Managing software assets one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses, however imminent change is on the way.

With software spend reaching an all-time high for enterprises across all continents, and Gartner predicting spending on global enterprise application software to total around $120.4 billion this year, up from $115 billion in 2011; there has never been a more compelling time for businesses to review their approach to managing their software estate. 


Software licence compliance audits are becoming more frequent, and businesses are under continuing pressure to reduce costs and curtail the resulting 7-8 figure un-budgeted software expenses resulting from non-compliant use. As a result, there is increasing focus on software licence optimisation as a means of meeting these challenges.

Solutions to manage the software estate vary, and in most organisations the information pertinent to software licences is often siloed, with purchasing, contracts/legal and operational IT often not having the software asset management technology or processes in place to share critical information about software purchases, entitlements and installations.

Coupled with this, enterprises are also demanding IT and application functionality as a service i.e. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

With the recent landmark EU ruling in the Oracle-UsedSoft case, which saw the legalisation of the re-sale of software licences, the complexity of how software is purchased and delivered is increasing.

A recent report by Gartner stressed the need for enterprises to go beyond traditional approaches to software management and implement ‘licence optimisation’ to meet today’s licence management challenges. Licence optimisation helps automate the process of managing the software estate, and provides a foundation for individual groups, such as those mentioned above, to share critical information to optimise software spend and ensure continuous licence compliance.

Vincent Smyth, General Manager for EMEA at Flexera Software says:

“We have long espoused that organisations seeking to maximise the value of their software estates must understand software license optimisation and implement it within the enterprise.  Gartner’s report validates this proposition. Given the way we consume software is becoming more complex, with virtualisation and the cloud – it’s become even more compelling for organisations to adopt a software licence optimisation approach that can manage this complexity.”

Flexera Software’s customers who are embracing licence optimisation are already seeing multi-million pound savings.  One global organisation has recently reduced its software licence costs by more than $35 million for just two major software vendors and it hopes to see similar savings with others.  Another discovered that 20% of its SAP licences were unused and saved over $1million.

As enterprises look at ways of making their IT resources go further, software licence optimisation must be a primary consideration. This next-generation software asset management approach goes hand-in-hand with best practice processes, which translates into ongoing, quantifiable cost savings as a matter of course.