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Sasol

Thanks to the Snow Software suite, we provide the business with a highly reliable, scalable, secure and cost-effective SAM service. Based on the Snow solutions, the team has become a key enabler for the organization, establishing a trusted SAM capability. We deliver a single source of truth for software license information, reducing the risk of non-compliance and optimizing licensing within Sasol.
Cobie Nel, Senior License and Asset Management Specialist, Sasol
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Sasol drives environmentally aware growth via $34M cost savings with Snow Software.

Company Profile

Challenges and Opportunities

In recent years, industrial companies have focused much
more on sustainability. Take Sasol, for example. This leading petrochemical business in South Africa transformed its operations to ensure it acts responsibly toward the environment while still delivering maximum value to stakeholders.

According to Cobie Nel, Senior License and Asset Management Specialist, sustainability is a major driver for Sasol solutions that will contribute to a thriving post-pandemic planet.

“We enhanced our efforts to streamline the business and focus on areas where we believe there are good growth prospects with low risk and lower-carbon intensity.”

Cobie Nel, Senior License and Asset Management Specialist, Sasol

Knowing that operational efficiency reduces waste, cuts carbon emissions and enables environmentally aware growth, the Sasol team looked at every area of its business, including its very large IT estate, to identify opportunities for efficiency optimization.

They found a complicated situation in which each of the operating regions had different policies, processes and procedures that were not aligned to an ISO standard. Sasol Information Management had a strategic objective to reduce the operational complexity by integrating management of the inventories and configuration databases into their operational processes.

Without standardized reporting for its IT systems that support its 34,000 users across 30 countries, they couldn’t get reliable, enterprise-wide data on IT assets, utilization and compliance.

“We wanted to improve our IT efficiency, reduce software and hardware costs, and much more,” says Cobie Nel. “For example, retiring redundant, under- used and older systems would pay off for sustainability reasons, and offer significant commercial savings.”

The Snow Solution

Sasol aimed to control, plan, procure, deploy, track, maintain and retire all its global Sasol software assets from a central location. Clarity and currency of information would reduce business risk by providing verified information for license audits. They would also cut costs simultaneously by identifying and eliminating redundant software.

“Central to the process was gaining executive buy-in,” comments Cobie Nel. “By providing visibility of assets and software utilization on a global scale, we could deliver better quality management information more rapidly than before, mitigating business risk and enabling data-driven decisions.”

Sasol operates in a highly regulated industry and across many countries with varying laws and regulations, so their selection criteria had to include the ability to support policies that meet legal requirements in multiple regions. The chosen solution would also need to integrate with existing business operations and cover Sasol’s core SAP® ERP systems and its manufacturing control systems.

To deliver on its enterprise policy, Sasol selected a
full suite of SAM solutions, including Snow Asset Manager, Snow Inventory Manager, Snow Software License Manager, Snow IT Service Manager Enhancer and Productivity Optimizer, Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, Snow for Oracle, and Snow for ServiceNow. This solution suite enables comprehensive management capabilities, from software application builds to utilization and licenses, and includes operating systems, devices, hardware configurations, and much more.

Cobie Nel continues, “The Snow solutions enable the team to become the trusted SAM capability within Sasol. For example, with Snow we can provide a single source of truth on software license information, users, and utilization. We now deliver highly reliable, scalable secure, and cost-effective SAM, and Sasol uses this data on a continual basis to manage the software asset lifecycle throughout the enterprise.”

“Combined, our enhanced software asset management project has delivered cost savings and avoidance that total more than $34 million.”


Cobie Nel, Senior Specialist, License and Asset Management

Impact and Results

With the Snow solutions in place, Cobie Nel reports impressive results: “Combined, our enhanced SAM project has delivered cost savings and avoidance that total more than $34 million. We used Snow to help rationalize and validate our licenses with multiple vendors, including Prometheus GWOS, K2, OMADA, AutoDesk, AirWatch, OpenText, Oracle, Acquire Sentinel, Cloudera, VMware, and many more.”

In addition, the team has become a key enabler for
the organization, with comprehensive management
of the software asset lifecycle, from planning through procurement to retirement. Based on accurate data, the IT team helps manage the corporation’s risk profile too, with significant reductions in contractual risk, reduced financial risk of penalties, and greater information security. At the strategic level, greater operational control cuts reputational threats, too.

Additional results included:

Sasol experienced numerous audits over the past 2 years. During a third-party review of Sasol’s Oracle licenses’ compliance status, the Snow platform identified some potential compliance concerns for which there were these estimated cost avoidances (only in South Africa):

Cobie Nel concludes, “Thanks to the Snow Software suite, we provide the business with a highly reliable, scalable, secure and cost-effective SAM service. Based on the Snow solutions, the team has become a key enabler for the organization, establishing a trusted SAM capability. We deliver a single source of truth for software license information, reducing the risk of non-compliance and optimizing licensing within Sasol.”