One of the likely reasons you invested in Express Software Manager is because of its outstanding software recognition.  We can all thank the Express Software Identification Database (ESID) for that.  Under development for over a decade, the ESID is recognized throughout the industry as the most accurate and comprehensive database of commercial applications, enabling proper identification of software installed and used across corporate desktops and servers.  

Despite the database’s completeness, there will likely be occasions that you find one or more unrecognized applications within your environment.  If this is ever the case, be sure to use the machine scanning technology found within Express Software Manager to capture the information needed to add the application(s) to the ESID!  It takes just a few minutes, and helps ensure there are no gaps in your IT asset reporting.

To contribute unrecognized apps to the ESID, simply follow the steps below:

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You may have heard rumblings about this, but it’s now official:  today we announced the spin-off of a new business entity that will focus its development efforts exclusively on further expansion and enhancement of the software catalog used within Express Software Manager. 

We’re all very excited that our software recognition offerings are receiving additional resources and focus; this is great news both for Express Software Manager users, as well as for our OEM partners.  For our end-user customers, the shift guarantees that improving and expanding of Express Software Manager’s software recognition will remain a top priority, as there now exists a dedicated business infrastructure to support exactly that.  For our OEM partners, it means there’s a business that’s 100% committed to maintaining the catalog, supporting their implementations, and responding to their unique needs.

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The following blog post, written by Mari Petersen (Express Metrix Director of Business Development), is in reference to the Software Identification Summit, which was held in Washington D.C. on May4th.  Two Express Metrix executives, Mari Petersen (Director of Business Development) and Kris Barker (Co-Founder & CEO) attended the conference.  According to TagVault, the event sponsor, “The software identification summit is designed to provide a forum for all software ecosystem members to discuss the future of software identification and discuss how these issues can be addressed in an authoritative fashion today with existing tools and technology.”

Kudos to Steve Klos for organizing a terrific conference last week!  I was especially impressed by the diversity of attendees: software publishers, tool providers, government agencies, SAM practitioners and other industry experts.  Each presentation was interesting in its own right, and on the whole, the sessions offered a variety of perspectives that complimented and reinforced one another.   

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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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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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