IT Teams

  • 8 min read

Key Metrics To Track Software Asset Management

Team Zluri

20th April, 2023

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Software asset management (SAM) has become increasingly important for IT managers to optimize software usage, reduce costs, and mitigate risks. Effective SAM enables IT administrators to maintain an accurate inventory of software assets, ensure compliance with licensing agreements, identify underutilized licenses, avoid unnecessary purchases, and mitigate security threats.

As a critical component of any organization's IT infrastructure, SAM requires tracking key metrics to make informed, data-driven decisions. 

As businesses embrace the digital age, software solutions have become a key driver of efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction. However, with this reliance on software comes the challenge of managing software assets effectively to maximize their benefits and minimize their drawbacks. 

For instance, imagine a large corporation that uses a wide range of software applications across its various departments. With effective SAM implementation, this corporation can avoid overspending on unnecessary licenses, facing costly penalties for non-compliance, and exposing itself to cybersecurity threats.

Effective SAM can help IT managers avoid these pitfalls by providing accurate inventory management, license compliance tracking, and vulnerability management. IT managers can then make data-driven decisions that reduce costs, improve operational efficiency, and minimize risks by tracking key metrics.

As an IT manager, understanding the importance of SAM and its role in your organization's IT infrastructure is critical to maintaining a competitive edge. By implementing effective SAM practices, you can ensure optimal software usage while reducing costs and mitigating risks, ensuring the success of your organization in the long run. Let's take a look at some of these key metrics.

Essential SAM Metrics to Monitor

IT managers can make informed decisions and take action to improve the overall management of their software assets through ongoing monitoring and analysis of the following metrics:

1. Input Data Metrics to Track SAM Data Accuracy

Input data metrics are essential for ensuring the accuracy and completeness of SAM data. By monitoring input data metrics, IT managers can ensure that the data used for SAM is reliable and trustworthy. This, in turn, helps them make informed decisions based on accurate SAM data.

One key input data metric is inventory accuracy, which measures the accuracy of the software inventory data. It is essential to ensure that the data collected is correct and up-to-date to avoid any compliance issues. Another crucial metric is data completeness, which measures the completeness of the software inventory data. Having complete data is vital for accurate license compliance and entitlement.

Data consistency is another important input data metric that measures the consistency of the software inventory data. Having consistent data ensures accurate reporting and decision-making. Data timeliness is another metric that measures the timeliness of the software inventory data. It is important to have up-to-date data to ensure accurate license compliance and entitlement.

Finally, data security is a critical input data metric that measures the security of the software inventory data. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that the data is secure and protected from unauthorized access to protect sensitive information.

By tracking these input data metrics, IT managers can ensure their SAM processes are optimized for success, avoiding compliance issues and maintaining accurate reporting.

2. Operational Metrics to Track Software Usage

Operational metrics are essential for IT managers to monitor software assets effectively. By tracking metrics related to software usage, IT managers can gain valuable insights into how their organization uses technology and identify improvement areas. 

License Reconciliation is the first operational metric that you should be tracking. It measures how well you stay on top of your licenses, ensuring you don't fall foul of any compliance issues that could result in costly penalties. Think of it as your first line of defense against an expensive mistake.

Next up, Software Deployment. You'll want to measure the speed and accuracy of your deployment efforts here, ensuring that you're rolling out new software quickly and correctly to avoid downtime and maximize productivity. After all, time is money, and you don't want to waste it, either!

License Optimization is an operational metric that can really make a difference to your bottom line. By effectively managing your licenses, you can reduce costs and ensure you're not paying for software you don't need. Now, who doesn't love a good cost-saving initiative?

License Pooling is another cost-effective metric that you should be tracking. By sharing licenses across multiple users, you can reduce costs and ensure you're not overpaying for idle software. Who knew sharing could be so beneficial?

License Reallocation is the next operational metric on our list. It measures how often and effectively you reallocate your licenses to ensure your software is used efficiently. This can result in significant cost savings and increased productivity. Who doesn't love a win-win situation?

Finally, License Expiration. This metric is all about tracking when your licenses are due to expire, so you can renew or retire them in a timely manner. Ensuring you have the right licenses in place means avoiding surprises down the line and keeping your software usage compliant.

By tracking these operational metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your software management practices and ensure that you optimize costs and minimize risk. After all, running a business isn't just about what you make–it's also about what you save!

3. Financial Metrics To Track SaaS Spend & Savings

These metrics provide valuable insights into the financial impact of SAM on the organization and help IT managers evaluate the effectiveness of their SAM strategy. Among the most significant metrics are Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Return on Investment (ROI), and Cost Avoidance.

TCO is a metric that measures the overall cost of owning and managing software assets, including acquisition, maintenance, and support costs. Reducing TCO to maximize ROI is critical, as higher costs can negatively impact profitability. In addition, by minimizing TCO, IT managers can allocate resources more effectively and invest in other areas that can drive growth.

ROI is a metric that measures the return on investment of software assets, such as enterprise software or infrastructure. It is essential to ensure that the ROI is positive and to identify opportunities to increase ROI through the effective management of software assets. By analyzing ROI, IT managers can make informed decisions on software investments and identify areas for improvement.

Cost avoidance is a metric that measures the cost savings achieved through license optimization and other SAM efforts. By tracking cost avoidance, admins can demonstrate the value of SAM and identify opportunities for further savings. This metric is essential in reducing costs and maximizing the ROI of software assets.

Analyzing these metrics allows you to optimize their software assets, allocate resources more effectively, and drive growth.

4. Strategic Metrics To Track Your SAM Strategies

Tracking strategic metrics is essential for IT managers to monitor software assets effectively. These metrics provide critical insights into the effectiveness of SAM efforts, enabling IT managers to make data-driven decisions to optimize software usage, reduce costs, and mitigate risks. 

First up is risk mitigation. Measuring risk mitigation is crucial to ensure that your SAM efforts keep your organization safe and secure. In addition, this metric provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of SAM initiatives and helps IT managers identify improvement areas.

By tracking risk mitigation metrics, IT managers can identify areas of non-compliance and take appropriate measures to address them. These measures can include conducting software audits, implementing software usage policies, and educating employees on software licensing agreements.

Next, vendor performance. This metric measures the performance of software vendors in terms of product quality, support, and pricing. By tracking vendor performance, you can identify vendors that provide the best products and services and make informed decisions about renewing contracts or selecting new vendors. This is essential to ensure that all the departments get the best possible value from their vendors.

Finally, SAM maturity. This metric measures the maturity level of SAM processes and practices within your organization. By tracking SAM maturity, you can identify areas for improvement and ensure that your SAM efforts are aligned with your organizational goals. This will help you identify gaps in your SAM processes and practices and take the required steps to improve your overall SAM maturity.

Tracking these three strategic metrics is essential to ensuring the effectiveness of your SAM efforts. By monitoring risk mitigation, vendor performance, and SAM maturity, you can make informed decisions to help you achieve your organizational goals. So, what are you waiting for? Start tracking these metrics today!

5. User Metrics To Track User Adoption & Satisfaction

By tracking key user metrics such as software requests, software adoption, and user satisfaction, IT managers can ensure that they make data-driven decisions to optimize software usage and improve the user experience.

One of the most important user metrics to track is software requests. By understanding what software your users need and how often they need it, you can ensure that your team is equipped with the necessary tools to do the job. Plus, tracking software requests can help you identify opportunities to optimize software usage and reduce wasted resources.

Another critical user metric is software adoption. After all, investing in new software is only worthwhile if your users actually adopt it. By tracking software adoption rates, you can ensure that your software investments are utilized effectively and make adjustments to encourage adoption.

Finally, user satisfaction is a key user metric to track. After all, the success of your IT efforts depends on your users' ability to use your software products effectively. By measuring user satisfaction, you can ensure that your users have a positive experience with your software assets and identify areas for improvement.

As a savvy IT manager, you understand the importance of optimizing your organization's software assets. However, managing software licenses, usage, and subscriptions across multiple departments and locations can be daunting. That's where an SMP like Zluri comes in. 

Optimizing Software Asset Management with Zluri

Zluri is designed to provide IT teams with the visibility they need to empower business units, measure value, and determine thresholds for centralized governance. With Zluri, you can benchmark costs, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your software assets.

One of Zluri's key strengths is its extensive app library, which includes over 225,000 apps. In addition, Zluri's five strong discovery methods allow it to discover 100% of SaaS app licenses in your organization, including those that might be hidden or unknown. 

These methods include SSO, finance and expense management systems, direct integration through APIs, desktop agents (optional), and browser agents (optional).

With Zluri, IT admins can easily track all apps, users, license types, and the number of licenses for each type in one single platform. This gives a clear view of subscriptions, contracts, and perpetual licenses, empowering IT admins to make informed decisions regarding unused licenses and abandoned apps. 

Additionally, Zluri helps to right-size unused licenses or downgrade to a suitable tier, ultimately reducing unnecessary software spending.

One of Zluri's key strengths is its alerts for upcoming payments and contract renewals. With Zluri, you'll receive alerts 30 days, 15 days, and 1 day in advance for contracts and 7 days and 1 day in advance for payments. 

You can even set custom alerts to prioritize high-value contracts. This gives you sufficient time to make informed decisions about renewals, helping to ensure that your organization remains fully compliant with software vendor licensing agreements.

Zluri empowers IT teams to manage all renewals efficiently with an approval process that minimizes unnecessary spending.

With Zluri, IT managers can plan for negotiation with SaaS vendors, ensuring that you get the best value for your money. In addition, Zluri levels the playing field for IT and procurement teams, empowering both to make informed decisions and optimize their organization's SaaS stack.

One of Zluri's key strengths is its usage monitoring feature, which optimizes the SaaS stack, application efficiency, and licensing costs. You can identify apps that cost you a lot but are used very little, allowing you to make informed decisions about renewals and reduce unnecessary spending.

Additionally, Zluri provides app insights that improve your SaaS governance. With actionable cards on the application overview, you can easily identify areas for improvement, optimize usage, and reduce costs.

Zluri gives you easy access to metadata and lets you track and get insights on vendors and contracts for each license. With Zluri, you can cut down your software spending and ensure that you get the best value for your money.

One of Zluri's key strengths is its ability to help keep track of licenses assigned to users external to the company, such as vendors, freelancers, and consultants. This lets IT teams control software licenses completely and ensure they're not overpaying for unused ones.

Each contract is stored contextually with other vendor information, giving you easy access to the required information during renewals, audits, terminations, and other critical moments. This helps you streamline your vendor management process and ensure you're always on top of your software licensing needs.

The onboarding and offboarding workflows ensure that access to app licenses is provided or terminated as required, streamlining the process for new joiners and departing employees. Also, with the employee app store, your team members can procure the licenses they need for short projects or job changes without any intervention from IT or procurement.

But Zluri doesn't just make managing licenses easy - it also helps you keep your organization secure and compliant. For example, with the threat level and risk score alerts, you can quickly identify critical apps that need attention, preventing potential cyber-attacks. 

Zluri maintains compliance with ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, and other standards, making you audit-ready and helping you avoid any compliance-related fines.

Overall, Zluri is a comprehensive solution for managing your organization's SaaS app licenses, vendors, and compliance, enabling you to cut costs, increase ROI, and stay secure.

So why delay? Take control of your SAM efforts with Zuri! Book a demo now.

About the author

Team Zluri

Team Zluri