The Bank of Ireland has deployed a software asset management (SAM) platform from Snow Software, as it aims to reduce its legacy estate of thousands of applications down to 800.
The Irish lender initially deployed the SAM software in 2011 following a costly vendor audit. This audit led to the creation of a SAM team within the organisation, helping to better understand its IT landscape which was growing and becoming more difficult to monitor.
This comprises around 15,000 PCs and laptops, more than 4,000 servers and up to 4,000 applications.
"We are going through a process to reduce the licensable applications down to about 800 - there are lots of duplications, and some which are old and never used," said Dave Hyland, head of software asset management at Bank of Ireland.
"That is going to clear out a lot of the estate and make it far easier to understand and manage. It also means we will be compliant by design."
A major focus on the SAM project has been to provide an overview of its use of Windows licenses, particularly as the bank migrated from XP to Windows 7.
“The Windows 7 programme is an opportunity to run the brush through the whole estate, leaving what we need and use, and taking everything else away,” he said.
“We are using that migration as an opportunity to rationalise our whole estate.”
However the bank is also planning on extending the Snow software to cover more of its enterprise applications across the business in future.
Hyland said that the SAM platform has helped the bank to become more intelligent in the way it manages its licenses, allowing it to make cost savings while still meeting the demands of the business.
“The reason we started using Snow was for compliance, but that is probably second or third [priority] now. It is more around spending decisions: do we invest in a certain product, are we using products we have already bought, or do we have too many products.”
He added: “If someone comes along and say they are going to start a project and they need more of license or entitlement - we can tell if the business is using all that we have. So I can look at the Wintel estate and I can see where it has been deployed and been used, and where it has not been used.”