“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.

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.

“I’m shocked. I had no idea we were using this many SaaS applications.”

This is the #1 piece of feedback we get after speaking to new customers using Snow Software for the first time. This is no surprise. There are tens of thousands of B2B SaaS companies in the market today, all with their own suites of SaaS solutions targeted at individuals or departments, creating an overwhelming number of applications available. The average organization uses at least 125 SaaS applications, and this is not even counting the free ones.

It is no wonder that IT is drowning in SaaS sprawl with the never-ending proliferation of SaaS apps and the bloated budgets associated with them. The very aspects that make SaaS so appealing to end users is wreaking havoc on the IT, Finance, Procurement, and ITAM teams that need to manage out-of-control software portfolios.

To support these teams, Snow is expanding its portfolio of solutions for solving the challenges of managing SaaS applications with Snow SaaS Management. In March, we made Snow SaaS Management available to a select number of customers, and today we are excited to share that is now in general availability.

Snow has over 10 years of experience supporting Software Asset Managers (SAM) to rein in SaaS sprawl. We launched our first SaaS solution – SAM for Cloud – as an extension of Software Asset Management in 2013. Our ten years of experience in the management of SaaS is telling us something: the market for B2B SaaS is about to change tremendously.

The rise of product-led growth, the shift from user-based to usage-based pricing, and the increased cybersecurity and data risks felt in IT from shadow SaaS means the tools we have been using to address SaaS sprawl must change. Technology innovation never stops and the tools that manage technology, like Snow, need to stay ahead of changes.  

Snow SaaS Management, our fourth-generation SaaS Management solution, is our solution to do this by:

• Building the most complete discovery engine in our industry with first-to-market agentless browser extensions for web application metering
• Launching an advanced optimization framework with deep insights by SaaS application built on our learnings from advanced optimization for M365 and Adobe Creative Cloud
• Empowering users with hybrid data to manage complex enterprise applications
• Taking a user versus device-centric view of the world (user-centric views, new to Snow SaaS Management, are critical in SaaS as IT needs individual insights for use cases like chargeback)
• Delivering this as a service on Snow Atlas, which means the end of waiting for a software upgrade – innovation is delivered on-demand
• Enabling users to buy SaaS Management without requiring them to purchase our Software Asset Management module first

Get the details on Snow SaaS Management

Here’s more on how Snow SaaS Management enables you to see what other solutions don’t and extract savings from SaaS that are impossible to do with other vendors in this space:

Consolidated visibility across all SaaS discovery methodologies

One of the reasons IT fails to rein in SaaS sprawl is multiple usage discovery methodologies, including connecting to SaaS vendor portals, importing SSO data and tracking browser data, are required for complete visibility. This is no easy task for IT to do on its own. Snow automates this by combining all discovery sources and providing comprehensive usage data at the application and user level.

Optimization insights at your fingertips

All Snow solutions move beyond simply providing raw data by transforming it into Technology Intelligence.

Snow SaaS Management now has “Insights” cards that recommend areas for optimization based on duplicate users or unused licenses.

In addition, Snow SaaS Management has broadened optimization capabilities from 8,000+ to over 23,000 SaaS applications, so you can see more and extract more savings across your entire SaaS portfolio.

User-centric views

Snow SaaS Management provides the ability to see all applications and subscriptions associated with each user. User views are also required to reduce risk when offboarding employees. In this scenario, IT must ensure access is removed not only for IT-managed SaaS but unknown applications that may have been procured by a department or individual.

Usage views not available anywhere else

While some SaaS management vendors can tell whether someone has used an application within the last 30, 60 or 90 days, Snow provides granular verified usage information with logs detailing how long an application has been used and when.

Given SaaS applications contain critical user data that would be lost if access rights were erroneously removed – usage data versus simply the financial data other SMPs provide – is a game-changer for IT departments seeking to improve license management, negotiate better deals at contract renewal and provide Security the data necessary to prevent shadow SaaS.

Optimization of complex, hybrid applications

One of the most expensive, difficult-to-manage SaaS applications are hybrid applications—such as Microsoft 365—that allow for both installed and cloud-based usage. Only by gathering and analyzing both usage types can IT and procurement leaders perform advanced optimization, such as selecting the most efficient license type based on usage. This choice can be critical considering the significant price difference between licenses such as M365 E5, E3 and E1.

Snow not only discovers and consolidates all hybrid application usage but provides actionable insights to highlight optimization opportunities.

Looking for more reasons to try out our newest solution for SaaS management? Here are 3 more:

1. Snow is the leading SaaS management vendor for tracking trial software and free applications such as ChatGPT.
2. We are the only SaaS management vendor with a SaaS cost optimization framework that combines installed and cloud-based hybrid application usage for applications such as Microsoft 365 to enable advanced license type optimization such as E5 vs. E3 vs. E1.
3. The combination of coverage of known and unknown SaaS applications – combining multiple discovery methodologies including a browser extension, vendor portals and SSO data – with our Data Intelligence Service gives you unparalleled visibility and management of SaaS.

As great as we feel about reaching general availability, we are just getting started.

Upcoming Snow SaaS Management innovations include new usage discovery methods, more specialized optimization capabilities for complex vendors, and even greater application rationalization capabilities, ensuring organizations have complete visibility of SaaS usage and optimized spend.

Existing customers, be sure to subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss our latest product updates and industry news. Not a customer yet? Join 700 other SaaS customers and schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of SaaS management and Technology Intelligence.

The post Snow Launches the Industry’s Most Complete Discovery Engine and Cost Optimization Framework to Rein in SaaS Sprawl appeared first on Snow Software.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Verification

Snow is proud to announce that its on-premises datacenter management offering has been verified by the Oracle Global License Advisory Services (GLAS) program as a third-party tool vendor for Oracle Fusion Middleware. This builds on the Oracle Database and Oracle Database Options verification Snow received in 2022.

This verification means Snow data is trusted by Oracle auditors. As a result, software asset managers can be audit-ready with the click of a button and continuously optimize their license allocations. This capability is more important than ever as organizations are getting squeezed by price increases and licensing changes such as the recent change for Oracle Java SE.

For more information on Snow’s Oracle management capabilities, be sure to check out the videos below on Snow’s designation as a Oracle Database certified vendor and Java visibility.

Cloud Management

Snow Commander enables VM provisioning and workflow orchestration.  New features strengthen workflow configuration and improve internal cost allocation.

Make workflows easier to configure.

• Users can now create workflow variables to store custom metadata.
• Metadata can be retrieved at a later step or in a subsequent workflow within the same service request.

Improved chargeback/showback reporting

• Simplify and automate reporting with unified chargeback or showback for private and public cloud resources.

Cloud Financial Management

Snow Cloud Cost is a FinOps-certified platform that enables visibility, monitoring, collaboration and cost optimization for the public cloud. Recent improvements further support cross-functional collaboration, forecast transparency and understanding the impact to cloud service provider rates over time.

Easily share insights with colleagues

• Cloud and FinOps Managers can analyze data, create a custom view and generate a link to share with colleagues.

• Create a dashboard, save it as a template so others can use as their personal dashboard.

Track progress toward goals

• Create a personalized view, then set a cost-based “goal”, which is overlayed on the graph for easy monitoring of progress over time.

Manage costs by rate

• Easily verify your cost reduction efforts and see if your Cloud Service Provider has altered Opex charges over time.

Click here to learn more about how Snow Cloud Cost helps optimize public cloud costs.

New Snow Partner capabilities

New capabilities on Snow Atlas give partners efficient and secure access to their customers’ systems to provide services with tighter collaboration and faster value realization.  

Partners can easily create inventory agents and share scripts with customers, driving faster solution deployment, adoption and customization. 

What’s next?

You can follow Snow product updates and our latest innovations on our blog and LinkedIn.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: February 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

We have continued to build out our REST API capabilities to enable new and deeper integrations.

• High availability REST and messaging API for querying: contracts, users, computers, custom-objects, mobile devices, and licenses
• Ability to use API data in PowerBI or other business intelligence applications for in-depth analysis and sharing within your organization
• Authenticated and authorized access to API endpoints enables administrators to better manage and stay secure by assigning user-specific permissions

Self-Service Agent Creation

Snow customers can now save time and move faster while gaining more control of their agent configurations.

• Create and configure inventory agent packages in a self-service portal
• Eliminate the dependency upon Snow Support to create new agent packages
• Gain greater control over the process and end-to-end delivery time

IT Service Management Connectors: Continuous Improvements

Also new in December are incremental product improvements, modernization, performance, and user experience improvements (including to back-end technologies such as our ITSM connectors).

Snow integration: BMC Helix for enhanced Service Desk team performance

• BMC Helix ITSM connector
  • Expanded attributes are now available (Category, Type, Item)
  • Better data control through a new operation system filter
  • Enhanced data aggregation flow from expanded timeout parameters

• BMC Helix Remedyforce connector
  • More intuitive aggregation date by using latest device scan date
  • Improved data aggregation stability via expanded timeout settings
  • Enhanced logging: data aggregation statistics now gathered

Managing Risk: Identify “Known Exploited” Vulnerabilities

Snow Risk Monitor’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog integration now gives you even more control in handling critical vulnerabilities in your IT landscape.

• Activating this one-click filter allows you to pinpoint all vulnerabilities in your IT environment that have already been exploited across the globe.
• The KEV catalog—currently including 850+ entries—is continuously updated by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
• Combine the exploited and critical vulnerability filters to identify the highest risk items in your IT landscape.

Be sure to check out our recent What’s New at Snow Software video featuring Risk Monitor detailing how to prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities.

Hybrid Cloud Management

Snow Commander’s new features and enhancements simplify hybrid cloud management for IT teams.

Enhance business agility, oversight, and efficiency

• Report Authorization option restricts report access to authorized users only.
• Build more powerful integrations with new REST API enhancements including capabilities such as:
  • Create/configure rightsizing groups
  • Manage custom attributes
  • Store/retrieve credentials
  • Retrieve change request definitions

Leverage additional flexibility with custom attributes on an organization        

• Custom attributes now provide additional flexibility by allowing users to define organization-related metadata and assign them to workflows.
• Query organization metadata by setting appropriate filters.

Monitor and reduce Microsoft^®Azure spending 

• Generate an Azure reserved instances (RI) recommendations report by one- or three-year intervals to help monitor and reduce spending.
• Configure reports to include a generation schedule, scope of provided cloud account regions, and a display of supported currencies.

Be sure to check out our recent What’s New at Snow Software video featuring Snow Commander detailing new features.

Configuration Improvements for Oracle^® Inventory

Two recent enhancements have been made to our Oracle^® Inventory scanning capability for custom environments.

• DBA group name configuration: In response to an enhancement request from our customers, we’ve made it possible to configure the name of the dba group in the newly introduced sios.config file. Sometimes for security reasons, customers will use a different dba group name than the standard Oracle configuration.
• Scanner execution mode configuration: With some large enterprise customers, custom behavior changes the current working directory to a different operating system user. To account for these custom environments, we’ve added a new file – sios.config – to improve execution mode configuration.

For more information on Snow’s recent designation as a Oracle-certified vendor, watch this video.

New Adobe Creative Cloud User Views

The following Snow improvements for Adobe Creative Cloud provide more accurate and improved visibility to your subscription usage:

• Adobe user details page: The new user details page now provides a month over month graph of total, active and inactive users; a list of all users and their associated SaaS subscription plans, including Adobe Creative Cloud.
• Adobe user linking page: To reduce administrative time, we have made improvements in the UI to easily connect your known Adobe portal users to any discovered, yet unlinked Snow License Manager user accounts. Administrators can insert the username they wish to link and may link multiple devices by separating each user with a comma.

Be sure to check out this video detailing Snow’s recent redesign of our Adobe Creative Cloud management solution.

What’s next?

We’re always posting updates on our latest innovations. You can follow Snow product updates on our blog and stay up-to-date on the latest Snow news on LinkedIn.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: December 2022 appeared first on Snow Software.

You can read the full report here, but throughout the findings, we found three key actions CIOs and IT leaders should consider as they close out 2022 and prepare to start the year off right.

1. Get ahead of your priorities and stay disciplined.

With the current macroeconomic environment (rising inflation, economic uncertainty, geopolitical uncertainty, etc.), it is no surprise that the #1 IT priority for 2023 is reducing IT costs followed by delivering digital transformation and minimizing security risks. But delivering digital transformation and reducing IT costs can be conflicting actions as digital transformation and innovation often require investment and resources.

With 94% of IT leaders noting that innovation remains a top priority, and 85% of respondents saying there is an expectation to innovate faster and demonstrate ROI, CIOs are being pulled in a million directions. They are juggling many timely problems and priorities, all while ensuring they are meeting individual goals and expectations.

Want to start 2023 strong? Now is the time to hone in on what your priorities are for 2023 and specifically Q1. Between now and the end of the year, clearly define your IT priorities and ensure you and your stakeholders are aligned. IT leaders will need discipline and focus entering 2023 but that must start now to make true impact.

Here’s the full list of what those IT leaders surveyed indicated as their top priorities for 2023:

2. Figure out what you don’t know. Visibility is imperative.

At Snow, we often talk about visibility, and we often say, “You can’t protect/control what you can’t see.” Throughout the 2023 IT Priorities Report, we discuss visibility because of the huge impact it can have on IT leaders’ priorities. If controlling cost and security risks are in the top priorities of the year, IT leaders must also prioritize visibility.

In fact, 76% of survey respondents say business units are procuring far more cloud and SaaS than IT knows about. Technology procurement is no longer controlled by IT, and organizations need to embrace this reality and put into place processes to gain a line of sight into what is being added to the organization’s technology landscape. A couple of key steps are:

• Ensure it’s easy for employees to get what they need, so they  work in tandem with IT to get the tools they need for their jobs.
  • Consider easily accessible, approved-use lists and policies. Software or SaaS application portals are even better.
• Leverage technology to discover applications in use.
• Educate and collaborate with business units, so employees and department leaders understand the impact of technology procurement.

For other ideas on how to gain more visibility, check out this blog.

3. Determine what data you need and make it actionable.

We live in a data-driven age, where every aspect of a business can be tracked from how many people enter the building to how many times someone visits a particular page on the Intranet. But trying to understand blind spots due to siloed data and identify the right data are still huge challenges for IT leaders to overcome in 2023.

While 96% of IT leaders said their managers and/or direct reports have the data they need to make good business decisions, this doesn’t mean they have actionable insights to determine what to do next. In fact, nearly nine in ten (89%) IT leaders say IT must invest in tools and technologies to extract value from their data and turn it into actionable intelligence.

If you don’t have a tool to gain actionable intelligence, now is the time. Data-driven decisions will be essential for CIOs given the challenging landscape ahead.

To view the full 2023 IT Priorities Report, download it here.

Additionally, if you are like many IT leaders and facing mounting pressures to identify cost-management drivers for 2023, get a head start by:

• Registering for this free, on-demand webinar on executive challenges in 2023, cost optimization, and avoidance strategies across cloud spend, hardware, SaaS, sustainability and more.  
• Additionally, tune in to a conversation with Becky Trevino, Snow EVP of Product, and AJ Witt, ITAM Review Analyst as they discuss ways to reduce waste and increase spend efficiency in this newest podcast episode.

The post New Snow 2023 IT Priorities Report: 3 Actions CIOs Should Take Now to Prepare for the New Year appeared first on Snow Software.

Visibility into containers for better cost and risk management

IT and Engineering leaders are transitioning from virtual machines (think VMware) to container technology to:

• Build new, distributed applications
• Lift and shift large enterprise applications
• Refactor legacy applications

Benefits from adopting container technologies include:

• Faster software delivery
• Streamlined application lifecycle management
• Ability to move legacy applications to modern architectures

Containers are an exciting new technology, but increased adoption brings risk to IT. Most ITAM teams have established processes in place for virtualized technologies. However, the majority lack visibility into how and where containers are being used. This means IT and ITAM teams are unable to forecast the costs of applications running inside containers or the risks associated with their use.

The new container visibility feature available on Snow Atlas offers details on how many containers are used and how long they have been running, with a view on Microsoft^®, Oracle and Red Hat containerized applications in this first release. Container visibility is available for Kubernetes environments running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure^® environments.

As detailed in the below screenshots, ITAM professionals will be able to:

• Discover hosts, nodes and container instances running in Kubernetes in Amazon EKS and in Azure AKS
• Discover and normalize standard Microsoft and Oracle containers
• Identify the number of containers running licensable Microsoft and Oracle software
• Identify the number of (virtual) resources that have been assigned to a container and match the relationship between container and host/node

Click here to register your interest in our free beta program for container visibility.

Agentless billing visibility of Azure and AWS consumption

One of the biggest pain points we hear from ITAM professionals is how to start proactively managing cloud costs. For ITAM teams seeking more control over cloud spend, Snow recommends focusing on how much your organization is spending in the cloud and understanding what is getting purchased with that spend.

To make it easier for ITAM teams to gather public cloud spend data, Snow is launching agentless billing visibility of Azure and AWS. This functionality gives ITAM teams a spend snapshot across AWS and Azure in the terminology and views used by IT asset managers. With this new service — available to all Snow Atlas customers — ITAM teams have improved views of their organization’s spend profile in public cloud, natively within their SAM tool. By building this feature natively within the SAM solution, Snow is empowering ITAM teams to drive conversations about spend optimization with cloud stakeholders and FinOps teams.

This is our first iteration in providing comprehensive visibility to cloud license usage that complements our leading capabilities for SaaS visibility. As shown in the below screenshot, ITAM and SAM leaders can slice and dice public cloud consumption to identify spending patterns. Starting with a complete view of expenses, you can pick date ranges, apply filters and group data based on resource group, cost category or region. Short term or even one day spikes in public cloud expenses can be identified and addressed.

Finally, the ability to save customized views enables teams to continuously stay on top of public cloud expenses.

This new feature is released in beta and is free for customers to trial. We’re excited to get your feedback on how to iterate and improve this capability.

For organizations with more mature cloud practices as well as FinOps or cloud operations practitioners, Snow Cloud Cost powered by Anodot provides greater depth of visibility, insights and analysis on public cloud spend, controls for budget management and spend allocation, detection of anomalies and recommendations for optimizing spend.

Expanded support to reduce S/4HANA migration risks

With mainstream support for the ECC platform ending in 2027 and core SAP^® products being optimized for the SAP HANA database, the question is not “if” your organization will transfer to S/4HANA, but when and how.

For organizations embarking on a migration to S/4HANA, six critical questions you need to answer are:

1. How many SAP licenses will I need in the future?
2. What types of licenses will I need?
3. Do I have special agreements that I want to keep?
4. Should I opt for a contract or product conversion?
5. Am I prepared for measurement based on authorizations?
6. How should I license digital access?

“Gartner estimates that over 16,000 SAP Business Suite clients have yet to buy and implement SAP S/4HANA licenses before support is discontinued in 2030.”²

To support these challenges, we’ve enhanced Snow Optimizer for SAP^® Software with the addition of a new module, Snow License Intelligence, which offers:

• Out-of-the-box rulesets for simulating S/4HANA licensing scenarios, including more than 200,000 SAP transactions analyzed and assigned to SAP user types and >70 rules for both usage- and authorization-based licensing
• Continual maintenance to match SAP’s evolving licensing scenarios
• Easy customization to customer-specific situations and licenses
• Fast implementation for new projects and M&A
• Automation enabling reduced resources for SAP license management
• License management best practices

Use asset data to build a more sustainable enterprise

Finally, Snow is announcing a new service that will support organizations with their sustainability goals.

Our solution uses your existing Snow data to create a customized sustainability report including:

• Certified sustainable laptop and desktop analysis: Get insight into the number of certified sustainable laptops and desktops in your organization to support certification analysis and sustainability goals
• Server migration to the cloud carbon impact: Evaluate the estimated reduction in CO2 emissions your organization may be able to make when moving on-premises servers to the cloud
• Device carbon calculator: Assess device energy efficiencies and associated carbon emissions to drive more energy-efficient procurement choices.

Customers are already realizing significant value and impact for their sustainability initiatives. In just 9 months of using these customized sustainability reports, one of our largest customers increased their number of TCO-certified laptops from 25% to 61%, and their number of TCO-certified desktops from 8% to 54%.

Gain visibility and act on intelligence

With a large degree of uncertainty in the broader macroeconomic environment, ITAM professionals need to focus on optimizing costs, negotiating better renewals and improving operational efficiency.

The latest releases from Snow give ITAM teams the data they need to see the software, container and cloud services running in their environment. These new capabilities also provide the intelligence to make actionable decisions and recommendations based on that information to improve their business.

At Snow, we not only empower organizations with a complete picture of their technology environment but provide the intelligence to take meaningful action. This perspective is a powerful agent of business agility and resilience.

Request a demo to see how these new features can help your organization today and into the future.

<sub>1 Gartner.  “CTOs’ Guide to Containers and Kubernetes — Answering the Top 10 FAQs.”  Published 31 May 2022.  Arun Chandrasekaran, Wataru Katsurashima.

2 Gartner.  “Offering Managers Insight: Opportunities in the SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP Market.”  13 April 2022.  Fabio Di Capua.</sub>

The post What’s New at Snow: ITAM Solutions for Rising Cloud Costs, Visibility Into Containers and Asset Data That Drives Sustainability Initiatives appeared first on Snow Software.

In this second annual awards ceremony, we’ll honor those accomplishments and recognize customer excellence in software, SAM, SaaS, SAP^® and cloud management categories. Customers of all sizes, in all industries and across all geographies are encouraged to apply.

We’ve heard from many customers that business is booming and they need more time to participate, so we’ve extended the deadline for submissions to April 29. Don’t miss this opportunity to get the recognition you deserve!

The 2022 categories

Our customers and partners use Snow products in many ways, especially as they face new pandemic-era challenges and support remote work alongside shifting budgets and increasing cloud costs. To honor the multitude of different programs and industries across our customer base, we’ve created these five distinguished award categories.

• Impact of the Year: This award recognizes an organization that has elevated its business by utilizing one or more Snow Software solutions. Outstanding programs have clearly defined challenges and have delivered multifaceted value, i.e., significant cost savings and increased efficiency, thereby reducing risk or enabling innovation.
• SAM Excellence: This award recognizes exceptional achievement in software or SaaS management powered by Snow SAM solutions. Measurable impacts may include cost optimization, audit mitigation, process automation, risk reduction and more.
• Cloud Excellence: This award recognizes exceptional achievement in cloud management powered by Snow Commander. Measurable impacts may include cost optimization, process automation, risk reduction, migration enablement and more.
• SAP Excellence: This award recognizes exceptional achievement in SAP management powered by Snow Optimizer for SAP^® Software. Measurable impacts may include cost optimization, audit mitigation, process automation, risk reduction and more.
• Technology for Good: This award recognizes 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.

What will the winners receive?

We will celebrate the winners at an awards ceremony in June and promote We will celebrate the winners at an awards ceremony in June and promote your work with 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
• Recognition for all our winners’ respective partners for their participation

Reasons to apply

• Elevate your program. Being recognized for the impact you’ve made on your organization will help prove the value of your technology intelligence initiatives.
• Support a worthy cause. Snow will donate $500 to the approved charity of your choice if you are selected as one of the winners.
• Cool prizes. In addition to the charitable donation, winners will also receive a personalized trophy, swag packs and a brainstorming session with our Product team.
• Real recognition. You and your team deserve a round of applause. We want to celebrate your great work!

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 our Sr. Customer Advocacy Manager, Kathleen Shepherd, and she can coach you on delivering a strong submission.  

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 Get Your ITAM Team the Recognition It Deserves appeared first on Snow Software.

Out of all the vendors, Oracle licensing can be notoriously complex. Trying to manually manage license allocation across virtual and non-virtual databases can be nearly impossible.

This verification endorses the completeness of Snow data and means that Snow has been verified to provide data sets that Oracle will accept, whenever accurate measurement data is needed, as an alternative to running Oracle’s measuring tools.

In order to be considered for this verification, Oracle performs rigorous testing to ensure that Snow data meets Oracle’s requirements for software licensing information. Snow joins a select list of other Oracle-verified vendors.

Verification improves optimization

Truly understanding your company’s Oracle database usage is a complicated, time-consuming proposition. However, proactive management is a critically important endeavor to manage costs by limiting unnecessary license purchases and minimize the risk of costly vendor non-compliance.

With Oracle verification, our customers can rely on data from the Snow platform to fully evaluate and optimize their Oracle usage. This very same data can also demonstrate compliance during an Oracle audit. The verification allows you to optimize your technology assets, entitlements and agreements in one place while reducing the time required to use Oracle measurement tools for an audit.

“Many of our customers are looking to reduce complexity in their IT environments. By gaining Oracle verification, we hope to help create a more streamlined experience when managing and optimizing usage data for Oracle database and database option solutions.”

CHRISTIAN DEN BOER, Director of Enterprise Applications at Snow Software

It is important to remember that using a tool that has been Oracle verified does not replace an Oracle License Audit or change Oracle’s contractual right to perform one. According to Oracle, the vendor “will still need to analyze usage data gathered from these tools to assess license needs and provide a compliance statement. Usage data gathered from these tools will still need to be analyzed by Oracle to assess license needs and provide the customer with a compliance statement.”

Proactive vendor negotiations

Enterprise IT teams use Snow to determine their full effective license position for every software title and vendor, across client and datacenter services, SaaS and mobile devices. This gives users complete visibility independent of the software maker. In this way, you can optimize your licensing position ahead of vendor contract negotiations, renewals, true-ups or even audits.

With the recent verification from Oracle, Snow data puts you in the driver’s seat if, for example, any discrepancies should appear between your Snow generated data and Oracle’s data. With this information, you can minimize costly non-compliance risks and better manage your budgets.

Snow can help customers maintain an optimized Oracle estate by:

• Providing a consolidated view of all Oracle databases, showing the options installed, how much has been used and highlighting which Management Packs have been enabled/agreed upon.
• Calculating the number of each license type required for Named User Plus licenses or Processor licenses, allowing you to select the most cost-effective option.
• Identifying the licensing implications of virtualization technologies, providing you with a chance to adjust the configuration in order to remain technically effective without using more licenses than necessary under Oracle’s hard and soft partitioning rules.
• Evaluating all Oracle databases technical requirements within the environment, making it more straightforward to understand whether an Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition 2 database is required.

Understanding your Oracle deployment

Oracle licensing is both expensive and multi-faceted. Every configuration variation can lead to significant differences in license exposure. It’s easy to make a mistake.

Snow allows key stakeholders across an organization to understand their Oracle deployment, rightsize their configurations, use the right license metric for the deployment and manage costs. And now with Oracle verification, rest assured knowing that the insights used to base decisions on are accepted by Oracle in the event of a contract negotiation or audit. Learn more about how Snow can help you manage your Oracle environment and control your spend.

The post Snow Joins Oracle’s List of Verified Third-party Vendors for Oracle Database and Database Options appeared first on Snow Software.

The 2022 categories

Our customers and partners use Snow products in many ways, especially as they face new pandemic-era challenges and support remote work alongside shifting budgets and increasing cloud costs. To honor the multitude of different programs and industries across our customer base, we’ve created five distinguished award categories.

• Impact of the Year: This award recognizes an organization that has elevated its business utilizing one or more of Snow’s solutions. Outstanding programs have clearly defined challenges and have delivered multifaceted value such as significant cost savings, increasing efficiency, reducing risk or enabling innovation.
• SAM Excellence: This award recognizes exceptional achievement in software or SaaS management powered by Snow’s SAM solutions. Measurable impacts may include cost optimization, audit mitigation, process automation, risk reduction and more.
• Cloud Excellence: This award recognizes exceptional achievement in cloud management powered by Snow Commander. Measurable impacts may include cost optimization, process automation, risk reduction, migration enablement and more.
• SAP Excellence: This award recognizes exceptional achievement in SAP management powered by Snow Optimizer for SAP Software. Measurable impacts may include cost optimization, audit mitigation, process automation, risk reduction more.
• Technology for Good: This award recognizes 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.

What will the winners receive?

We will celebrate the winners at an awards ceremony in June and promote your work with a press release, social spotlights and more. Winning organizations will also receive:

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

Reasons to apply

• You can elevate your program. Being recognized for the impact you’ve made on your organization will help prove the value of your technology intelligence initiatives.
• You want to support a worthy cause. Snow will donate $500 to the approved charity of your choice if you are selected as one of the winners.
• You like cool prizes. In addition to the charitable donation, winners will also receive a personalized trophy, swag packs and a brainstorming session with our Product team.
• You and your team deserve a round of applause. We want to celebrate your great work!

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.

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 2022 Technology Intelligence Awards appeared first on Snow Software.