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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Happy holidays to all!  As we wrap up 2011, we have a final Report of the Month to highlight within Express Software Manager:  Software Installation by Version.  This report, while simple in conception, has a whole host of uses, from ensuring your users have successfully upgraded to the latest version of Application X to verifying the install path of your end users’ software. 

The Software Installation by Version report, depicted in the screenshot below, shows which versions of any given application title are installed across your organization, along with the specific machines upon which those versions reside.  The second screenshot zeroes in on Microsoft Office Professional 2007, revealing which of its components are installed on a particular user’s muchine, along with associated service packs. 

Screenshot #1)

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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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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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This is the second of two posts related to the challenges SMBs often encounter finding asset management software that matches their functional requirements, resource limitations, and budgets.  You can read the first post in the series here.

In this post I’ll explore five functional areas where SMBs have been underserved both by large, enterprise-oriented suites, as well as by the more basic, lower-cost computer inventory products.

1) License management capabilities

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