Applications
Centennial smartens up asset management
Are those licences in order?
By Derek du Preez | Published 22:56, 05 September 07
Centennial Software has launched SAM.Suite to enable IT managers keep closer tabs on their software licences. The product comprises Centennial Discovery as well as the Centennial License Manager.
The company said that the product had been released to help large organisations get to grips with licence allocation as many of them were unaware of the true situation. “We know from research that about 35 percent of organisations are under-licensed and about 35 percent of organisations are over-licensed,” said Centennial vice president (EMEA) Matt Fisher.
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Centennial said that SAM.Suite offers complete end-to-end software asset management from the initial identification and audit of software on the network, through to the licence compliance reports.
According to Fisher, much of the problem is down to the fact that most companies still manage their licences in paper form. He said that although some vendors are now looking at some sort of electronic tagging to improve licence management, it’s happening slowly and will take a number of years to come into fruition.
One area that SAMsuite will not help managers however is in dealing with software piracy. The product will not pick up on whether software is legitimate or not; nor would it be able to identify software that has been delivered through a peer-to-peer program such as BitTorrent, although it will recognise the peer-to-program itself.
Centennial said that SAM.Suite was the first product of its type to automate many of the SAM best practices as outlined in the ISO 19770-1 SAM standard. SAM.Suite is available immediately, priced on a per-seat basis (example: 1,000 seat license costs £18,440). Existing Centennial Discovery customers can add License Manager to their portfolio at a special discounted price until 31 December 2007.
