Extending Software Asset Management with Application Performance Optimization

Addressing challenging times for IT software asset management.

Today’s IT environments are complex, with applications deployed across multiple clouds, data centers and architectures. This complexity is increasing as software gets deployed with more frequency across cloud and different IT locations. In the past couple of years alone, things have gotten more complicated because of organizations shifting to a digital-first approach to combat the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. More employees are working remotely, and record attrition is causing organizations to invest more and accelerate their digital transformation efforts. 

With so much change in modern IT environments, it is impossible to optimize IT spend and remain compliant to the license contracts without getting full visibility into your entire IT estate.  Remaining competitive in today’s digital world requires enterprises to optimize their technology investments. IT leaders must understand what is running in their IT estates and the impact it will have on their business initiatives. Yet, according to Flexera’s 2021 State of IT Visibility report, less than 25% of IT leaders have complete visibility into their IT estates, leaving most organizations with an incomplete view of their assets. 

There are significant challenges in understanding organizational licenses, how they are being used and communicating this across the organization, especially with the growing complexity and dynamic nature of IT infrastructure. Asset usage can change on a second-to-second basis and IT and finance must be aligned to ensure that the organization can best meet its financial and technology needs and obligations.

Optimizing your IT estate

As leaders look for ways to optimize their IT estates, they are challenged with choosing between optimizing for licensing and optimizing for performance. Each one has implications for the other, and without a holistic approach, organizations must choose where to focus their efforts. 

Traditional software asset management (SAM) and IT asset management (ITAM) technologies help organizations understand where licenses are deployed, how software is being used, what versions of software are deployed and if license use is compliant. This approach yields substantial benefits, but does not provide mechanisms to optimize on a continuous basis. Manual efforts are required to holistically view applications, resources and software to achieve license optimization and compliance. Application resource management provides an understanding of resource requirements with the ability to optimize these resources based on application performance requirements.

Break down silos to increase visibility and automation

A new approach is needed to automate and effectively manage today’s challenging IT landscapes. Manual processes for mapping siloed data don’t give you the holistic understanding needed for today’s dynamic environments. You need real-time insights that maximize the return on software investment and mitigate the risk of noncompliance to better align investments with business outcomes.  

So how can this be achieved? By leveraging technology integrations to garner and act on insights across your SAM, ITAM and application resource management technologies and organizational silos. Automation helps you to effectively balance license cost and application performance to meet dynamic business demands in complex hybrid environments. Combining license asset data and application performance data with intelligent automation gives IT leaders the visibility needed to optimize their IT estates while ensuring they remain in compliance. Getting the full view of what is going on with your software, applications and resources allows you to optimize IT spend across your entire IT estate. 

IBM + Flexera

New technology integrations developed by IBM and Flexera provide real-time visibility and automation to manage risk in IT environments, assure performance and optimize IT asset spend through automation. Enhancements to IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management and Flexera One give you insights that maximize the return on software investment and mitigate the risk of noncompliance to better align investments with business outcomes.

Combining software license data and insights to automate license and resource optimization reduces overall costs and ensures resources are optimized across all IT properties for application performance. Learn more about IBM’s solutions for software and IT asset management, and join our webcast — “Automating license compliance and resource optimization” — on March 15, 2022, at 11 a.m. ET (or catch the replay) to learn more about automating license optimization.

Learn more about IBM Instana Observability – Application performance monitoring.