Many global companies spend much more money on software than they  have to. According to International Association of Information Technology  Asset Managers (IAITAM), the size of over-spending exceeds 50%. It is very often because of mismanagement in the Software Asset domain. It means great amount of money which is being thrown away every year. Hopefully, there are many things we could do to minimize additional, unnecessary costs.

First of all, we should find the areas which are being mismanaged. There are a few of them which are the most common.  The first source of savings could be exact evaluation of the right number of negotiated contracts. It does require an accurate software acquisition plan, which should be based on the statistical data of needs or usage.

Another very important area which should be tightly related to the process of acquisition is proactive monitoring of software configurations and utilization.  It is proved that only exact knowledge of IT environment can prevent the organization from additional expenses. It enables the organization to measure the utilizations, needs and costs. Very often companies maintain greater amount of software just because of their lack of knowledge about software usage.The ignorance and lack of knowledge about the right number of required software are more common in those organizations which do not apply software asset management practices. A lot of money could have been saved if adequate software asset management business practices had been in place.

Software Asset Management processes  are proven solution to this problem.  As a result of using it,  maintenance of unused software is ultimately eliminated.  It helps companies be in compliance with licensing as well as save a lot of money by eliminating over-licensing.  What is more, there is no need to purchase additional software if there are redundancies.

Furthermore, Software Asset Manager should have the knowledge which software is actually being used by employees and which is not needed any more.  Unnecessary software is very often installed on the users\' computers without any purpose and generates additional costs.  The process of discovering unnecessary software and removing it from employees’ systems can result in considerable savings.

Another area which should be managed very carefully is contract negotiations. It could be source of serious savings for the organization. The contract negotiations should concern better price, displacement programs, shortening long-time contracts, occurrence of automatic renewal and evaluation of the sufficient level of technical support which is very often set too high.  

Establishing Business Processes can also generate significant savings, especially the ones optimizing the work related to software asset management domain. Acquisition Strategic Planning, IT Asset disaster Recovery, Telecom Invoice Optimization, Lisence Compliance Reconciliation and Starategic Vendor Management are just a few examples of business areas where the savings are possible.

There are many software asset management practices, the whole organization can benefit from. The main aim of introducing them is reducing IT budgets which is crucial for most organizations. Software Assets Management practices are recognized as the effective strategy to cut unnecessary costs.  On the other hand, in a large organization, practices alone might turn out to be insufficient. New technologies and automation, which are crucial in the software licenses reconciliation process, are to be implemented. Discovery, CMDB and lifecycle solutions are becoming the most important part of the Software Asset Management, which enable us to gain mastery over the software as well as the whole IT infrastructure.