What’s New at Snow: Industry-leading intelligence for cloud, datacenter, risk management & more
It has been a busy spring at Snow. For the second year in a row, we were recognized by Gartner analysts as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Tools and by our end users as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice. But the story doesn’t stop there.
We are proud to announce several new and enhanced features that make Snow the best platform for complete visibility and technology intelligence:
- Control cost with first-to-market advanced spend optimization for Adobe Creative Cloud.
- Enhancements to our entire Oracle portfolio, including automated entitlement imports, support for IBM hard partitioning and VMware soft partitioning.
- Industry-leading advanced data center optimization for Windows Server, including recommendations on which edition to license.
- Breakthrough analytics that provide immediate visibility into known software vulnerabilities as well as compliance risks.
- Expanded visibility and optimization for SaaS applications, bringing the total to 18,000 covered apps.
- Detailed visibility and optimization of licensing compliance exclusions.
This launch marks a shift forward for the Snow platform. Our users are at a tipping point: exploding SaaS expenditures, increasingly complex enterprises systems and the constant threat of security and compliance risks are at odds with strategic digital transformation initiatives and fundamental changes in how employees use technology. With this release, our customers can tame their biggest technology pain points while unleashing productivity, innovation and value across their enterprise.
Control costs with first-to-market adobe creative cloud optimization
Adobe Creative Cloud, considered the third largest cloud-based application in the market, has also become one of the largest SaaS expenditures for enterprises. Used by over 90% of the world’s creative professionals, it accounts for over $6 billion in annual recurring revenue to Adobe. Snow is the only vendor that provides complete and detailed visibility into Adobe Creative Cloud usage. This includes discovery of unused accounts that can be reallocated and advanced optimization logic such as identifying “All Apps” licenses that can be reduced to “Single Apps”. Snow also enables identification of ALL Adobe Creative Cloud licenses across the enterprise, even those purchased without IT department involvement.
Download our guide for more information on optimizing your Adobe Creative Cloud spend.
Get critical insight into oracle applications
According to Gartner, while overall IT spend is set to increase by an average of 2.9% per year from 2016 to 2022, enterprise application software spend will increase by a total of 60% during this same time period. Oracle will account for a large portion of this spend.
In this release, we make it easier to get visibility and control of Oracle spend through automated entitlement import which matches entitlements to the usage itself, providing visibility into maintenance renewal schedules, product use rights, number of licenses and support status.
To make sure their environments are properly licensed, SAM managers need detailed information about IBM hard partitioning and VMware soft partitioning. With Snow, you can now:
- Capture required IBM logical partitions (Lpar) for hard partitioning.
- Apply the correct Oracle hard partitioning requirements.
- Get required data points for VMware soft-partitioned data centers.
For more information, get our guide on Snow for Oracle.
Optimize data center spend for windows server
Solving key challenges related to Microsoft licensing continues to be one of the top requested features from our customers and partners. As more organizations accelerate their digital transformation efforts, cloud migration planning has become a top use case for Windows Server spend optimization.
IT leaders and SAM managers need to optimize Microsoft Server licensing effectively. This is especially critical in virtualized environments where lack of accurate information can impact the ability to ensure compliance. This clarity is also necessary during contract renewals where failure to optimize for the best licensing model can result in overspending.
Snow offers industry-leading advanced optimization for Windows Server that includes:
- True-up reporting, including automated recommendations for optimal edition to license.
- License cost optimization reporting.
- Windows Server reporting on common risk factors that could affect customers (e.g. VM usage, visibility gaps, etc.).
Gain immediate visibility into software vulnerabilities and compliance risks
The ability to get an integrated view of technology intelligence across software, hardware, SaaS and IaaS makes the Snow platform valuable for more than just spend optimization. Snow’s Governance & Risk product provides key analytics to display the level of severity software vulnerabilities pose to your organization using the United States National Vulnerability Database (NVD). We illustrate which vulnerable applications are in use so that you can prioritize and remediate. With Governance & Risk, you have an overview of known risks with the ability to search for specific vulnerabilities in your environment to identify attack vectors or the path of a vulnerability.
Snow’s Governance & Risk product offers key intelligence to help you understand which applications and what types of applications process personal data. With this intelligence, Snow provides visibility into the organizations risk exposure by calculating a scored risk metric for data privacy compliance – such as GDPR.
To get more information, please visit the Snow Governance & Risk product overview page or download our guide on managing risk.
Counter cloud shock with effective saas management
The rate of SaaS adoption continues to explode, with Gartner forecasting spend on SaaS to grow 160% from 2017 through 2022.
Unlike our competitors – who primarily rely on data from SSO logins or financial system scanning for spend insights – Snow provides detailed user-level tracking for more than 18,000 SaaS applications. Snow’s methodology finds SaaS application usage regardless of where or how the application was procured, and even discovers usage of trials and free applications.
For the most used SaaS applications, Snow offers automated entitlement management, including a single-pane-of-glass view of spend and utilization rates, allowing IT to quickly identify and remediate unused accounts. In our latest release, Snow adds support for these new applications:
- Aha! for Product
- Freshdesk
- Freshsales
- Freshservice
- GitHub Enterprise
- GitLab Enterprise
- Kayako
- Okta
- Zoom
To get more information on Snow for SaaS, please visit the product overview page here.
Ease your daily pain with dynamic compliance exclusions
SAM managers spend a lot of time adjusting compliance figures to account for product specific licensing rules. Snow has made it easier to create dynamic exclusion rules to remove license requirements to account for scenarios such as production or test environments. We added advanced rules engine support for both organizational and product-specific licensing rules and created an audit trail that tracks compliance exclusions.
Learn more
Technology choice and workforce empowerment are the new norm. IT can no longer control from a centrally managed system the technology employees choose to use. In today’s world, anyone with a credit card can spin up an AWS instance or begin inputting critical data into Smartsheet, then expense that usage later with zero service tickets or corporate financial tracking.
This new reality is driving unprecedented productivity for consumers of technology within organizations. But it is making the job of Technology Guardians – IT, Software Asset Managers, Finance, Legal – harder than ever. In most organizations, internal tracking of software usage and consumption is the Wild West, where rules don’t apply but ingenuity flourishes.
At Snow, we provide Technology Guardians with the tools they need to tame their organization’s unruly technology frontiers, enabling them to unleash value without impeding innovation.