Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Illinois)

In spite of the escalating intensity of the rhetoric surrounding the upcoming presidential elections, I do think there’s one thing we can all agree on no matter what our political leanings: the government should make every effort to cut wasteful spending.

Illinois congressman, Joe Walsh, has taken steps to root out waste within a relatively small, yet still significant, portion of the government’s budget: $40 billion in annual software spending. Congressman Walsh recognizes what companies in the private sector have known for a long time: that establishing some very simple software license management processes can help eliminate significant amounts of waste. According to Walsh, “There is a tremendous amount of waste currently institutionalized in the federal government’s current system (or lack thereof) in procuring and using software… Adopting best practices from the private sector around software asset management and license optimization is a painless and efficient way to eliminate this wasteful spending, while increasing the value being delivered to government employees.”

As such, Walsh has proposed a House amendment to the 2012 Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) authorization bill, which holds the department accountable for reigning in superfluous software spending. The amendment contains specific language requiring that the CIO:

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Do you have SCCM implemented and wish you had a way to transform its software inventory data into intuitive, license-centric reports?  Would you consider spending 2-4 hours testing a new product that allows you to leverage your SCCM data for your software license management efforts?  If so, we’d love to hear from you.   

If you are selected as a tester and complete the necessary steps, we’ll send you $300! 

The criteria for participation are as follows:

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As most of you are probably aware, with the 9.5 version of Express Software Manager we introduced a purchasing system and interface that allows for easy reconciliation of purchasing details with deployed hardware and software assets. One of the most basic and useful purchasing reports found within the product is the “License Unit Purchase History.” This report allows you to view both summary and detailed purchasing information for any given license unit group, manufacturer, or UPNSC category. Not only can you quickly determine how many licenses you’ve purchased for any given application, but you can also see how many purchase orders were executed, per unit (and summary) costs, and license type.

In the below example, grouped by manufacturer, you can drill in on the individual license unit to see, for any given order, the machines/users to which purchased items have been assigned. Additionally, this data can be exported to Excel for budgeting, planning, and executive reporting purposes. (more…)

The following bylined article can also be found in the April issue of IAITAM’s ITAK Magazine and the April edition of FAST IiS Kaleidoscope.

Since the dawn of the desktop era, IT departments have struggled to keep track of software installed across their corporate networks.  Accurate software inventories are crucial to ensuring installed applications are properly licensed, understanding whether or not they’re being used, and budgeting for future software purchases.  Unfortunately, no standard methodology exists across applications and manufacturers for correlating installed program executables with actual application titles.  This leaves asset managers and the software discovery tools they utilize with any number of half-complete approaches to application recognition.

Driven by licensing challenges stemming from inaccurate and incomplete software identification, the ISO/IEC 19770-2 software tagging standard has been developed, providing publishers with guidelines for “tagging” their applications in a standard way that makes identification straightforward, automated, and virtually foolproof for discovery tools.  Yet despite the technical ease with which software tags can be implemented, publishers have been painfully slow to adopt the standard, and end users have not pressed vendors hard enough to spur them to action. 

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When asked about our company’s products, most people immediately think of Express Software Manager^®, our flagship product offered to businesses for IT asset inventory, software usage, and license reporting.  What many (including our long-standing customers) don’t realize is that we also separately license our software catalog, one of the key components of Express Software Manager, to a very different “customer”—asset management vendors themselves. 

Today we are proud to add Numara Software to a growing list of OEM partners, which includes IBM, LANDesk, New Boundary, BMC, and Amando Software.   The Express Software Identification Database (ESID)^® will power the software recognition for Numara’s Asset Management Platform, strengthening the accuracy and reliability of its existing capabilities such as asset inventory, software deployment, patch management, and license tracking.  Read the press release here.

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