Frequently Asked Questions by CIOs and IT Directors

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.