What's New in Zurich Release for Software Asset Management

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ServiceNow® Software Asset Management offers a cohesive platform for technical teams to optimize technology spend, mitigate risk, and automate software lifecycle processes. By providing users with the capability to exercise precise control over their software and cloud expenses, this solution delivers immediate visibility into unlicensed installations, opportunities to recover licenses, and actionable software statuses categorized by publishers. This enables a proactive approach to managing software and cloud costs, empowering swift decision-making or the automated implementation of cost-saving initiatives to fortify financial budgets.

In the ServiceNow® AI Platform Zurich release, there are three key features for Now Assist for Software Asset Management:

1. Help manage software asset requests
2. Create software reclamation rule
3. Evaluate software removal candidate

There are also four key features for Software Asset Management:

1. Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization support
2. Adobe SaaS guided setup
3. Organizational license positions
4. SQL server high availability compliance

Help manage software asset requests

Software asset managers frequently handle a high volume of asset requests, which can quickly lead to a backlog of routine fulfillment tasks. Clearing this backlog is time-consuming and takes away from the time SAM managers could spend on higher-value activities.

The help manage software asset requests agentic workflow introduces AI agents to assist in fulfilling software requests more efficiently. By streamlining the process and enabling AI agents to support fulfillment, this workflow reduces request processing time, enhances overall productivity, and allows SAM managers to focus on more strategic tasks.​

Create software reclamation rule

SAM environments often lack clear reclamation rules which leads to inefficiencies and missed savings. Due to these limitations, SAM managers struggle to prioritize rule creation, resulting in stale or incomplete rule coverage and under-optimized software portfolios.

The create software reclamation rule agentic workflow addresses these challenges by leveraging AI agents to evaluate software usage and automatically create reclamation rules. This automates the process of software evaluation, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring that only essential software is retained. It provides a guided experience with automated workflows, improving efficiency and accuracy in software management.​

Evaluate software removal candidate

SAM teams face challenges in reclaiming software due to incomplete license data and requiring manual effort and expertise that either does not or is difficult to scale. Intelligent recommendations are needed to improve this process.

The evaluate software removal candidate agentic workflow addresses these challenges by leveraging AI agents to evaluate software usage and identify candidates for removal. This solution automates the process of software evaluation, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring that only essential software is retained. It provides a guided experience with automated workflows, improving efficiency and accuracy in software management.​

Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization support

Without holistic support for Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization, users experience usability challenges when deploying licensing server software. Additional costs can also incur for the user without optimized Windows Server support.

With Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization support, users can leverage optimization benefits for software deployed on Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology. This offers enhanced visibility by accurately showcasing required licenses and generating reports on realized savings. ​

Adobe SaaS guided setup

Configuring the Adobe SaaS integration can be confusing due to its complex nature and multi-step process. With Adobe SaaS guided setup, SAM managers can quickly setup Adobe SaaS in Software Asset Management Professional with step-by-step prescriptive guidance and built-out phases. This simplified set up process helps SAM managers reduce time to value by decreasing onboarding time, minimizing configuration errors, and advancing license optimization outcomes. ​

Organizational license positions

Organizational license positions enable organizations to track license consumption for chargebacks and showbacks. This feature utilizes current reconciliation results in effective license position (ELP) reporting, allowing organizations to define how to group and filter license consumption by various organizational structure fields. It also provides the ability to create and group custom fields for reconciliation results.​

SQL Server high availability compliance

SAM managers often struggle to accurately assess license consumption for Microsoft SQL Server in high-availability setups due to discovery and compliance challenges.

The SQL Server high availability compliance feature addresses these challenges by capturing the complete architecture and key attributes of license consumptions using ServiceNow Discovery. It automatically determines passive failover SQL instances that don’t require a license and calculates license compliance for SQL Server in always-on availability groups. This ensures accurate tracking and reporting of license consumption, supporting data-driven decision-making and compliance.​

To learn more about additional features and enhancements for Software Asset Management in this release, check out the Zurich release notes and view the additional feature table below:

Feature/Capability	Description
Single-sign on application groups	Leverage the enhanced SSO integration that supports tracking subscriptions for specific SaaS offerings and editions. This update enables you to map SSO groups to software models for the specific offerings or editions and optimally license users based on their access.
Enhanced M365 subscription optimization	Enhance the process of reclamation candidate selection for Microsoft 365 downgrade opportunities by considering three key factors: product usage, mailbox storage, and Microsoft OneDrive storage. Considering all these aspects enables more accurate and effective reclamation decisions.
Biweekly content updates	Gain the benefit of twice-weekly shipments of the Content Library. This increase in the update frequency delivers faster Content Service to your ServiceNow instance.
Enhanced reclamation workflow with flow designer framework	Manage the reclamation process using the functionality migrated to the Flow Designer. The Flow Designer migration includes additional error handling features to enable a more intuitive and efficient way to manage the reclamation process.
Cluster license assignment preferences	Define and apply preferred cluster licensing assignments to the Microsoft software products that are deployed on your hypervisor clusters. By using a preferred cluster licensing assignment, you can choose whether you want to license these software products at either the physical host layer or the virtual layer, helping you better align with your organization’s predetermined licensing strategy. Built-in validations help verify that your licensing strategy setup complies with the relevant Microsoft licensing requirements.
Extended software lifecycle support	Gain insight into the extended life cycle of a software product when you purchase an add-on or optional support. Each time you indicate that a software product has an add-on or optional support, the Software Asset Management application extends the life-cycle dates of that product, as defined by the add-on or optional support. Use these extended life-cycle dates to identify and plan for your end-of-life (EOL) risks.
Enhanced VMware license compliance reporting	Following the updates to VMware's licensing policy, use the Software Asset Management publisher pack for VMware to track and manage licensing for VMware vSphere Standard (VVS) and VMware vSphere Essentials Plus (VVEP), which are updated suite-based product offerings for VMware vSphere. With these updated product offerings, you can measure compliance and optimize licensing for multiple VMware vSphere products under a single subscription. In addition, the publisher pack can account for the number of cores and the licensing minimums when calculating licensing requirements for VVS and VVEP.
Asset content service analytics	Gain in-depth information related to various content tables and trends in content change from the enhanced Content Library portal. The introduction of numeric widgets, line graphs, bar charts, and content-specific tabs provides complete visibility to content shipped and analyze content coverage. The expanded search feature with additional filter options lets you view the records for a particular period or release.
Group assignment license allocations	Allocate licenses to user groups instead of individual users for a software entitlement using the group allocation feature for the user-based licensing metric software. Group allocation feature enables Software Asset Management managers to streamline and manage the license allocation process efficiently. User allocation is created for the group members based on the availability of unallocated licenses. Any changes made to the composition of the user group automatically updates the license allocation.
Enhanced license workbench experience	Conduct a deeper analysis of your publisher compliance using both the list view and the card view in the License usage view. You can save and share the data by exporting the list view in multiple file formats. View integrated health check results, license usage analysis, and learn why a retired or stale CI is using a license. Furthermore, to avoid clutter on the Publisher details page, software model results are only shown for software models that have entitlements.
RedHat licensing updates	Enhanced RedHat Enterprise Linux Server (RHEL) rights calculations.
SaaS detection from Agent Client Collector	Decoupled the dependency on Digital Employee Experience (DEX) SKU for SaaS metering for browser discovery, now dependent on Agent Client Collector for Visibility (ACC-V) SKU.