Participating in a recent webinar with industry CIO's presented an opportunity to evaluate what has - or hasn't - changed in terms of SAM in the technology space today. Perhaps most interesting - and reassuring - is that CIO's still recognise compliance as the major driver for a SAM function in their organisations, closely followed by the incentive of cost optimisation and savings as represented in the poll below:

Why reassuring? Well we believe that gaining a robust compliance discipline should be front and foremost in implementing SAM in any organisation - the benefits of properly managing your software assets results in two significant outcomes to your business:

1. When vendors recognise that you have your software space under control their desire to review and audit is outweighed by the probable lack of return, meaning you save valuable time and resources not having to respond to an exercise that can potentially take months to complete; and
2. Having tangible oversight of important assets and clear record keeping enhances your business reputation overall - if you can't manage these basic fundamentals for your own purposes how confident can your customers be that you can deliver for them?

When asked to consider the landscape three years from now the supplier risk element was significantly superseded by cyber-risk, and cost and productivity elevated to the major returns:

For these results we'd point back to the present - dealing with compliance should be the priority and the returns will follow. Cost optimisation and productivity gains should quite simply be a by-product of properly managing your software domain rather than the core driver - there is an inherent danger in  putting finances ahead of compliance just as in the case of regulatory requirements ...