]]> http://www.scalable.com/conversation/2012/01/31/wininstall-customer-testimonial-kajima-international/feed/ 0 http://www.scalable.com/conversation/2011/10/18/survey-4-is-upon-us/ http://www.scalable.com/conversation/2011/10/18/survey-4-is-upon-us/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:18:12 +0000 Mark Cresswell http://www.scalable.com/conversation/?p=2622 Scalable is releasing Survey 4 this week. This release is by far the most significant in the company’s history. It has been almost a full year in the making and we’ve had it in “closed beta” now for 3 months. Survey 4 is significant for Scalable and its customers on a number of fronts.

Chief among the changes is the introduction of what we are calling a “dynamic catalog”. Software usage metering, in it truest sense, relies on the measurement of activity that affects executable programs. Since executables are of little use for things such a compliance reporting and migration analysis, most metering tools will attempt to map executables to meaningful objects, such as installed packages, by means of an external catalog. These catalogs are often out of date and cannot easily cater for site-specific application packaging. With Survey 4 Scalable will now associate the executable with its owning application package dynamically i.e. without a catalog. We do this via a mechanism we invented, based on years of application packaging experience with WinINSTALL, by introspecting on MSI and other registrations that occur during installation of Windows applications.

We’ve also extended our sub-function tracking capability. It’s now possible to track the use of individual dialogs within an application. This can be used to determine whether training programs have been effective; whether individual application components and plug-ins are in use, and to determine whether usage policies are being followed.

Read/Write Differentiation for Web Apps

Our web application tracking, always a popular feature, has been enhanced to include a discovery capability that allows an organization to quickly vector in on those web applications that require further usage analysis, and we’ve also added web applications to our license management capabilities, since so many newly deployed applications are delivered via SaaS.

We’ve extend our support for tracking the usage of App-V applications and introduced a range of additional planning reports for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Our user interface has been brought bang up to date with a new web 2.0 interface based on the same model as Scalable LIVE!, our ITAM platform as a service, and indeed Survey 4 can now act as a data-feed for Scalable LIVE!. This interface means that existing customers of one of our Scalable LIVE! applications, such as Asset Vision, can now begin to see Survey software usage metering information in the same environment.

Survey 4 can itself be deployed as a SaaS application and we’ve dramatically improved the installation process for those organizations that still want to run such tools on-premise.

Customers current on maintenance can install Survey 4 via a download from our support portal. If you are not current on maintenance, please contact us to see how you can gain access to this new release.

We’re very proud of how much we’ve been able to deliver in this release. We’re sure you’ll see some incredible benefits as a result if you are looking at software cost-reduction initiatives or migration programs

This new Scalable white paper “Achieving Windows 7 Readiness” is intended for anyone involved in strategic planning and policy making for Windows 7 upgrade projects.

Whether the migration is a “fork‐lift” upgrade project for all PCs in your organization, or using a “replace as you go” method only for machines refreshed, with careful planning and a sound migration policy framework, the Windows 7 upgrade process can be a seamless, scalable experience across the entire project.

Achieving Windows 7 Readiness Whitepaper

1. Is this a problem really worth solving?

a. A quick look at our testimonial page will provide an indication of the scale of the savings to be had. Unless your organization is one of the few that can afford to waste as much as 30% of your software budget then the problem is certainly worth solving.

2. Survey looks like it will highlight historical process inefficiencies within my team; this fact makes it difficult to support.

a. Survey is relatively new on the market. It has not been possible to perform the analysis that Survey enables before, so no one can be accused of ignoring this problem. However, Survey does exist now and to ignore its capabilities, particularly in the current climate, would be wrong.

3. We already have an IT Asset Management  (ITAM) tool that gives us asset usage information.

a. This is a common misconception. Comprehensive ITAM tools provide a range of valuable benefits different to those provided by Survey, because Survey is complementary to ITAM tools. Survey’s asset usage measurement method is unique and is where the real cost-reduction value surfaces. Usage measurement features in ITAM tools reveal whether an asset has been used and, for some software assets, they may show how long an application has been open on the desktop. Also, this  usage information will not cover some of the increasingly common methods by which applications are delivered such as web browser, thin-client, virtual desktop, virtual application. This limited usage information is not just ineffective for cost reduction purposes; it is dangerous and guarantees you will buy more software than you need. Consider the common scenario where an employee receives an email with a PDF as an attachment. The employee clicks that PDF, launches Adobe Acrobat and doesn’t shut Acrobat down until the end of the day. An ITAM tool will show that the employee is a frequent user of Adobe Acrobat and needs a license. Survey will reveal the employee only ever reads a PDF and just needs the Adobe Reader; the difference in cost is enormous. There are many usage scenarios where ITAM tools will report an application as heavily used, and thereby needed by the employee, when Survey will report contextually accurate usage that shows a license is not required. ALL Scalable’s customers already have an ITAM tool yet they routinely report significant annually savings subsequent to the implementation of Survey.

4. We already have a Software Asset Management  (SAM) tool to handle licensing matters.

a. SAM tools are designed to show whether an organization is in compliance with its licensing obligations. They will also explain how much it will cost to get in compliance in the event the organization is under licensed. With certain SAM tools it is possible to determine downgrade options that can yield significant savings. However, ask yourself this question; when your SAM tool tells you that you are under-licensed for Microsoft Visio to the tune of 1000 copies, will it then tell you which of those copies can be safely replaced with a low-cost viewer because they have not been used to create a Visio diagram for over 90 days? Will it also show which of your Microsoft Office Professional users have never created anything in Publisher or Access?

5. How can we afford to buy software in the current climate?

a. Organizations are going to continue buying software, often unnecessarily, particularly as vendors step up audits and true-ups to compensate for revenue short falls resulting from global economic issues.  Using the Survey application, to police the usage of your existing software portfolio, can eliminate these wasteful purchases. Every customer we have reports that their software spending decreases within the first few months of implementing Survey – even factoring in the cost of licensing our software. So confident are we of this fact that we are happy to give the software away in exchange for a percentage of the savings made.

One useful report many customers aren’t familiar with within Asset Vision is the “Warranty Spider” report, which provides automatic enumeration of up-to-date warranty information on discovered devices in your environment.  Based on devices with asset tag information, Asset Vision will automatically communicate with the manufacturer of those devices and report accurate and up-to-date information back to you in a “zero-touch” fashion.

For example, imagine needing to find out warranty information for all Dell, IBM, HP, Acer, Lenovo, Etc. laptops, desktops and servers in your environment.   The Asset Vision Warranty Spider report will automatically provide you with the data necessary for you to correlate based on the device name, serial number, and manufacturer, and to understand what the state of the warranty contract is for those discovered devices.  Questions that Asset Vision will answer:  Is the warranty expired?  Is the warranty active?  What type of warranty is it?  Who services the warranty? Who do I call for warranty information?