Maidenhead: Flexera laid out a game-changing Software Asset Management (SAM) vision recently during a global Live Streaming Event.
The company is pioneering a new collaborative plan to repair the broken software supply chain and reduce the risk, waste and unpredictability of buying and managing software. “Software is everywhere, so SAM has to be everywhere too. To get better software ROI, buyers need to tear down walls - between themselves and their suppliers, and internally between departments. As a SAM provider, we also must break down barriers between SAM tools and other solutions,” said Tom Canning, Vice President of Strategy at Flexera. “Today we’re laying out the most comprehensive SAM vision in our company’s history. It will ensure our customers get the software and hardware asset data they need, when and where they need it, to make better business decisions. And it will forever change how companies think about the value SAM delivers across the organisation.” Bridging the DivideTo deliver a ‘single source of truth’ both software suppliers and buyers can agree on, a SAM solution must be powered by data. Intelligence underpins the accuracy of asset, software compliance, vulnerability exposure, and other SAM reports. Flexera’s research team already has built the industry’s largest data repository of over 150 million data points. It includes open source components, software recognition rules, product use rights, stock keeping units (SKUs), and software vulnerabilities from Secunia Research at Flexera. Today, Flexera is adding end of service life data to its repository. Now customers can identify and get rid of outdated and unsupported software, reducing security risks and eliminating wasteful maintenance payments. Flexera’s bridging the divide between software suppliers and buyers by, for the first time, empowering software suppliers to contribute directly to Flexera’s SAM data repository. Accurate vendor-supplied data reduces the time and effort customers spend managing software. A new Nexus Data Cloud lets vendors like Microsoft contribute “certified software intelligence” to the repository. Flexera will announce additional vendors contributing to the Data Cloud in the coming weeks and months.