These days there are quite a few tools available for SAM (Software Asset Management), but most of these tools fall short of what they promise. Too much heavy lifting is shouldered by the end user in effort to get simple, straightforward reports on software. They can also be prohibitively expensive and require a lot of effort and resources to deploy.
Designed from the ground up as the world’s first SAAS SAM tool, AssetLabs set out to alleviate the pain in normalizing, identifying and categorizing software. Having created the world’s largest software catalog, AssetLabs automatically cleans up software inventory and allows users to create meaningful, reliable software reports for licensing, inventory, support status and more, all without any deployment efforts. Their promise: “Get up and running on our platform in 1 day.”
We sat down with Steve O’Halloran founder of AssetLabs to tell us more about the company.
How did AssetLabs get started?
AssetLabs was formed out of the former AssetMetrix; a PC inventory & asset Intelligence service that was offered by LSPs such as Dell, Compugen, SoftChoice and others. AssetMetrix was acquired by Microsoft in 2006 and became the Asset Intelligence functions (AI) of System Center (SCCM) and Microsoft Intune.
After AssetMetrix, we set out to build a new platform for SAM which was inventory agnostic, had no integration requirements, and could identify software on the fly-meaning; the user wouldn’t have to manually correct software title variations, choose which correct licensing metric to use, or what downgrade rights to apply. Our goal is to make SAM as easy and affordable as possible.
Is it fair to say AssetLabs takes the learning curve out of Software Asset Management?
That’s right, users can get up and running in a day, and get a license entitlement position for software simply by inputting their license counts. Our interface is extremely easy to use. Software is sorted in simplistic, elegant views not found in any other tool. Our normalization engine facilitates this, and is state of the art. We also take even the most complex licensing metrics, such as SQL Server licensing, and produce licensing worksheets that can be generated on the fly.
Tell us more about your normalization process, what makes it unique?
First off, being agnostic to inventory tools means you can use any source of data you want. Most of our users use SCCM, but we can also take inventory from other popular tools such as ServiceNow, Snow, Flexera, Lansweeper, anything really. And if you don’t have an existing tool, you can use Microsoft MAP toolkit for free.
Now given that we can use any source, we have to be able to recognize software without depending on fingerprints.. this by the way is a big mistake that the “big 3“ sam companies do and why users are frustrated by the poor software recognition. We don’t rely on any sort of fingerprint, or installation path. A new version of Microsoft Office could be released tomorrow and we wouldn’t need to do a manual categorization or license type identification, it would be done automatically by our normalization engine’s algorithms, of which there are thousands of rules. And we can do this at a rate of 350,000 titles per second so naturally it’s very fast and scalable.
That sounds rather complex, how do you keep it simple from the customer’s perspective?
Of course, this process can be rather complicated, but all this is done in the background – completely invisible to the user. By the time the end user sees their data on our web portal, the normalization, categorization, license types and other metadata has already been added. Much like going to see a movie, the audience doesn’t need to worry about the effort that went into making that, the special effects, layers of cgi and sound effects etc, they just get to reap the benefits of the final product.
We also offer our tools to SAM consultants to accelerate their own practices with their clients. The feedback we consistently receive is that there’s nothing out there like this.
You say that you’ve set out to create an affordable solution, do you think you’ve managed to achieve that?
We don’t have the overhead that other SAM tool providers have. We don’t have a large sales force or marketing team to pay. We took the approach to build a simpler more effective tool, and pass the savings on to the customer. We offer a subscription model without long term commitment requirements, pricing is as low as $1/month per device and even lower as your device count scales up. We’re confident there’s nothing out there in that price range, and we’ve looked extensively.
About AssetLabs
AssetLabs is a Canadian based Software Asset Management provider. Their offerings include web-based SAM tools and consulting services for audit defense and software true-ups to enterprises worldwide.
Free trials and demos available at AssetLabs’ website.
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