Every day we talk to customers who struggle with managing their software portfolios; for many, it’s been an ongoing challenge for years.

For most, figuring out what they already own and are using is the initial challenge. To determine this, most organizations invest in some type of software tracking tool to create an inventory of software deployed in their environment. Unfortunately, instead of getting the quick and easy answers they want, they get a whole lot of data with thousands of line items that need to be consolidated. And then they still have the challenge of determining how what they own was acquired and finding the internal resources to perform that analysis.

Then once the process is completed, a company still needs to figure out how they will update and manage the data moving forward. Software management is a moving target as employees join and retire from companies, licensing intricacies vary from vendor to vendor, and programs change over time. Customers need to be able to properly forecast future software expenditures in order to present budgets to senior management. Depending on the size and complexity of an organization, without help, tracking and managing software licenses can quickly become a full-time job.

So the BIG question: Is there a better way to do this?

CompuCom has been helping clients manage their software licenses for more than 17 years. We can take your existing inventory, no matter how messy, clean it up and present it back to you in an easy-to-understand format. No inventory solution? No problem. Let us recommend a few ways to work around that. Adding asset intelligence with the help of our strategic accounts team is a key part of our value proposition. Our team will then begin the tedious process of working with each software vendor to gather all the historical data and create a solid baseline that can be compared to the current install base.

Once this baseline analysis is performed, it becomes the stepping-stone to identifying underutilized assets and opportunities to recover budgets for future IT projects. Once you are armed with this information, your company is better able to make more informed decisions based on facts.

CompuCom has local software experts across the US and Canada who are there to help you better manage existing licenses and optimize future investments.