We are pleased to announce ServiceNow Software Asset Management Professional was included in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for SAM1!
After only three months in the SAM market at the time of evaluation, we are excited about the results of our initial Software Asset Management Professional product capabilities. In the time since Gartner evaluated the product in October 2017, we have completed development for two additional releases loaded with features. The customer uptake has been tremendous, exceeding even our own internal expectations. The value of having SAM in the same place you run IT is resonating with our customers.
As general availability for SAM in Jakarta was in July 2017, we did not meet the inclusion criteria for Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management2, requiring the marketing and selling of a SAM tool since January 2017.
The Opportunity to get SAM Right
For more than 15 years, customers have struggled to address software asset management with point tools that only cover portions of the SAM life cycle. According to the 2017 Gartner SAM Tools Research Circle Survey3, “only 23% of respondents reported their SAM tools aligned extremely well with their prepurchase expectations.” Before we arrived, customers were in desperate need of a SAM solution that fully met expectations. We felt that customers deserved better, and we knew we could help by entering the SAM space.
We recognized that maintaining isolated data islands connected by brittle integration bridges was a daunting ask of customers. Business processes that were not supported by native workflows were destined to fail. Customers simply could not scale headcount or obtain budget to meet the total cost of ownership requirements point tools presented.
We expected to disrupt the SAM market, and disrupt it we have. After decades of the same approach to SAM, we have seen a flurry of reactive activity across the industry. From acquisitions to new partnerships, companies are attempting to duct tape the necessary components of SAM together. We have seen company business models changing as well, aiming to try and become a “platform.” We must be doing something right.
The platform approach aligns to Gartner’s definition of share information, describing the critical capability as “Consume and produce information for use in other domains. A central system of record for IT assets enables the enterprise to manage vendors and software assets throughout their life cycle.1” ServiceNow SAM is an enabler for the rest of IT Service Management, IT Operations Management and IT Business Management. Together with comprehensive hardware asset management, CMDB and Discovery, customers are finally able to achieve more value from a SAM solution. ServiceNow SAM supports ISO 19770-3 which together with Performance Analytics, enables customers to forecast and optimize future consumption.
We have disrupted the way SAM tools are thought of and scored in an organization. Traditionally, SAM legacy tools have needed to hook into something else to send their output, facilitating the importance of sharing of information. ServiceNow is unique in that information share is a native capability organic to our platform approach. Our goal is to make SAM work for our customers and we do that by making SAM central to IT. We don’t want to ask the customer to maintain integrations if they don’t have to, instead we provide a central source of truth. ITSM, EA, ITBM, Security Operations, PPM and Agile Development are all native to the ServiceNow platform. Could we build a custom integration to an external ITSM tool? Yes, we could. But we prefer to make our customer’s lives easier instead.
As a standard practice, ServiceNow does not provide product pricing information for non-commercial purposes. Our understanding is that pricing is a contributor to TCO, a score that carries a significant weighting on the overall assessment. We believe not being able to provide pricing information may have had a negative impact on the overall scoring. Please reach out to your ServiceNow account manager for pricing information.
The Future of ITAM
While we are off to a great start, we know there is a ton of platform enabled capability we can bring to our customers. They are all game changers, which makes the hard part just figuring out which ones to do first. Like our easy to opt-in crowd sourced Content Library, we are changing the way SAM is thought of, designed and delivered, all centered on the customer experience. With ServiceNow’s bi-annual releases, we are expanding beyond traditional SAM uses cases, addressing customer’s future needs only possible from a single system of action.
Imagine what is possible when you run SAM from the same place that you manage the rest of your IT. We are excited about the expanding role that ITAM will be able to take on for organizations running ServiceNow. By supporting the use cases of tomorrow, we’ll provide successful outcomes for our customers.
We hope to see you at Knowledge 18 May 7-10th in Las Vegas where you can hear from our customers, get hands on with our labs and stop by the SAM demo booth!
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
References:
1. Critical Capabilities for Software Asset Management Tools
Published: 16 April 2018 ID: G00326348
Analyst(s): Roger Williams, April Adams, Matt Corsi
2. Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Management Tools
Published: 16 April 2018 ID: G00325849
Analyst(s): Roger Williams, April Adams, Matt Corsi
3.Select the Right SAM Tool to Reduce Risks, Optimize Costs and Improve Decision Making
Published: 21 August 2017 ID: G00334605
Analyst(s): Roger Williams | Victoria Barber | Matt Corsi
