Back in January, a bombshell report came out about NASA overspending on software to the tune of millions of dollars a year. And the story points to a major opportunity for all IT solutions providers and their customers to improve their software asset management practices.
An auditor discovered NASA spent $35 million on unnecessary licences and penalties – including $15 million on un-needed Oracle seats alone. The culprit? Sub-par software asset management and identity access policies, mixed with a healthy fear of not buying enough.
You might be tempted to make a few rocket scientists jokes. But the sad reality is these kinds of horror stories are all too common in our industry. If you are an IT solutions provider, the fact is many of your customers are burning their money on software.
Bad software asset management happens all the time.
Even the smartest, best equipped organizations get their software licensing extremely wrong. We should know: Working with our partners, we’ve helped more 22,000 organizations worldwide get their IT spending in order.
Here are just a few examples that we encountered with our partners, recently:
- A healthcare organization discovered they were overpaying $2 million on Microsoft, after using our assessment tools ahead of an audit
- A hospitality business uncovered $8 million in software spending, after going through our licensing consolidation process
- A construction firm freed up 60% of their total software budget – and identified numerous security vulnerabilities – across Adobe, Microsoft and Oracle
We could go on. Every day we hear from our partners and IT teams about similar situations. But with rising economic pressures, where every dollar counts, there’s simply no more room for error.
The common thread: Easily avoidable oversights
The worst part is all of this is easily avoidable.
ITAM and software licensing can be extremely difficult and time consuming for IT teams. But there are proven, known solutions to avoid the fees and the wasted spending. Every time we see a big eye-opening story like this, it usually boils down to the same oversights and human errors.
With NASA, they had no centralized view of their software spending – and they didn’t have the right tools or policies in place to avoid making costly mistakes.
The same issues caused the millions in over-spend, unnecessary complexity and security risks for the three customer examples we shared above.
Only when it was time for an audit, did the problem and the solutions become clear.
There’s a better way to do software asset management.
If you are an IT solutions provider, there’s a better way forward. You can help your customers avoid the pain and get total control on their licensing and ITAM. And you can get started in just a few minutes
Hidden inside your customer’s environment is a gold mine of opportunity to maximize your impact as a trusted partner. But disparate systems and complexity make it nearly impossible for you to surface the insights you need to show them how to improve their spending, close security gaps and optimize investments in the cloud.
With an ITAM discovery engine, like Block 64, you can uncover a consolidated, real-time view of your customer’s entire IT infrastructure, including assets, cybersecurity threats and licensing utilization metrics. You will be able to inventory thousands of end-points and generate executive-ready reports in minutes, providing clear, actionable insights to your customers, so they’ll know exactly what they need, and how much to pay.
By leveraging the right ITAM tools, insights, and guidance, you can help your customers circumvent SAM pitfalls and pre-empt financial penalties. Rather than viewing SAM as an insurmountable challenge, with your help it can be seen as an opportunity to cut costs and mitigate risks.
And, by the way, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to get this stuff right. You just need the right partner.
About Block 64
Block 64 is a modern IT discovery platform. We empower over 22,000 customers to implement smarter ITAM strategies, courtesy of our real-time reporting, analytics, and sales enablement tools.
Improve your software asset management – try free
We’re currently offering a fully funded Zero Trust Readiness assessment for you or one of your customers. With it, you’ll be able to quickly identify vulnerabilities and discover opportunities to reinforce endpoints in a few clicks. If you are interested in speeding the path to zero trust, reach out to us or book your free demo.
