Software Asset Management overview
Summarize
Summary of Software Asset Management overview
The Software Asset Management (SAM) application in ServiceNow Yokohama release provides comprehensive functionality to manage and optimize software assets throughout your organization. It enables visibility into software installations, licensing compliance, and optimization opportunities to reduce costs and mitigate risk.
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Key Features
- Dashboards: Visualize software installation data and licensing compliance via dashboards including Software Asset Analytics, Normalization trends, and Software Publisher Analytics for vendors like Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and VMware. Activation of the publisher pack add-on is required to access some dashboards such as Office 365 and Adobe Cloud.
- Licensing: Manage software models tied to installed software with assigned entitlements defining license details. Features include publisher part number lookup, license metrics, entitlement discovery maps, import capabilities, and error reporting.
- Discovery and Normalization: Integrate with discovery tools like ServiceNow Discovery or Microsoft SCCM to identify installed software. The normalization process matches discovered software data against a ServiceNow repository to standardize records. Customers can create custom products and manually normalize software as needed. The product supports the Microsoft SCCM 2016 plugin with a migration path to the Service Graph Connector for newer versions.
- Reconciliation: Calculate compliance status by reconciling discovered software with entitlements. Generate removal candidates for unused software to reclaim licenses and perform remediation actions.
- Optimization: Automate reclamation of software rights by uninstalling unused software using workflows and Client Software Distribution. Supports creation of purchase orders directly via Procurement integration for streamlined management.
- Downgrade Rights: Built-in support for managing downgrade rights allows using licenses for earlier versions of software when rights to the latest version are acquired.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
This solution empowers organizations to maintain accurate software inventory, ensure licensing compliance, optimize software usage, and reduce unnecessary software expenditures. The integration with discovery tools and the normalization library simplifies software data management. Automated reclamation workflows and procurement integration streamline operational efficiency. Additionally, managing downgrade rights helps maximize license flexibility.
An overview of the functionality of the Software Asset Management application.
Software Asset Management functionality consists of these main features.
| Feature area | Description |
|---|---|
| Dashboards | These dashboards show software installation results for your environment in the
form of statistics and charts.
|
| Licensing | Software models created for all installed software products are used to tie
software installations (software being used) with entitlements (software owned).
Entitlements define license details and are assigned to software models. Features include publisher part number lookup, common per core and per processor license metrics, entitlement discovery maps, exclusion listing, client access, license change projection, entitlement import, and entitlement import error results list. |
| Discovery and normalization | A discovery process, such as ServiceNow
Discovery or Microsoft SCCM (2012 v2 or 2016), can be
used to discover the software installed in your environment. The normalization process compares the discovered publisher, discovered product, and discovered version values against the ServiceNow repository of normalized equivalents An OOB Normalization library contains all content except publisher and product. Custom products can be created if a software product does not exist in the Software Library. Discovered software can also be manually normalized for reconciliation. A software discovery model is then matched to discovered software installations. Features include partial, full, and publisher normalization, License Workbench, License Position report, custom pattern normalization rules, normalization suggestions, on-premise customer support, and an optional Software Asset Management content service to update the Normalization Library with pattern normalization rules. The Integration — Microsoft SCCM 2016 plugin is compatible with SCCM version 1606, 1906, 1910, and 2002. Note: Legacy SCCM plugins, SCCM 2012 and SCCM 2016, will be deprecated in
the upcoming releases.If you
are creating the integration for the very first time, then begin with Microsoft SCCM Service Graph Connector SG Connector. If you are already
using one of these plugins then use the application titled Migration Readiness Tool
for Service Graph Connector for SCCM in the ServiceNow Store to prepare for
migration to the Service Graph Connector. |
| Reconciliation | The reconciliation process calculates the compliance status of software products
regarding discovery and entitlements. Removal candidates are generated for unused software that can be used to reclaim software rights. Features include reconciliation grouping, and remediation actions for resolving compliance issues. |
| Optimization | The reclamation process remediates non-compliance by uninstalling software from
devices and reclaiming those software rights. The reclamation process can be automated
using Client Software Distribution
(CSD). Features include removal candidate and workflows, reclamation rule creation, software usage listing, and support for creating a purchase order directly using Procurement integration. For more information, see the Procurement overview. |
| Downgrade Rights | The concept of downgrading licenses is built into the Software Asset Management plugin feature. Downgrade rights is the process of having acquired the rights to the latest version of software but using the rights to license earlier versions of the same software. For more information, see Downgrade Rights. |