Software Asset Management

What is software asset management?

Software asset management offers a centralized system of discovering, tracking, and monitoring your software infrastructure. Software asset management is a component of IT asset management, which more broadly accounts for hardware, workstation, software health status, and lifecycle metrics.

What is software license management?

Software license management is a critical component of software asset management. Your software license—officially known as an End-User License Agreement (EULA)—establishes the criteria and limitations for software use. EULAs will differ for each software you purchase. Nearly every software your business installs will come with a licensing agreement, and failure to comply with software licenses can be costly. Effective software license management can help you more easily demonstrate license compliance if an audit takes place.

Why is software asset management important?

Software asset management can help your business save money, time, and hassle. For example, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) may periodically conducts licensing audits to check if your licensing is following the legally-binding guidelines that were imposed when you purchased it. If the BSA finds you’re operating outside of compliance, fines can exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars. By having effective software management in place, you can help eliminate the risk of having to pay noncompliance fees to the BSA when your licensing audit comes around. 

Inefficient software maintenance can also be a major cause of increased costs. By tracking how many and where software licenses are being used, you can more easily forecast and budget software needs. Software license management can also let you know when your software is idle to help ensure you’re not spending money on licensing for unused software.

How does software asset management work?

Within software asset management, there are several important capabilities. The first key feature in your software management process is asset discovery. Once you understand your software, asset management focuses on software lifecycle details—including tracking licensing, compliance regulations, and warranties. Software asset management can also include ticket mapping to keep track of user-end software issues.

Of course, not every software asset management plan is the same—software asset management can serve different purposes in organizations depending on their IT infrastructure, software portfolio, business goals, and user base.

What does asset management software do?

Asset management software offers discovery, automated management, and end-user incident solutions—all from a single console. IT asset management software can help you at each step of the process, including discovery, tracking, alerts, and issue management.

Asset management software can include built-in discovery tools to help you establish a comprehensive layout of your entire software asset inventory inclusive of a wide range of software statistics—not just your software’s name and model.

Asset management software discovery can also record dozens of different parameters for your software license and can determine whether your software complies with each point of its license. It can also provide suggestions for optimal license use. Since asset management tools can establish a timetable for your software lifecycle in one central console, you can more easily visualize and optimize your software budget.

Asset management software can also include asset-to-ticket mapping to support troubleshooting. If a user experiences a software malfunction, your software asset management tool can link related tickets to help support more effective service ticket problem-solving. 

Any successful IT asset management software will also include customizable alerts. If a license change has occurred—or a license is about to expire—users need proactive knowledge of all software asset changes. Automated alerts can help you focus on more important things than checking your asset management stats daily. When alerts are customizable, you can ensure the tool tells you about the exact issues you need to be notified about.

Traditional spreadsheet-based software asset management can be unreliable compared to real-time, automated asset management software. By using a streamlined management dashboard and automated licensing updates, IT asset management software can help save time as well as improve the accuracy and efficiency of your software asset management protocol.

How does software asset management work in Web Help Desk?

SolarWinds Web Help Desk is a comprehensive software asset management tool with both software and hardware IT asset management tools designed to provide a holistic view of your IT infrastructure.

Web Help Desk comes equipped with software asset discovery using built-in Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Asset discovery can be integrated with a configuration management database (CMDB) to streamline your real-time discovery process. If you need to implement a different type of asset discovery software, Web Help Desk also offers third-party integration with other asset discovery tools. 

WHD also offers automated ticket processing for software assets. When incidents occur, you can integrate your software inventory with your ticketing solutions to help speed up troubleshooting. Web Help Desk also offers an audit trail of each ticket, which can specify which software asset was involved. You can use WHD to track software licenses throughout their lifecycles to head off issues. 

Web Help Desk software asset management tools are built to satisfy ITIL guidelines around software and licensing, including incident, problem, change, and release.