“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.

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.

The post Maximizing Oracle Investments With the Latest Insights and Offerings appeared first on Snow Software.

The “Best of” awards acknowledge companies that have consistently received top ratings for six months, thanks to real customer reviews! The Best Value and Best Feature Set awards are based on exceptional rankings in the feature set and value category, while the Best Relationship award is determined by reviews highlighting repeated purchases and successful implementation.

Winning the Best Value award is a particularly proud moment for us. Paula Darvell, Chief Marketing Officer at Snow, highlights: “Organizations today cannot afford to invest in tools that do not deliver on their promises. Our relentless focus on furthering innovation for our customers and partnering with them to deliver the actionable insights, agility and scale they need, allows our customers to create positive impact with Snow.”

All of these awards would not have been possible without you, our valued customers! Here are some examples of what you had to say about us in the past six months:

• “If it relates to software, Snow License Manager is our organization’s single source of truth.” – Read the full review here.
• “Snow License Manager is an indispensable tool for professional license management.” – Read the full review here.
• “The application is easy to use and I can do my job as a global license manager.” – Read the full review here. 

Truly, the best way to understand how our products deliver results is to hear it directly from our customers. At Snow, we delight in the incredible things our customers accomplish along with the value that our solutions deliver in helping drive real business impact and in solving real-world challenges.

Upcoming events

As we approach the end of the year, we know it’s a busy time balancing life and work. We have several upcoming events to support you as you get ready for 2024!

December 7, 2023: Ask Me Anything

Join us at our final Ask-Me-Anything session of 2023, where you will have the opportunity to ask our Snow experts any questions you have and delve deeper into topics that matter to you. These sessions are designed with you in mind. If you have a topic you want to cover, submit your questions in advance by emailing us at customermarketing@snowsoftware.com.

*NEW* COMING SOON: On-Demand Webinar

Snow 2024 Innovation Session: What’s New, What’s Happening & What’s Next?

So much has happened this year from generative AI to hyper-sprawl of SaaS and cloud technologies, and we have curated an hour-long webinar to help you prepare for next year! The webinar is on-demand, so you can watch at your leisure and includes:

• What’s new? Gain a deeper understanding of new Snow features and functionality that you can leverage today.  
• What’s happening? Let our panel of experts help contextualize what is happening in the market; with exclusive insights from the new 2024 IT Priorities Report, their take on AI and how it’s changing the technology landscape, as well as common questions from Snow customers. 
• What’s next? Get a sneak peek of the innovation roadmap and be the first to hear about new, exciting AI developments emerging from Snow Labs. 

During the session, we are also launching our seasonal give-back for you, our valued Snow customers. We are joining forces, once again, with Rewards Earth, and for each view of the webinar, we commit to plant a tree… not only to supply you with the inspiration and knowledge to start 2024 off on the right foot but you’ll also be making a positive impact to the planet! 

Snow’s success is only due to the success of our customers. We hope to continue bringing you value every single day!

For more information on the “Best of” Awards, please visit TrustRadius. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at customermarketing@snowsoftware.com.

The post Snow Software Wins Three “Best of 2023” Awards From TrustRadius appeared first on Snow Software.

We’ve seen a lot over our 25+ years, from periods of economic growth and uncertainty to the introduction of new technologies such as cloud, SaaS and now artificial intelligence. We have always risen to the moment, innovating to address our customers’ most critical and complex challenges. We have partnered with them on our roadmap to deliver business critical solutions that makes managing the business of IT easier.  

We have also built a powerful partner network that helps us provide scale, world-class service and support around the world.  

For the past few years, Snow has been focused on delivering Technology Intelligence – or the ability to understand and manage all technology. This was in response to feedback from our customers who, in the light of shifting market dynamics and increasing technology complexity and convergence, needed a more holistic approach to managing their data.  

Underpinning this vision, in 2022 we launched our next generation cloud-native platform, Snow Atlas, that provides unified visibility and rapidly accelerates time to value and innovation for customers. We now have over 100 customers adopting the new platform in its first year since GA. In 2023, we’ve added our fourth generation SaaS Management solution with comprehensive discovery and usage data and have built new cloud capabilities to help bridge ITAM and FinOps. And we’re continuing to push the boundaries of innovation in both our core engineering team and Snow Labs, our innovation incubator.  

I’m so proud of the journey we’ve been on as a company and so grateful for everyone who’s been a part of it.   

So what does today’s news mean?  

When I think about the new possibilities and growing complexity facing our customers and the pace at which market dynamics are evolving, it’s clear that our vision around Technology Intelligence has never been more essential. With Technology Intelligence, organizations can not only address critical areas of focus such as managing software costs and mitigating risk, but also bring together disparate, overlapping areas of IT to create a unified view and actionable insights of the entire technology landscape. 

Uniting with Flexera, we will be able to advance Technology Intelligence to continue solving today’s challenges and address the potential ones of tomorrow. Combining our resources gives us access to greater resources in people, IP and expertise in accelerating this journey. While Snow and Flexera each bring unique strengths, the combined business will reach a truly global footprint, the delivery power of a strategic partner network, and provide exciting capabilities that bring the best of SAM, HAM, SaaS management, ITAM, Cloud and FinOps. This means more choice and value for customers across the globe.  

When we launched our new Snow brand back in 2020, we talked about providing the actionable perspective and confidence to make technology a powerful agent of business agility: “Perspective is Power”. Uniting our organizations means we’re able to bring even more perspective and context to the platform, enabling us to help customers tackle broader use cases. It also gives us greater access to an expanded ecosystem and community, with valuable perspectives and expertise of organizations such as the FinOps Foundation, ITAM Forum and TBM Council as we move forward.  

Today, I’m grateful and excited. Grateful for the journey that’s gotten Snow to this point. For the loyalty and trust of our customers and partners, and for our talented and dedicated employees who’ve made it all possible. And I’m excited for the journey ahead and the ability to deliver expanded Technology Intelligence and value for our customers.  

We hope you’ll join us as we celebrate this milestone and enter the next phase for Snow. 

For more information, please read our press release. 

The post A New Era for Technology Intelligence and Customer Innovation appeared first on Snow Software.

At Snow Software, we have long pioneered solutions that enable organizations to identify and take advantage of cost savings, mitigate risk, and drive innovation forward. That’s why we are excited to preview Snow Copilot, our first AI-enabled assistant designed to help tackle the biggest challenges facing IT Asset Management (ITAM) and FinOps practices. This is a major milestone for our innovation initiatives running at Snow Labs.

Let’s walk through Snow Copilot, Snow Labs’ vision, its groundbreaking offerings, and more insights into this exciting new chapter at Snow.

The need for Snow Labs

If you’re not already aware, Snow Labs is an innovation incubator that brings together Snow customers and product experts to address the evolving challenges faced by organizations today, and solved by Technology Intelligence (the ability to understand and manage all technology).

This gives us an opportunity to investigate the most complex problems our customers face and utilize the changing technology landscape to find potential solutions. While Snow already drives innovation within its standard product roadmap, an innovation incubator like Snow Labs empowers us to advance in areas outside our roadmap. These include:

• Moving beyond “safe” innovation where we have a good handle on viability and feasibility and trialing higher risk and more uncertain solutions and technologies
• Explicitly investing in taking risks to create new and innovative solutions for our customers and partners
• Functioning outside Snow standard structured Engineering and Product Development processes to quickly create prototypes, Minimum Viable Products (MVP), and test new capabilities before they are moved into the main portfolio
• Gathering customer feedback at MVP stages to create the ability to fail quickly or to advance products into production

For the past 25 years, Snow has been on a mission to provide strategic insights and drive positive business outcomes from technology asset data. Snow Labs is the next step in our journey, aimed at fostering experimentation and rapid prototyping with transformative technologies like generative AI, which help our customers harness their data effectively.

Snow Labs innovating with AI

Organizations are constantly inundated with vast amounts of data, but IT leaders struggle to make sense of it and act upon it effectively. Despite advancements in self-service dashboards and APIs, many technologies fail to integrate essential data silos across the organization. This integration challenge is one reason why senior decision-makers continue to report difficulties in gaining complete visibility over their entire IT estate.

Using generative AI capabilities, our Snow Labs team looked at how we could:

• Democratize data insights
• Lower the barriers to accessing valuable information
• Provide a better understanding of technology asset data
• Categorize data for context
• Offer fine-tuned, real-world recommendations based on proprietary data

The first of these capabilities is Snow Copilot, an AI assistant, currently in beta, that at launch 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. Snow Copilot leverages Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service for generating responses. We know security is at the forefront of our customers’ minds, and with Snow Copilot, your data stays securely within your own environment, ensuring data privacy and integrity.

We specifically chose the name Copilot because it means an assistant that works alongside you, a term that originated from the aviation industry. In AI, copilot is being adopted more to understand data, handle tasks like writing or coding, and add context in “natural language”. An AI assistant can help advance IT stakeholders’ understanding around technology asset data, particularly those without technical expertise.

Snow Copilot makes it possible to chat with your data. You ask questions and Snow Copilot delivers the answer in natural language removing the need for you to export the computer data set into PowerBI or Excel then formulating an answer yourself or scouring through hundreds of rows within our data set.

Other upcoming AI-powered capabilities from Snow Labs include:

• Machine Learning Entitlement Ingestion Service: This service will simplify software entitlement uploads with automated invoice processing powered by machine learning, making data more comprehensive and improving the insights users gain from Snow Atlas. It addresses a challenging issue where organizations are not uploading invoices and entitlements, thus exposing themselves to licensing and compliance risks. 
  
• Enhanced Data Intelligence Service (DIS) Dataset with OpenAI: This service will augment SaaS descriptions in the Snow DIS with deeper description detail, categories, functions, etc. AI brings substantial data enrichment to existing datasets and provide our customers with transformative insights. This enhancement will lead to greater data accuracy, consistency and normalization.

More advanced experiments from Snow Labs include:

• Fine-Tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on Snow’s proprietary data: Providing customers with personalized licensing recommendations to make more informed decisions regarding their technology assets.

The future of Snow Labs

Snow Labs allows us to move swiftly to bring innovative capabilities to the industry and transform the way businesses interact with their data. The introduction of Snow Copilot and other AI-enabled capabilities will empower IT leaders to make data-driven decisions, maximize their IT investments, and mitigate compliance risks.

Snow Labs’ commitment to democratizing data insights and its pioneering approach to Technology Intelligence ensure that businesses can stay at the cutting edge of innovation. Snow Labs is set to break new ground and our journey is just beginning!

Snow Copilot is available for current Snow Atlas customers who apply for the beta program. You can also ask your Snow Account Manager for more information. Watch Snow Copilot in action and read more details in our press release.

The post Unlocking the Potential of Technology Data With Snow Labs and Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Snow Software.

To do this, Snow commissioned a report surveying IT decision-makers. This year, we polled 800 leaders in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. What we found in our 2024 IT Priorities Report is both expected and surprising if we consider the events of the year.  

Let’s take a look. 

Further economic uncertainty reins

The last few years have been marked by constant economic uncertainty – so it’s understandable that many organizations continued to focus on cost savings initiatives. This year, we saw a pretty marked shift in the number of companies that took wide, sweeping cost-cutting steps, including the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and more.

Despite these significant cost reduction measures – or the year of efficiency as Mark Zuckerberg declared it for Meta, at least – there was a flicker of optimism in the form of artificial intelligence.

As such, IT leaders said that their top three priorities in 2023 were AI, reducing security risks and reducing IT costs. In fact, most IT leaders also believe these priorities will carry over into 2024.

What was surprising about the rise of AI within IT leaders’ agendas was the confidence surrounding it.

Eighty-two percent said they are completely prepared to leverage generative AI. That’s a pretty significant percentage considering that we are still in the early stages of AI use cases and benefits. It does indicate the promise of AI, but the extreme confidence is something worth watching, especially with the likely additional regulation around the world, such as the recent US executive order on AI or the EU AI Act, which seeks to provide a framework for regulating AI in Europe.

The findings – and external data – also suggest that much of AI use today is within the current technology stack and is likely being used for productivity and efficiency gains. Seventy-five percent also said they increased spend on security tools in 2023, and this may be to counter uncertain risks surrounding AI.

However, what’s clear is navigating uncertainty caused by the global macroeconomic climate is a priority and an ongoing reality for the foreseeable future. And AI is providing a bit of sunshine amongst a somewhat dreary forecast.

Data’s new normal moment

In past years, we’ve asked IT leaders about their relationship with data. Being able to source the right data at the right time can make or break organizations, providing competitive advantages, indications on buying behaviors and more. However, many organizations are drowning in data, in some form or fashion.

We asked IT leaders about this – and in 2023, the number has decreased significantly. Forty-six percent said they were overwhelmed by their data, which is a 14-point decrease from 2022 and 26-point drop from 2021.

What’s happening? Have we really solved our data deluge problem?

While we didn’t specifically ask IT leaders what has changed, we can take some educated guesses. One of which is that most of our technology from public cloud to SaaS and more includes data dashboards that provide near real-time updates. We have become used to receiving data in more digestible ways – and even if those are not always presented to us in an actionable format, we know how to navigate some of what we receive.

However, there’s a bit of a warning here that we should consider.

Using dashboards provided by our technology vendors is one way to consume data about the integrity of our programs or ROI of our tools. PowerBI for example, provides ways to pull subsets of data into something more understandable. But this isn’t a long-term solution.

Bringing together data and making it actionable should be the ultimate goal.

The introduction of generative AI within our IT landscapes will likely create further complexity and exacerbate an already tenuous situation we have with our data. Not to mention the source and reliability of that data. It’s essential that we don’t go back to being overwhelmed, but rather we learn from history and prepare for future data challenges and possibilities. Swimming in vast amounts of data – and navigating exponential complexity around that data – will be the new normal.

Visibility remains elusive

We talk about complexity quite often here at Snow. That’s because we’ve seen A LOT of it across our customers’ environments – and we regularly see tech vendors introducing further complexity from pricing increases, new AI integrations, licensing updates and more.

This complexity and the effects of it are part of the reason why we are so passionate about the need for comprehensive visibility – and the need for a less siloed, more platform-based approach, which is another key growth area in this year’s report.

88% of IT leaders reported moving towards platforms and away from point tools.

2024 it priorities report

According to this year’s survey, visibility is an area that needs much more work. Sixty-seven percent of IT leaders said they know their business units are buying more cloud and SaaS than they are aware of. There also is no one clear issue driving this lack of visibility within their organizations.

Considering the priorities around reducing risk and identifying cost savings, it seems like tackling visibility issues is intrinsically linked. Establishing a foundation of visibility is essential for every organization. But it is especially important for those organizations that are looking to dive deeper into AI.

72% of IT leaders anticipate increasing spend on emerging technology applications like artificial intelligence in the next two to three years.

2024 it priorities report

As we close out yet another year, there is so much we can learn from this in retrospective. The question is whether we take those learnings and apply them to 2024. Many of the findings from this year’s IT Priorities Report indicate to us that organizations still need visibility across their entire technology environment and actionable insights that can help them address their priorities for the coming year including the use of AI, reduction of security risks and reduction of IT costs.

If the only constant is change, then we should prepare to be increasingly agile and ensure we fundamentally understand how to get the most out of our technology investments. It may be the difference between a good company – and a great company.

To read more about this year’s findings or hear what is on the minds of IT leaders, download the 2024 IT Priorities Report.

The post Innovation and Adaptation: Are You Ready for What’s in Store for 2024? appeared first on Snow Software.

New partner capabilities

Customer application management: Improved security and cost optimization

From the Customers overview page, Snow partners are now able to compare and prioritize high-value metrics across all their customers’ applications.

For example, they can quickly identify customers whose IT environments contain a specific number of installed yet prohibited (aka “denied”) applications. In the same way, partners can easily see which customers have applications with the following support statuses: end of support (EOS), end of extended support (EOES) or end of life (EOL).

As you can see in the bottom part of the screenshot above, the partner drills into the customer environment in question to then carry out established policies for handling these risky applications (in this example, 50 installations on Acrobat Professional 2017 reached EOS over a year ago).

And when it comes to optimizing application costs, Snow partners can also use these same views to immediately identify and uncover details regarding customers’ used and unused applications, acting accordingly to reduce provisioned licenses, and rightsize license entitlements with vendors based on actual usage.

New SAM capabilities

ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow: Significant performance improvements

With Snow ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow, customers can now gain greatly improved performance through implementing indexes.

This improved performance is realized in the form of faster processing and aggregation of Snow SAM data into ServiceNow. Implementing indexes provides the most benefits for ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow environments from approximately 30,000 to 70,000 devices.

Learn how to use the ServiceNow Guided Setup steps to create performance-increasing indexes in our Snow Globe knowledge base article, How to implement Snow for ServiceNow performance improvements. To access Snow Globe articles, you can create a user account here for free.

SAM on Snow Atlas

Proactive data governance with computer properties filtering

As a SaaS platform, Snow Atlas is continually updated with incremental value. You can follow these frequently communicated new and enhanced capabilities through Snow’s community public broadcast page, Snow Atlas Releases.

One such example of a small but powerful, quick update is the recently released Computers list filtering capability, which allows you to inspect the current situation of computers in your IT landscape.

Has a laptop, datacenter server or virtual machine unexpectedly reported back as having Inactive status? Are computers being scanned in the time intervals you’re expecting? Just choose a column to filter to the property you’re most interested in; then, take appropriate action on the resulting filtered computer list, if necessary.

Oracle: Even better, more complete visibility of your Java installations

Detection of Java installations across your entire IT landscape can be tricky. Snow is a pioneer in this area, having first provided this capability two years ago, with continued enhancements all along the way.

Fast forward to the late summer of 2023, and Snow keeps adding incremental innovation, this time in the form of our enhanced All Java installations report on Snow Atlas.

This report’s value has increased significantly through the addition of the following new columns: Architecture, Installation status, Home path, Reason message, plus a host of others located in our new column selector.

New SaaS Management capabilities

Improved SaaS data source: Browser extension

Increasing SaaS sprawl in organizations is driving a lack of visibility, wasted spend, and heightened security & regulatory risks. To combat this, Snow SaaS Management provides consolidated SaaS application usage and cost data visibility, thanks to several discovery sources.

One of these SaaS data discovery sources is unique to Snow: Using a web browser extension to discover both known and unknown applications accessed from within your IT landscape, including free and trial SaaS apps. The browser extension also discovers individual SaaS activity, detailed down to the number of hours and minutes users have spent logged into such SaaS apps. This is key information for you to know when it comes to your security and software renewal processes.

Our most recent news is that this secure, powerful browser extension uses an innovative data collection method that does not depend on an agent. This allows customers to benefit from a standalone SaaS management solution if desired, without any other product dependencies.

New Cloud Cost management capabilities

Snow Cloud Cost: New S3 recommendations for better cost efficiency

Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) is among the most extensively used AWS services today. Take advantage of the following new enhancements to the Snow Cloud Cost recommendations engine to maximize your ROI on Amazon S3:

• S3 multipart uploads: Identifies unfinished S3 multipart uploads that are still incurring storage costs and consuming your space. This recommendation allows you to decide if you’d like it to be completed or cleaned up.
• S3 versioning: Identifies S3 buckets that have versioning enabled but do not have lifecycle rules defined to manage older version of your files. This helps you to implement lifecycle rules to expire or transition older version of files to reduce storage costs.
• S3 storage class: Identifies S3 buckets that are currently using the standard storage class or low-access storage class. This enables you to migrate data to more cost effective storage classes such as intelligent tiering for infrequently accessed data.

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: September 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

Cutting-edge anomaly detection (public beta)

With Snow Cloud Cost, now you can uncover hidden cost inefficiencies and optimize financial performance. The anomaly detection capability marks a significant advancement in cost data analysis and financial management. By automating the detection of cost irregularities, you can:

• Proactively identify inefficiencies
• Prevent revenue leakage
• Unlock opportunities for cost optimization

The anomaly detection monitoring provides an overview of anomalies and anomaly alerts, enabling users to view historical alerts/anomalies and trends, in addition to exporting the data into CSV.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Prometheus agent (public beta)

The Prometheus agent will enable us to ingest metrics from your Kubernetes clusters more efficiently and will only scrape metrics from a predefined set provided as part of the installation. The agent can be further customized according to your individual business requirements.

• The agent queries the data on an hourly basis by default (the interval is configurable).
• Queries execute in batches and aggregate the hourly metrics data.
• The agent can query data for multiple clusters from a single Prometheus or Thanos agent.

It’s now easier to track Kubernetes waste

Kubernetes (K8s) is an important area of focus for cloud financial management, and we’re committed to delivering best-in-class K8s FinOps features. Recent enhancements include:

• AWS, Azure, K8s cost & usage explorers: The cost breakdown table now displays CPU actual/waste and a memory actual/waste breakdown.
• AWS, GCP, Azure, K8s cost & usage Explorers: CPU/memory request metric has been replaced with the CPU/memory waste metric.
• AWS, K8s cost & usage explorers: Cost breakdown table data can be grouped by node group level.

Microsoft Azure virtual machine and storage cost breakdown report

Gain a comprehensive view of your Azure costs by seeing the total virtual machine (VM) cost and storage cost in a single dashboard. This holistic approach allows you to evaluate the overall impact of VMs and storage on your cloud expenses, enabling better cost optimization strategies.

Container visibility now available on Snow Atlas

Containers are isolated environments, which makes gathering information about how they’re being used or the software and applications residing in them extremely inefficient using traditional technologies (agents). As a result, software asset managers have a blind spot in calculating their effective compliance position for commercial applications running in these environments.

To help software asset management (SAM) pros solve this challenge, Snow released a new feature in Snow Spend Optimizer on Snow Atlas that provides visibility to software running in Kubernetes environments. Current supported environments include Kubernetes on-premises, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Service & OpenShift. 

The container visibility feature:

• Scans the container environment to identify if there are commercial products that need a license. This feature scans for commercial applications in standard containers for Microsoft, RedHat and Oracle. A standard container is a container that has been acquired from a repository of these vendors and has not been modified after that.
• Provides details on what kind of license is required to be compliant. SAM pros need some historical insight on when applications were deployed (start/end times) within containerized environments, so they know exactly when a compliance vulnerability may have started.

Snow Atlas webpage UI and performance updates

We recently released updates to the Snow Atlas pages for inventoried computers, the identified applications and license management. The new pages are fast, responsive and dynamically scalable for various screen sizes. Our performance tests show that search time has improved to find applications in just one second.

Improved Snow Atlas navigation

We love to hear from our customers and to learn  ways to improve our products. One piece of feedback we received from several customers was that moving the secondary menu to the left side led to some space constraints. To address this issue, we’ve made the secondary menu collapsible. This update is available to all Snow Atlas customers.

Managed service partners (MSPs) can see and control access to Snow Atlas

For Snow partners who manage their customers’ SAM environments (customers buy through a partner and grant full access to the partner), our latest release allows partner administrators to see which of their customer systems they can sign into and access.

For these MSP administrators with full control, they can also extend or prevent access to other users. These latest features allow partners to identify gaps in servicing their customers as well as prevent any unauthorized access to the customer systems.

What’s next?

The What’s New section on the Snow Atlas homepage will now include Snow Atlas release notes, so you can always stay on top of the latest innovations. We have more product updates and innovations coming across Snow, so be sure to 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: July 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

What is Technology Intelligence?

Technology Intelligence is the ability to understand and manage all your technology. Only by having a complete picture of all the technology investments across your organization can you ensure that your technology is delivering value. This intelligence is fundamental to making more data-driven decisions about your technology, allowing business and IT leaders to use these insights across strategic initiatives, whether driving growth, fostering innovation or fortifying resilience. Technology Intelligence helps organizations move from silos to collaboration, addressing complexity and creating simplicity.

Our 2023 submissions

Customers were recognized in nine categories across the full range of technology intelligence. Organizations of all sizes, in all industries and across all geographies were encouraged to apply. We selected the award winners based on the quality of submission and tangible detail provided, demonstrable metrics against the award categories, and the business outcomes achieved. 

The categories and winners

Impact of the Year:  Organizations that deliver multifaceted value and elevate their business utilizing one or more of the solutions offered by Snow. 

• Winner: 
  • Target (Australia) 
  • Morrisons PLC (UK) 
  • Xylem, Inc. (US) 

• Honorable Mention: 
  • JG Summit Holdings (Philippines) 

Transformation of the Year:  Recognizes organizational excellence and programs that raised the bar on best practices for collaboration and globalization of Technology Intelligence. 

• Winner: 
  • Majorel (Germany) 

• Honorable Mention: 
  • Dachser (Germany) 

Cloud Excellence:  Recognizes exceptional vision in cloud cost management, cloud management or FinOps, powered by the Snow suite of cloud solutions. 

• Winner: 
  • Noventiq (Global) 

Innovation of the Year:  Recognizes organizations that achieved technical innovations, whether that was a new way to connect systems, a new way to leverage data or even helping Snow build new and better products. 

• Winner: 
  • Telkomsel (Indonesia) 

• Honorable Mention: 
  • Vodafone (UK) 

ITAM Excellence (replacing SAM Excellence from previous years):  Recognizes exceptional achievement in IT Asset Management powered by the Snow SAM solution. 

• Winner: 
  • Dart Container (US) 

• Honorable Mention: 
  • Tata Consultancy Services (India) 
  • Mphasis (India) 

SaaS Management Excellence (new):  Recognizes exceptional achievement in SaaS management powered by Snow SaaS Management. 

• Winner: 
  • Curtin University (Australia) 

• Honorable Mention: 
  • Bridge Investment Group (US) 
  • Ulster University (N. Ireland) 

Technology for Good:  An organization that has leveraged Technology Intelligence to tackle some of the most challenging issues affecting society and the planet. 

• Winner: 
  • Christchurch City Council (New Zealand) 

• Honorable Mention: 
  • Bane NOR (Norway) 
  • Mercy (US) 

Trailblazer of the Year:  Recognizes organizations new to Snow that have realized accelerated time to value on Snow Atlas. 

• Winner: 
  • Equans (Netherlands) 

Judges’ Choice:  Celebrates organizations that our judges also wanted to recognize for how they have gone above and beyond in their Technology Intelligence journey in 2023. 

• Cosentino (Spain) 
• University of Cambridge (UK) 

We’d also like to extend our appreciation to our global partners who have closely supported and collaborated with many of the award winners and honorees. The outstanding efforts of partners such as SoftwareONE, Softcat, CDW Logistics, Long View Systems, Insight, Crayon, PT Astra Graphia Information Technology, and Sistemas Informáticos Abiertos have played a pivotal role in driving these exceptional achievements.  

The best way to really understand how our products deliver results is to hear directly from our customers. At Snow, we are always delighted to hear about the incredible things our customers accomplish along with the value that our solutions deliver in helping drive real business impact and in solving real-world challenges. We hope to see an equally amazing turnout next year! For more information on this year’s award winners and categories, please visit our customer awards page. And to dive deeper into Technology Intelligence, visit our Seeing Beyond resource hub. 

The post Announcing the Winners of the 3rd Annual Technology Intelligence Awards appeared first on Snow Software.

At Snow Software, we pride ourselves on finding this time. This marks the third year we are hosting the Technology Intelligence Awards. It’s an amazing opportunity for us to learn all about our customers’ successes and the incredible impact they’re making every single day. This is our chance to celebrate with you, for you! 

Customers of all sizes, across all geographies and industries are encouraged to apply as we’re keen to honor those with accomplishments in SaaS, SAM and cloud management, to name a few. Don’t miss this opportunity to get the recognition you deserve! 

The 2023 categories

Our customers and partners are using Snow Software to empower IT and business leaders, evolve the way their companies think about technology investments and drive transformation with precision and agility. With this in mind, we’ve created eight distinguished award categories to complement the diversity of our customer communities: 

• IMPACT OF THE YEAR
  • Goes to an organization that has delivered multifaceted value and elevated their business by utilizing one or more Snow solutions
  • Outstanding programs have clearly defined challenges and have delivered impacts such as significant costs savings, increasing efficiency, reducing risk or enabling innovation  
• ITAM EXCELLENCE
  • Recognizes exceptional achievement in IT asset management powered by the Snow SAM solution
  • Measurable outcomes may include cost optimization, audit mitigation,  process automation and risk reduction 
• SAAS MANAGEMENT EXCELLENCE
  • Recognizes exceptional achievement in SaaS management powered by the Snow SaaS Management solution
  • Measurable impacts may include exceptional vendor management, limiting SaaS sprawl with demonstrable cost savings and/or risk mitigation, audit management/compliance and improved visibility
• CLOUD EXCELLENCE
  • Recognizes exceptional achievement in cloud cost management, cloud management or FinOps, powered by the Snow suite of cloud solutions
  • Measurable  impacts may include cost optimization/allocation, process automation, risk reduction and migration enablement
• TECHNOLOGY FOR GOOD
  • An organization that has leveraged Technology Intelligence to tackle some of the most challenging issues affecting society and the planet
  • Areas  of impact  could include  sustainability programs,  medical breakthroughs,  charitable initiatives and more
• TRANSFORMATION OF THE YEAR
  • Recognizes organizational excellence and programs that raised the bar on best practices for collaboration and globalization of Technology Intelligence
• INNOVATION OF THE YEAR
  • Recognizes organizations that did something technically innovative, whether that was a new way to connect systems, leverage data or even help Snow build new and better products
• TRAILBLAZER OF THE YEAR
  • Recognizes organizations new to Snow that have realized accelerated time to value on Snow Atlas
  • Winner demonstrates agility, has an cloud-first strategy, embraces new thinking and is an active part of the peer-to-peer community 

How do we celebrate the winners?

You and your team deserve a round of applause. We want to celebrate your great work! Award winners will all be celebrated at a virtual awards ceremony on June 15. Your efforts will be promoted in a press release, social spotlights and more.

Winning organizations will also receive: 

• A $500 donation to an approved charity of your choice 
• A personalized Technology Intelligence Awards trophy 
• Snow swag for your team 
• A brainstorming session with the Snow Product Team 
• A digital promotion package with branded graphics 

Need some help?

Your Snow account representative or partner can work with you to create a strong application and even submit it on your behalf. We’re here to support you however we can. Please feel free to contact Catherine Picknell, the awards program owner, if you have any questions.

Don’t miss your chance to showcase your team’s achievements! Learn more about the Technology Intelligence Awards and share your story today. 

The post Announcing the 2023 Snow Technology Intelligence Awards appeared first on Snow Software.