Global warming, earthquakes, floods, and then, there’s the recession. Some businesses have survived the recent economic turmoil by using cost optimization efforts, but for most the downturn isn’t over yet. Companies are questioning their basic assumptions and establishing best practices for implementing low cost strategies, to achieve higher production growth and prepare for continued hard times.
The economic crisis has made an impact on business views about IT investments. IT budgets are tighter, with little allowance for new investments anymore. Business is not “as usual” on Wall Street, where Fortune 500 companies have experienced financial setbacks.
In times like these, thinking and acting “out of the box” is required to make strides towards standardization, growth, automation, compliance and governance.
Most companies’ common mistake in handling their IT Assets is that they don’t track software usage. They don’t know how or even if the software they buy is being used. Without an accurate usage report to guide them, IT Managers often waste money by buying more licenses than they need, and by renewing more support contracts than they are actively using. Other times, attempting to cut costs, organizations purchase too few licenses, hindering end users from effective work performance.
According to a forecast by IDC, IT spending will grow by just 0.5%, and overall spending growth will be –3.6%, led by a steep decline in outlays for computer hardware and 3.4 % in software expenditure and IT services. All this would result in an estimated $1.44 trillion for worldwide IT spending.
Enterprises can reduce costs by systematically managing the lifecycle of their IT assets. Metering software, by providing accurate usage data for active, informed management of license assets, is essential for managers to be able to reduce software costs, improve end-user productivity and optimize IT assets. Open iT software offers a variety of metering solutions to enable companies to collect usage statistics and optimize their IT assets. How is Open iT unique as compared to other licensing software? In the three areas of concurrency, validation of usage data for pay-per-use contracts, and optimizing active versus inactive licenses, Open iT offers a superior approach to that of its competitors.
Global License Agreements
From the beginning, Open iT was designed to operate in our Fortune 500 customers’ large, global installations with complex environments, where concurrency issues are at the heart of efficient software license management. Incorrect handling of concurrency can be disastrous for IT budgets, and incorrect usage metering can be misleading for purchasing and business process decisions. Open iT handles concurrency on all levels of data, whether it is mapping of features to products, grouping of concurrent values or reporting across locations/time-zones.
What Open iT does differently is to collect the usage locally, at the lowest level possible. On a server, the streams of usage data are merged, and processed to account for concurrency issues and to calculate the true global concurrency across the entire organization.
Pay-Per-Use Contracts
In order to negotiate pay-per-use contacts, and administer them in a trouble-free way, it is necessary to obtain accurate and irrefutable usage data that both buyer and seller can rely on. Open iT gathers usage information from multiple sources and does not rely solely on the log files of the license server software. We know from firsthand experience with multiple customers that server log files do not always provide exact information. It is not uncommon for licenses that have been returned to the free pool to still be registered as if they are in use, which leads to an artificially high reading of usage with correspondingly higher cost.
Active/Inactive Use
It is a common practice for end users to open expensive programs with the honest intention of using them and then, for various reasons, to leave them lying idle for significant periods of time. This also leads to misleadingly high readings of actual license usage resulting in unnecessary expenditure.
Open iT metering and optimization solutions can reveal how your IT assets are being used. As an indispensable tool used to empower companies in effectively managing their data resources, Open iT software provides reports needed for managers making strategic decisions on how to get more out of IT assets.
Learn more and schedule a live demo to see how your company can do more with less by optimizing your IT assets.
Reference:
IDC – Press Release. “IDC Forecasts Worldwide IT Spending Growth of 0.5% in 2009.” 25 Feb. 2009.
