All around the world, enterprises are realizing that they must employ Software Asset Management (SAM) to assure compliance, improve procurement and reduce costs. Popular desktop software vendors such as Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec agree, and are already making it much easier to manage their software licenses through the SAM lifecycle.
But what about SAP? Enterprises running SAP are now looking to SAM to help them better manage their usage and costs. Starting with their dominant position in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), SAP’s growing offering of application software is consuming an ever larger share of the enterprise IT budget. In fact, in the last decade, SAP customers have experienced double-digit increases in their annual costs through increased maintenance and licensing charges. In addition, over the past 10 years with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and ISO/IEC 19770-1, managing IT and software assets has become critically important. Since SAP’s deployments are complex, understanding and managing SAP contracts, deployments and license usage can be challenging. But now, it is absolutely essential.