Put yourself in the shoes of an IT manager within a mid-sized or large organization. You might also be that ‘boring’ finance guy who is super-cautious while evaluating exciting proposals sent forward by internal and external stakeholders. Your primary goal is to identify avenues for cost optimization that benefit your organization while aligning with your key performance indicators (KPIs). One essential tool in your arsenal is intelligent software license tracking, enabling you to optimize licenses and trim your IT expenditures effectively.
What is software license tracking?
Large IT companies often find it overwhelming to manage different types of software licenses. However, with the help of software license tracking, such organizations can easily overcome this challenge. Software license tracking can help them monitor the usage of different software tools, ensure compliance, and nullify overspending expenses.
Notably, software license tracking is an integral part of software asset management. While there are other processes such as software procurement, recycling of software, ensuring compliance, and more, software license tracking is crucial as it can help you prevent license overspending.
Why is software license tracking important?
For those immersed in IT, the potential pitfalls stemming from the absence of a robust license management solution are well recognized. However, even if you’re not a tech-savvy individual but hold decision-making authority within your organization, understanding this aspect is equally crucial. Without access to pertinent insights regarding licensing agreements, software tool usage, and compliance obligations, you risk inflating your license budget. This could happen due to two primary reasons:
- Lack of clarity on where expenses can be trimmed.
- Exposure to penalties for violating software licensing agreements.
This underscores the significance of implementing software license management. Failing to harness the benefits of software license tracking could mean missing out on opportunities to slash licensing costs by substantial amounts, potentially saving your organization thousands of dollars.
How intelligent software license tracking can make way for enhanced productivity and more
Track software licenses across different servers and reduce complexity
By leveraging advanced software license tracking features, you can ensure complete ownership of your software licenses and track them at a micro level. It also becomes simple to allocate license types such as named-user, concurrent, node-locked, and more to all monitored software. Similarly, you can also access a single list view of all licenses along with the number of purchases, availability, and allocations. Moreover, you can filter software installed on different servers to ensure better allocation and tracking. Organizations can also upgrade or downgrade existing licenses across servers and manage emergency license requirements. Additionally, it is possible with software license tracking to make individual suites for software licenses provided by different vendors such as AutoDesk, Flexera, Adobe, Microsoft, and more.
Gain comprehensive control of your software licenses: Minimize risks and IT expenses
Effective software license tracking gives you an overall idea regarding over-licensed as well as under-licensed software in your software dashboard. You can further track the number of unused and under-utilized licenses and optimize licenses with advanced features such as idle time monitoring and license harvesting. It also minimizes license management risks and helps organizations stay compliant as you get advanced notifications for license expiry dates and reminders for renewal. Apart from that, organizations can set up periodic internal audits to detect possible license violations and resolve the issue at the earliest. Thus, companies can always be prepared for ad-hoc external audit requests, and avoid paying penalties for breaching license compliance.
Save time and improve accountability with intelligent software license tracking
Manual tracking of software licenses can take a lot of time and is impossible in large organizations where types of software are diverse, the number of licenses purchased is high, and changes are rapid. However, by leveraging software license tracking features, you can automate tracking of all SLM processes inside your organization simultaneously, while your IT employees can prioritize more strategic tasks at hand. It also enables you to allocate license ownership to specific users or groups, thus specifying the cost center responsible for the software usage. It enhances accountability and makes way for wise software usage.
It is evident that all these benefits of software license management lead to reduced complexity and enhanced productivity. Moreover, with software license tracking solutions such as OpenLM, you can avail customized license management solutions based on your business needs. Prioritize software license tracking today and open the door to a future of 100% license optimization.
To learn more about software license tracking features and benefits, make sure to register for our insightful webinars.
