Partner Profile: Fisher IT Asset Consulting Limited

Area of Focus/ Specialism(s):

Software License Compliance and Optimization; Licence Assurance & Advisory and Managed Software Asset Management (SAM) Services.

What is the biggest change youÂ’ve seen in SAM since you started in this discipline?

A maturity within the enterprise market to recognize that Software Asset Management is a discipline that has a huge cost implication on a companyÂ’s assets; and that the risk of non-compliance, over spend and lack of management is real. This recognition has meant that at the next level there has been a very big shortage of experienced and trained SAM specialists to resource organization needs. With the constant development of technology, the SAM market space will continue to see change and will therefore always be in a state of flux technically, operationally and at a resource level.

What gives you the greatest satisfaction about being in SAM?

That organizations are now recognizing the fact that this discipline is real and therefore needs to be managed just like any other IT asset.

If you could change one aspect of SAM, what would it be?

Software vendors to make the licensing of their software be automatically managed at an electronic level, so that they can scanned, recognised and interpreted i.e. software tags. Therefore, software vendors will enable the end-user to understand how to match their agreements with usage; and be able to start to understand any gaps for compliance purposes. There is still too much complexity around software agreements and the rights of end-users.