Properly assessing portfolio licenses for your customers
Today, software spending at companies of all sizes continues to increase exponentially. According to Statista, IT spending on enterprise-level software is expected to grow to an estimated $517 billion in 2021, an increase of 10.8 per cent from the previous year.
Driving this increase in software spending is rapid digitization and technology innovation where companies are looking to enhance competitiveness and business value. Greater software spending and usage also opens up companies to additional cyber threats, as well as the necessity to provide continuous software maintenance and IT management overhead.
Additionally, there are more software audits being conducted today, which means enhanced complexity for users to ensure they are in compliance with their licensing agreements.
Business expansion opportunities for IT service providers
All of this presents an ideal business expansion opportunity for IT service providers to work with a trusted partner on software license management for their customers.
The right license portfolio management is critical for any organization so that IT leaders can have a stronger inventory on license lifecycles. However, according to a global survey, 80 per cent of organizations do not fully manage their software assets. Collecting IT data was shown to be the biggest challenge amongst almost half (49 percent) of respondents and this was closely followed by understanding licensing rules at 48 per cent. At 74 per cent, Microsoft is the greatest concern for licensing compliance and overspend amongst respondents.
More than likely, these numbers are high because IT departments view license portfolio management as difficult, especially with the ever-expanding use of software. Many others simply have a difficult time quantifying and keeping track of who’s using or not using all software and applications that have been downloaded and deployed.
Why it’s important for users
What’s at stake are significant impacts to the bottom line for any company. The right license portfolio management is critical in keeping up with licenses that are being underutilized and overutilized – which can lead to audits and substantial fines.
To combat this, there are license management tools available for IT departments to use, but these often fall short because they lack a strategic focus specific to each individual organization. This is why it’s critical for the IT service provider to handle, especially when service providers can better assess each license usage properly and report more efficiently and effectively through proper data collection, configuration and customization for each organization.
IT service providers offer great value by helping organizational leaders optimize software spending, deployment, and usage across the license and application lifecycle. What’s more, IT service providers can help reduce the threat of cyber risks and potential audits.
Strategy at work
All of this is made possible when IT service providers partner with a trusted provider of license portfolio strategies that specializes in software and application licensing in order to set the right strategy for each customer.
IT service providers, through the help of their trusted partners, today employ a managed services approach to properly assess and monitor license usage. IT service providers and their partners can also provide predictable data-driven outcomes to improve operational efficiencies and enhance important organizational business decisions.
The right portfolio license management strategy will have IT service providers managing contracts, license options and usage rights, along with deployment models that include physical, cloud, and mobile platforms.
A partner for successful outcomes
As cloud-based hosted software services continue to reshape and expand the principles of modern IT, the future of any hosting services provider depends on the quality of its partnerships. DXC Workplace Asset Management offers service providers the best opportunity to build the right portfolio of cloud-based hosted solutions, including Microsoft, that best positions for optimum business growth potential while cutting costs out of the portfolio.
For more information, visit our website and contact your local DXC Workplace Asset Management Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement Reseller today.