Supplementing Asset Management Tools

While large organizations rely on asset management software to count their computer hardware and software infrastructure, simply matching software counts against the number of licenses purchased is not guaranteed to prove full compliance. In many cases, software asset management (SAM) tools will detect more or less software than a fully compliant organization has actually purchased.

Asset management databases can be annotated and extended to record how a device or a user has come to be licensed for the software in use, and also to track licenses for products that may be committed to a device, even if they don’t show up in an inventory scan or at the device console. Without a central place to store both dynamic and supplemental information, customers may buy extra licenses “defensively” to make sure they are covered.

One particular attribute of Microsoft’s licensing—the company’s insistence on assigning licenses to either physical devices or users—creates complications in virtual environments but is actually helpful for the purposes of software asset management, because user and device numbers and identities are readily available in most organizations and can be associated with licensing data that cannot be discovered by automated inventory tools.