Given today's recession, companies are taking a harder look
at their ongoing costs. IT executives are being challenged to
innovate within current budget levels, without sacrificing service
quality or jeopardising productivity,writes Jeff
Greenwald, director of enterprise product management atAcresso
Software.
But while there are established processes to manage just about
every other IT asset, software, which represents 20% of an IT
organisation's spending, is often managed in a manual and
fragmented way. Knowing what an organisation is entitled to use
compared with what it is actually using is made complex by a
combination of historical procurements, changing organisational
structures, multiple licensing types and pricing tiers, and
disconnects between procurement, legal, finance, and IT.
Left with a limited and unreliable view, teams are forced to
make guesses about future license needs. To stay competitive,
companies must adopt new methods for managing high-value enterprise
software applications, including the SAP business platform, which
more than 76,000 companies depend on to support core business
processes.
In order to achieve a more efficient approach to SAP license
lifecycle management, organisations should incorporate seven vital
methods into their current processes.
Firstly, automating and centralising the usage data collection
would be one of the initial steps in taking control. A large
majority of organisations have complex SAP architectures, with
satellite offices using their own SAP systems. Organisations could
save significant time and effort by implementing technology and
processes that can automatically interrogate each satellite system,
centrally collect usage information, and prioritise it to enable
efficient analysis and informed decisions.
Automating licence compliance validation can also help the
process of gaining control. Once usage data is collected, license
management teams must compare the data with SAP contract terms to
determine if software usage is compliant with their agreement.
Third-party licence management solutions enable organisations to
automatically monitor software use as it relates to these
contractual entitlements.
Control can also be gained by determining future procurement
requirements based on usage trends. When determining future
software needs, many organisations do not take into account the
peaks and troughs of past usage cycles. In order to accurately
forecast future SAP needs and proactively address compliance by
planning for proper coverage, insight into these usage trends is
essential.
Thinking of ways to identify and reuse under-utilised licences
is also important. Too often, under-utilised licences are present.
By analysing user behaviour, organisations can identify users with
little or no CPU consumption over a given period of time and
address them appropriately.
Likewise, identifying and reusing duplicate licences is
essential to cut back on unnecessary spending. Some organisations
do not have a standard in place to assign a uniform set of SAP user
IDs. This can result in several licences being assigned to one
person, who is represented within the system in multiple ways. By
performing appropriate analysis, businesses may identify duplicate
user ID assignments, consolidate them and then consider whether any
unused licences could be reallocated to new users prior to making
new purchases.
It is also important that there is a standardised process for
assigning named user categories. In SAP's preferred method of
application pricing, there are multiple named user categories, each
with different usage rights and pricing. The boundaries between
these licence types are vague and user classification is often left
to an administrator who has little information to determine which
licence type any given user should be assigned.
Licence administrators could more easily identify the most
appropriate named user category based on unique criteria such as
the amount of time used, the kind of component or module used, or
authorisation role. Automated systems can recommend the most
appropriate classification based on a combination of these
attributes.
Finally, internally allocating SAP costs based on actual usage
can help gain control of licences. Many companies allocate software
costs back to their business, instilling greater accountability and
influencing user behaviour to drive more efficient usage. However,
given the overwhelming time and effort necessary to assemble usage
data there is less incentive for an organisation to more
efficiently manage its investment in SAP.
By following the necessary guidelines that result in accessible
and actionable usage information, IT teams can more easily map this
data to the organisational structure and internally allocate SAP
costs based on actual usage.