Sometimes known as Reclaim, or Harvesting – most ITAM / SAM professionals agree that removing unused software is part of a good and complete IT Asset Management programme. The trouble is it is often seen as a hard part that people never get around to. Other things seem to get in the way.
One anecdote that exemplifies this to me happened when I was discussing reclaim with a potential customer a year or two ago. She was responsible for Software Asset Management across a 50k seat organization. I asked her if she looked at application usage at all? She replied that yes – in fact she had an objective to measure usage of 5 desktop applications that year, with a view to looking at potential reclaim.
I said that was good, but I wondered how she had chosen which 5 applications to measure, as an organization of that size would likely have several thousand applications present on their systems. She said that she had chosen 5 applications with low install counts so that she could make sure her objective was met.
Now – I think some of the problems with that approach are obvious, and realistically I think we can all agree that maybe her objectives should be more tightly analysed. However, this highlights a real problem. When looking at usage of software, with the intention of finding the most value and removing unused software, you need to look at ALL the applications in order to understand where the value is. We know from very broad benchmarking, that on average every PC has over $200 of unused software on it. Tapping into that means looking at usage on all applications.
To know more about exactly how to reliably remove unused software as well as know it is there, please listen to the recording of the webinar on ‘Automating the removal of Microsoft and Adobe Software’.