one of the first to allow users to filter by product families and related products within the family of applications and subscriptions.    

Customers can now see a holistic view of not only all their Microsoft 365 subscriptions but also key insights to optimize their Microsoft investment (e.g. aggregated view of the Microsoft 365 offering that bundles all the applications such as Visio, Project, Microsoft Office, etc.).   

Users can review assignments and activity across multiple Microsoft 365 license types in one place to support optimization efforts. Other KPIs include purchased and free, unassigned and over-assigned; approved and unauthorized; usage and costs; active, inactive, and no activity; monitored and unmonitored.  

These metrics help you control shadow SaaS, keep the IT environment more secure, and properly allocate costs across business units. 

SAP license management 

Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software: Latest version provides even greater compliance, optimization, and automation  

Besides becoming certified once again by SAP, Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software’s newest release—version 4.0—provides Snow customers with even more control over their SAP license management. Here are some highlights: 

• Compliance: 8,000+ embedded products provide easier contract management possibilities. 
• Optimization: Two new STAR License Intelligence rule set updates help customers stay current with recent SAP changes. 
• Automation: Customers can always rely on the latest Snow release to keep them automatically up to date, as we stay certified and current to frequent changes from SAP, such as pricing condition lists. 

For more news related to version 4.0 of Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, please see the Release Notes and view the video below: 

Innovation area: Cloud management capabilities 

CostGPT – AI tool on Snow Cloud Cost 

Snow Cloud Cost customers now have access to an AI tool called CostGPT across the platform. You can talk to CostGPT, ask it questions about your cloud cost, and in return, it provides you with personalized insights and visualizations, all in just a few seconds. 

Here are some key benefits of using CostGPT: 

• Simplicity: Users can ask questions about their cloud costs in chat. For instance, “How much have I spent on Amazon in last three years?” Users can also ask more specific queries like “What percentage of my EBS storage is gp3?” The tool will analyze cloud accounts and provide the requested insights. 
• Actionable insights: CostGPT offers insights to optimize cloud costs and suggests additional questions and commands to understand cloud spending better. 
• Proactive decision-making: CostGPT enables organizations to make informed decisions on cloud resource allocation and spending based on search data. This prevents unnecessary costs and optimizes resource utilization. 
• Real-time data visualizations: CostGPT provides visualizations for exploring and analyzing cloud costs. This helps our users make informed decisions and plan expenditure patterns. 

We recognize the challenges of managing cloud costs and the need for multicloud visibility. With CostGPT, users can effortlessly understand their cloud costs instantly. 

What’s next?  

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing. 

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 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

In August, Oracle Verified Solution for Databases was released for SAM on Snow Atlas, a new feature allowing organizations to generate output files in .zip format which contain information about existing hardware, Oracle Databases, Database Options and management packs software and the virtualization technology if present. The .zip file is created based on Oracle-defined specifications and can be generated using Snow tools instead of using Oracle collection tools.

In addition to the Databases solution, several enhancements were made to the “All Java installations” report, with additional columns for Architecture, Installation Status, Home Path and Reason messaging added. A new column selector with several new columns has also been implemented.

The Oracle Verified Solution for Fusion Middleware was released on Snow Atlas in September, extending Oracle Verified Data functionality with Fusion Middleware Products data. This allows users to generate output files regarding existing WebLogic Server, visibility for Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Forms and Reports, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Web Center and Oracle Internet Application Server Installations.

SAM on Snow Atlas also gained visibility for five additional Oracle Fusion Middleware products in September, with visibility into Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Forms and Reports, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Tuxedo, Oracle Web Center and Oracle Internet Application Server.

In October, the Oracle Verified Solution for Java SE was also made available on SAM on Snow Atlas, extending Oracle Verified Data functionality with Oracle Java/OpenJDK data. This update also allows for a single output file to include one row per server of all Oracle verified data products (Oracle Databases, Fusion Middleware and Java SE).

These improvements sit on top of the Oracle Global Licensing and Advisory Services (GLAS) Verification of Snow as a verified third-party tool for Oracle Fusion Middleware in January and Oracle Java SE in May, and Oracle Database and Database Options in 2022. This verified code from Snow’s on-premises offering was then added to Snow Atlas, ensuring all Snow customers can access trusted, verified data on their Oracle estate, no matter what Snow offering they rely on.

By adding these verifications to the suite of offerings available on Snow Atlas, customers can have confidence in both the verification of the data as well as the timeliness, as Snow Atlas continuously updates. As more innovations are made available on Snow Atlas, so too will the Oracle portfolio of verified products grow to ensure customers can gain all the data they need directly from their Snow products.

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In this blog post, I will show you the driving factors behind why we need sustainable IT asset management (ITAM) practices, how to implement them into your business, how they can reduce the impact on the environment’s capital whilst increasing your organization’s capital, and deliver on what your customers and employees want to see from a sustainable viewpoint.

There are many factors why this area of ITAM is gaining more focus, however, there are two universal goals under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that are driving this:

• Goal 12, Responsible Consumption and Production
• Goal 13, Climate Change

A deeper dive into sustainability goals for greener ITAM

SDG Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
Goal 12 is about ensuring sustainable consumption and production. The reason the UN named this as a global goal was that our planet provides us with an abundance of natural resources. However, we have treated Earth as an endless supply chain, and we currently consume more than what the planet can provide. In fact, every year there’s a day called “Earth Overshoot Day,” which occurs when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds Earth’s biocapacity. This year, Earth Overshoot Day was on August 2. In simple terms, by the second of August this year, we had already consumed the earth’s compacity for what it could produce for the whole of 2023. A negative compounding factor of this abundance of consumption is the outcome. In 2022, the estimated e-waste produced was 59.4 million metric tons. To put this in perspective, that’s the weight of the Great Wall of China, which is 13,171 miles long.

SDG Goal 13: Climate Change
The aim of this goal is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. The motivation behind this goal is to achieve a climate neutral world by 2050 and to limit global warming to below 2°C (35.6°F) — with an aim of 1.5°C (34.7°F)— compared with pre-industrial times. All organizations should be setting plans and targets to reach net-zero emissions aligned to 2050. This is across all scopes (both direct and indirect).

So, how can we achieve greener ITAM?

Step 1: Get a baseline position of your current assets.
Before we can make a plan, we must first understand what our baseline position is. To do this, you will need to gather an inventory of all your IT assets (laptops, desktops, services, mobile devices, etc.). If you have an asset register or an inventory solution like Snow Atlas, this can help speed up the process and establish a baseline, as you can discover and report on all your IT assets automatically.

Step 2: Assess the environmental impact of your current IT assets.
Devices consist of a number of minerals and materials that had to be mined and processed before entering the manufacturing process. When evaluating impact, you should assess not just tangible, hardware materials, but the entire lifecycle of the device, from factory conditions, to the percentage of recycled plastic and energy consumption of the device. Manufacturers and third-parties can provide sustainable factors and ratings associated with devices, so that you can start to rank the most sustainable and energy-efficient devices in your organization. This is how we can start to support Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 12 and 13. Getting visibility of the environmental impact of all your devices can be a large undertaking. However, there are solutions to assist with this, such as Sustainability with Snow.

Step 3: Prolong the lifespan of your assets to reduce emissions.
If you prolong the lifespan of a laptop from four years to six years, you can reduce its total emissions by 28%. This is due to the highest proportion of emissions being created in the manufacturing process. What’s more is you could potentially reduce the cost of ownership also by 28%. This does come with a maintenance aspect with the possibility that in order to prolong an asset, you may have to replace the memory, hard drive and battery.

Step 4: Setting a sustainable procurement strategy.
Now that you have established a baseline and understand the sustainable credentials of your devices, you can now strategize how to improve your position moving forward. You can achieve this by replacing devices that no longer support the business user’s role with sustainably procured assets. This can be:

• Via third-party, sustainability-certified devices that have met the threshold to be awarded certifications of sustainable assets
• By procuring from eco-friendly IT vendors, for example, vendors that remanufacture laptops
• By vendors who use circular frameworks for their designs
• Via responsible leasing, where there are multiple lease cycles for a device

Greener ITAM is achievable with these steps. They can help your organization meet your sustainability goals, as well as the global goals. You can contribute to SDG 12 by purchasing IT assets ethically and extending their lifespan, and have a positive impact on SDG 13 by selecting devices that are more energy-efficient and have lower carbon footprints in their creation and operation. It’s time for greener ITAM.

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