DEKRA
With the help of Snow’s reporting, we have now gained visibility regarding the licenses used in the company and have been able to optimize our software estate. As a result, we’ve been able redistribute excess licenses and avoid spending on procuring more.
Company Background:
DEKRA is the European leader for safety on the road, at work and at home. It has sales of €2.9 billion and a workforce of more than 37,000 across 50 countries. Its services range from vehicle testing and appraisals to claims management, industrial and construction testing, safety consulting, as well as testing and certification of products and systems.
Challenges:
- To have a better overview of software licenses and systems used across the IT infrastructure
- To achieve a higher level of compliance
- To implement a software asset management platform powerful and flexible enough to manage a diverse and global IT landscape
- To find a SAM solution that is intuitive and easy to use
The benefits:
- Savings of more than €750,000
- Reduction of financial risk and the time required to go through the auditing process
- Simplified global control and a comprehensive overview of the IT environment resulting in significant time savings.
The starting point
With DEKRA growing rapidly through acquisition, management of its software estate became increasingly fragmentred and burdensome. A Microsoft audit was the spur that made the company decide to implement a suitable SAM solution to control its global IT structure.
DEKRA’s reach is worldwide and it has a lot of subsidiaries, each with its own IT department. To mitigate audit risk, the company realised it needed visibility of the IT landscape across all its subsidiaries. Without an adequate SAM solution in place, there was no quick and accurate way to inventory what and how many software licences were installed and used actively (or not) across the company. License management and compliance were carried out manually in Excel, and separately in each subsidiary, a time-consuming process with a huge margin for error that could not even pretend to give an accurate detection of unused software licenses, or – more seriously – software out of compliance. The “process” was both ineffective and costly.
Targets
By implementing Snow, DEKRA wanted to gain visibility of all software licenses deployed globally, as well as ensure compliance.
Use of the Snow platform
DEKRA uses a number of Snow products to optimize asset and license management. In addition to Snow License Manager and Snow Inventory Client for Windows, it implemented Snow’s Software Recognition Service (SRS) to take the guesswork out of recognizing and understanding what software is installed across DEKRA’s multi-site, multi-platform network.
Results
DEKRA now has a functioning software asset management solution; the company is keenly aware of the advantages of using a single solution to carry out the full range of SAM responsibilities. Snow Inventory client proved particularly useful, as it provides an overview of the inventory data across the entire estate within a highly effective response time. Together with the license information, the data is fully and seamlessly integrated into Snow License Manager, enabling the company to identify issues of over- and under-licensing.
Pre-Snow, there was no uniform compliance level across all of DEKRA’s operations as each subsidiary managed its own licenses, resulting in a lack of visibility of the global licensing position. Thanks to Snow, DEKRA is now able to pool these licenses, with unused licenses reharvested and made available to other employees.
Another benefit of Snow is its comprehensive reporting, enabling DEKRA managers to tell at a glance which software is being used by whom. These insights are used in price negotiations with the software publishers. In addition, the reporting functionalities give quick and easy access to all information so it is no longer necessary to spend weeks aggregating data in preparation for a vendor audit.
“With the help of Snow’s reporting, we have now gained visibility regarding the licenses we used in the company and have been able to optimise our software estate. As a result, we were able to redistribute excess licenses and avoid spending on procuring more,“ says Carola Iberl, Global License Manager at DEKRA.
She continues:
“Before we deployed the Snow solution, we were unable to ensure a consistent level of compliance across our company. We were constantly running the risk of not detecting missing or excess licenses. Through the global introduction of a SAM platform, we were able to optimise our licensing stock and significantly reduce the burden on our employees. In the first three years after the introduction of Snow, we were able to achieve savings of more than €750,000 and at the same time minimize the financial risk of an audit.”
DEKRA is considering deploying more Snow solutions. “We plan to integrate Unix-based systems with Windows machines as well as optimize our Oracle environment with Snow. Snow Software has proven to be a reliable partner in the area of software asset management, with which we have achieved significant savings,” Iberl concludes.