Specialist high-end software is expensive—and yet, your organization’s skilled specialists often can’t work without it. Look closely in many organizations and high-value applications like Computer-Aided Design software, niche engineering applications, high-end data science tools such as SPSS or SAS, and finance and accounting tools aren’t difficult to discover.
But how intensively are they being used? Why have they been bought? And are they even being used at all?
Examples abound of high-value applications used for just a few minutes a week, or acquired for a particular purpose that no longer exists.
And yet, at the same time as new users are recruited or new requirements emerge, organizations can find themselves buying even more licenses for the same high-value applications.
To the rescue: software harvesting.
Software Harvesting’s Promise
Imagine if it were possible to automatically survey your organization’s entire IT estate, discovering not only what high-value applications are out there, but who is using them.
Now imagine a further step. As well as discovering who is using your organization’s high-value applications, imagine that it’s possible to determine how much they are using them, including:
- When they were last used
- The length of a typical session in either elapsed time or keystrokes
- How frequently they are launched
And now imagine that it is possible to deactivate the licenses of underused or unused software, and reallocate those licenses to new users instead of buying additional fresh licenses.
Imagine no longer: this is software re-harvesting in action.
And the savings from software re-harvesting can be significant—very significant indeed.
Getting the Data
But how exactly can organizations automatically survey their entire IT estate to unlock these possibilities?
The answer: Scalable Software’s Asset Vision intelligent software discovery tool. Asset Vision finds and catalogues hardware and software assets across the organization’s entire IT estate regardless of platform or location.
With a couple of clicks, IT administrators can see not only every piece of software installed across the IT estate, but also data such as:
- Which software packages are installed
- Its publisher
- Its version number
- Who is using it
- At which precise workstation
- Frequency of use
- Number of keystrokes associated with a user session
- How many times it has been launched
- When it was last used
Moreover, Asset Vision flexibly presents this data to aid decision-making regarding the deployment—and redeployment—of high-value applications.
Want to see every piece of software on every desktop across the organization that hasn’t been launched in the last 90 days? Or the last 30 days? With Asset Vision, it’s easy.
The Right Software, the Right Decisions
If the software is there, Asset Vision will find it. And it won’t just find it, but will also discover and normalize all the data that you need in order to make the correct software re-harvesting decisions and drive down the cost of high-value application deployments.
In short, when a business needs facts about its IT estate, Asset Vision provides them—rapidly, accurately, and with low impact.
For intelligent software discovery, Asset Vision leads the pack. To learn more, reach out to schedule your demo to see Asset Vision in action.
