TOGETHER STRONGER
SAM & THE ROLE OF THE MODERN VAR
Julia Collingburn
ITAM Solution Leader, Technology Lifecycle Services
Computacenter recently had the pleasure of hosting a group of Procurement and Software Asset Management (SAM) industry leaders where the focus of the discussion was on the challenges caused by the current macroeconomic climate and how bringing SAM, Procurement, and the modern Value-Added Reseller (VAR) closer together can overcome these challenges to enable success.
The market is requiring much more than a traditional Reseller service, as businesses are looking to outsource their challenges and benefit from the skilled resource pool, deep independent vendor knowledge, and broad technical capabilities that a VAR can offer.
Although very much on the increase before the pandemic, the use of SaaS and in particular the move from data centers to the cloud accelerated at an unprecedented speed during the pandemic. Businesses are now trying to gain visibility and control over purchasing decisions made during this time and ensure there is appropriate governance, preparation and planning in place going forward.
The challenge faced by SAM and Procurement is that they are often bypassed, business units most frequently purchase software subscriptions and cloud directly, leading to spiralling software portfolios, technology sprawl and unbudgeted spend. Adding to this, an increasing number of software vendors are making their software even easier to consume and without the need of a credit card, but then making it very difficult to get out of.
In addition, SAM and Procurement are often seen as gatekeepers, an unnecessary bureaucratic layer to get through to obtain the software wanted by the business. It was felt strongly, that this needs to change – both SAM and Procurement are service functions to the business and can provide valuable data insights and knowledge enabling the business to make informed decisions.
Interestingly, another view was shared on this, where the individual business units buy their own software and it is considered a positive, as they manage their own budget, they are focussed on only buying what they need, so not prone to overspend. However, by doing this the business as a whole does not benefit from economies of scale discounts or from license optimisation.
Whether purchasing continues to be business-led or is transformed into an automated managed service catalogue delivering a frictionless user experience and operational efficiency, what is key for both SAM and Procurement is to have complete visibility of what has been purchased and under what licensing terms, so they can analyse usage, look for optimisation and rationalisation opportunities, ensure they are included within the joiners, movers, leavers (JML) process, and are included in financial forecasts.
SAM discovery tooling with SaaS and Cloud (FinOps) capability is vital to gain the required visibility across hybrid technology, especially for those businesses that have gone through acquisitions where the challenge is even greater