Culture
Save $1M with Software Asset Management
In this new series of Now on Now stories, we share how we use ServiceNow products internally to transform our operations and create great experiences. We hope our stories will inspire our customers and partners to harvest even more business value and resiliency from the Now Platform®. For more information, visit the Now on Now Workflows Book of Knowledge.
Effective IT asset management enables IT leaders to digitize and manage software licenses (on-premises or SaaS-based) and hardware assets with intuitive workflows and better lifecycle visibility to make IT environments more secure and operationally efficient.
With many companies having a predominantly home-based workforce, it’s even more important to understand where hardware assets are located and by whom. IT leaders also need to know if assets are being used remotely and are properly allocated. Providing better visibility into hardware assets and software licenses allows ServiceNow to make better decisions about utilization and new investments.
Reclaiming software costs
ServiceNow was able to reclaim approximately $1 million from the company’s software budget by implementing ServiceNow® Software Asset Management (SAM), according to Poonam Kripalani, Senior Manager for IT Asset Management Governance at ServiceNow.
“We’re currently focused on various different ServiceNow® IT Asset Management (ITAM) activities, Kripalani said. “For example, automating our software requests, automating our software reclaim requests, and driving ITAM process efficiencies.”
Recently, the company wanted to gain better visibility into its Microsoft product usage to ensure license compliance. “Being compliant reduces the reputational risk and any unplanned compliance audit monetary findings,” observed Kripalani. The company also wanted to optimize software spend and automate software request fulfillment to make it faster and easier for end users.
However, ServiceNow faced challenges, especially when it came to desktop and SaaS products, which make up 26% of overall software spend. These challenges included:
Lack of visibility into our software spend > Goal: Establish trustworthy data
14 different groups procuring software licenses > Goal: Operational integration
SaaS software was not being tracked > Goal: Define roles and responsibilities
A SAM team was created with clear roles and responsibilities to focus on establishing trustworthy data to operationalize SAM. “Good data is a prerequisite for good software asset management,” said Kripalani.
The outcomes
Today, subscription data is captured automatically from the Microsoft portal and validated. This provides a complete picture of allocation and compliance. ServiceNow also has insights into all purchase requisition data to better manage costs. All data is tracked and reviewed from the Microsoft dashboard for a complete view of ServiceNow’s compliance position.
“We were successful in reducing our software spend by $1 million over the last two years. By having automated processes, we have trustworthy software license data and better visibility into license allocation, cost, and compliance position via SAM dashboards,” Kripalani revealed.
ServiceNow now has trustworthy software license data and better visibility into license allocation, cost, and compliance position via its SAM Dashboard. By automating software requests, the company has saved 3,260 hours (or almost $300K) and enhanced the user experience. The company was also able to successfully identify and reclaim unused licenses, resulting in $795K in software cost savings over the last 2 years.
Software data quality and compliance visibility are now 100% across the company. IT teams also benefit because they can focus on the high value work that they were trained to do, rather than spending their time on administrative tasks.
Kripalani and her team are also focusing on software spend detection with a software spend detection feature, part of the ServiceNow New York release. The company previously tracked 250 software products. In the last three years, however, ServiceNow has doubled in size, and many more software purchases were being made on corporate credit cards. In fact, an analysis of over one million credit card transactions revealed that 700 additional software products were being used internally.
“Manually, it would have taken us weeks or months to analyze this data, but by using software spend detection, this analysis was completed in just a few hours,” said Kripalani.. Moving forward, she and her team will focus on doing a deeper analysis of these additional discovered software products.
To learn more about SAM, check out these resources:
Knowledge 2020 Digital Experience Session: Now on Now: Reclaim $1 million in Opex from your software budget using SAM
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