Fastest Way to Save Money on Software Licenses
How have you tried to save money on your software licenses? Did you try buying fewer licenses just to realize you’re missing some? Have you bought more licenses to get a discounted price but realize you overspent? Did you try software license recycling?
What Is That?
Software license recycling is simply recovering unused licenses and keeping them in a central location until another employee needs it. It is the internal reuse of licenses.
Why Do You Need It?
Once an employee leaves the company or changes department, the individual may stop using a certain laptop and all the software licenses he or she had access to. In several cases, installed software seems forgotten on the computer especially if the computer restores a base image without verification. In addition, computers are often not reused right away so the installed software stays. Often when a computer’s ownership switches, the new user may not need the same software and then the installed software becomes a waste.
Problems with cloud subscriptions
People often lose their cloud subscriptions too. The prices of most SaaS depend on the features used as well as the number of users who have access to the software. Once an employee departs, it’s easy to be unaware of all the SaaS and cloud subscriptions the individual had access to. For example, an employee contributes to the social media campaigns on a marketing platform like Buffer. If this employee leaves, their account may easily seem forgotten and wasted. Plus, you’ll want to know who is actually a user of a service like Salesforce as you don’t want to be overpaying for such a costly service just to realize that 10 accounts are inactive.
Using your Software Asset Management (SAM) with HR processes reveals many ways of saving costs, like software recycling. You don’t want to buy more subscriptions, SaaS or software when you could have just reused the licenses you already had. Without buying any new tools or doing extensive research, software license recycling is the fastest way to save money.
How Does It Work?
Imagine a fixed asset like a chair. When one employee isn’t using a chair anymore, you keep it in a storage room until another employee needs it. In this particular case, an individual would need to know that no one is using the chair. Then, he or she has to store the chair in a safe spot with all the other unused chairs. When a chair is finally needed, the individual will then recover the chair and give it to the new user.
This process is similar to software license recycling but without manual labor. Whether it is a SaaS or an installed software, you can retrieve the license and put it in storage with just a few clicks. You can then re-purpose it with another few simple clicks. If the integration with HR is set up, the system automatically detects a change in the employment status.
You can do this with your SAM processes and removing the manual checks from the software asset manager. A SAM tool should have a recycling configuration management tool, network discovery and inventory tool. In contrast, SCCM or LANSweeper don’t. Use your SAM solution and recycle your software to save costs immediately.
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