New at Snow: Introducing BYOL Optimization, Expanded SaaS Visibility, SAP Enhancements and More
IT and business leaders have experienced unprecedented challenges over the past few months. Between working through the implications of remote work, cloud disruption, technology sprawl, budget shrinkage, increased security threats, economic uncertainty and more, CIOs and their teams are navigating an incredibly complex situation with limited visibility.
With these challenges in mind, we are proud to announce several releases across our portfolio of products. These new capabilities are geared towards helping IT teams improve insight into their technology ecosystem, reduce unnecessary costs and minimize risk.
Learn more about our releases below and see how you can take advantage of what’s new at Snow.
Discover savings & reduce risk with BYOL
To incentivize cloud migration, vendors created Bring Your Own License (BYOL) programs to allow customers to make use of existing licenses when provisioning new workloads in the cloud. BYOL can offer significant cost savings, but most organizations struggle to take advantage of these opportunities because of improper tooling, complex agreements, and a general lack of awareness.
For example, Microsoft’s BYOL program, known as Azure Hybrid Use Benefit (HUB), allows users to get more value from their Windows Server licenses by saving them up to 40% off the normal cost of running their virtual machines. Additionally, many traditional software licenses have restrictive policies that tie a license to a specific server or type of server so it cannot be re-used.
With the launch of Snow’s BYOL optimization functionality – the first for a cloud management platform – we’re making it easier for users to maximize their savings with Azure HUB and minimize their risk of license non-compliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Available in Snow Commander, this functionality marks the first time that Snow is bringing together cloud management and software asset management capabilities to help organizations identify, understand and more efficiently manage their software and cloud investments.
Azure Hybrid Benefit capabilities include:
- Identifying the potential for Azure Hybrid Benefit savings
- Setting Azure VMs & SQL Server workloads to pay-as-you-go
- Gaining visibility into unused licenses that can be moved to Azure with Snow license data
- Supporting scripts to automate activation/deactivation of Azure Hybrid Benefit
The optimization feature also looks at licenses in AWS to ensure you’re minimizing the risk of non-compliance, including all cases where tenancy is not set properly. Left alone, that could lead to a costly violation of Microsoft policies.
The latest version of Snow Commander provides new cloud expense management features as well, including support for billing tags, customizable cloud markups and discounts, cost anomaly detection and enhanced billing retrieval.
BYOL optimization and additional cloud expense management features are available now with Snow Commander 8.3.
Gain visibility over complex SAP environments
Last year, one of our largest customers approached us with a problem. They had several subsidiaries but lacked visibility into how many SAP systems they had available and how many SAP users were on the system organization wide. They were afraid of being at risk of non-compliance and missing out on an opportunity to better manage their next renewal with SAP.
As we explored this customer’s request, we found that they were not alone. It is nearly impossible for large enterprises to get complete visibility of an SAP environment. This difficulty is compounded if they have undergone a merger or acquisition, are comprised of several independent brands or operate multiple standalone divisions.
With this release, Snow is first-to-market with a solution that enables large enterprises, or parent organizations to efficiently manage their SAP licenses. We call it Supermaster. Customers using Supermaster now have full visibility of all individual SAP systems connected to it, either directly or indirectly through the Submasters in the subsidiaries. They can initiate changes to user master data for every user in all systems, while still allowing the people in charge of the subsidiaries to maintain full control.
Supermaster will be available in Snow Optimizer for SAP 3.0 on September 15, 2020.
Reduce enterprise SaaS spend
As the world rushed towards remote working practices because of COVID-19, IT teams leveraged applications like Microsoft Teams and Zoom to help ensure business continuity. But since the shift to remote work happened so quickly, most IT teams were not prepared for a spike in usage or spend and have had to since reallocate budgets to accommodate this ‘new normal.’
To help our customers generate savings during their next SaaS renewal negotiation and better allocate future IT spend, Snow has made it easier to have accurate SaaS usage data at your fingertips:
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Deeper coverage for Microsoft 365. Get detailed usage information for even more M365 applications – including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, and OneDrive – to help identify applications not being used as well as users provisioned with unnecessary, expensive subscriptions (e.g. licensed for E5 but could use E3 or E1).
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Organization insights for the enterprise. Snow is now able to leverage organizational data from Active Directory such as departments, user profiles, hierarchies, and more to help customers make focused SaaS management decisions.
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Expanded support for complex global M365 contracts that span multiple tenants. Asset managers can filter specific tenants allowing specific information on users across different sub-portals.
These new enterprise SaaS capabilities are now available on Snow License Manager 9.7 or on our Technology Intelligence Platform via Snow Spend Optimizer for SaaS.
Take control of costly Oracle licensing
Oracle licensing is one of the largest pain points for many of our customers when they attempt to control software spend. Large organizations can save seven or eight figures during an Oracle renewal if they are able to identify costs savings opportunities, without increasing non-compliance risk.
In this release, we have expanded visibility into Oracle usage to help identify cost savings opportunities while providing more insights into non-compliance risk areas:
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New trending dashboard. Users have near real-time visibility into compliance position with trending data on available licenses, assigned licenses, and compliancy. For additional insight, information can be viewed by date range and filtered by specific Oracle products.
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Cover for SE2 licensing. Oracle allows customers to use Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) licenses to cover Standard Edition (SE) installations. Snow now supports this in both manual and auto-assignment modes. SE installations covered by SE2 licenses will be marked as covered product.
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Support for matching service level policy. Snow makes it easy to get visibility into matching service level policy non-compliance, one of the top 10 areas of Oracle non-compliance.
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Enhanced reporting. Access 17 new reports covering optimization potential on Database, Management Packs, Application Server licenses (both NUP and Processor) and more.
These new features are available now with Snow License Manager 9.7 and Oracle Management Option or on our Technology Intelligence Platform via Snow Spend Optimizer for Data Center.
Minimize software vulnerabilities & compliance risks
Security teams are on high alert and stretched thin as cyberattacks increased dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many have also had to reallocate current budget to cover unexpected costs related to securing a remote workforce, and a recent McKinsey survey found that over 70% of CISOs expect their budget will shrink in 2021.
With their unique insight into the technology ecosystem, software asset managers can play a critical role in mitigating the risk of data breaches and data privacy non-compliance. To further support the partnership between SAM and the Security team, Risk Monitor now offers users the ability to build and share daily reports that show risk exposure based on selected criteria.
This release also includes the new and improved Vulnerability Lookup feature which allows security teams to quickly find a particular software title or version that has vulnerabilities associated with it. This functionality will help IT teams minimize unnecessary risk introduced into their environments.
These features are now available in Snow Risk Monitor 2.0.
Lead through uncertainty
To guide their organizations through uncertain times, IT teams need a new approach for long-term cost management and risk exposure – one that places visibility into technology use at its core.
At Snow, we believe that IT leaders who are empowered with end-to-end visibility of their technology consumption and resulting spend are better prepared to make strategic decisions and keep their organization resilient during these times of change and uncertainty.
Request a demo to see how these new features can help your organization today and into the future.