IT asset and licence management is the work of keeping count of every application, licence, subscription and old system that a company pays for. It checks two things: that the company uses what it pays for, and that it pays for what it uses. It is also called IT asset management, or ITAM. The IT industry often calls everything a company runs its software estate.
A company with 2,000 staff may pay for several hundred applications. Some are installed on its own servers and laptops, under licences bought from software makers. A licence is the legal permission to use a piece of software, usually for a set number of users or machines. Others are SaaS applications, which are rented by subscription and used over the internet. Two problems keep appearing. The company pays for licences that nobody uses. And it uses software for which it has no licence, which can lead to a large bill when the software maker checks.
For instance, an IT team at a media company in Noida may find that the company pays for three different video-editing tools, used by different teams. It may also find that 25 people who left last year still have paid accounts. Each product in this zone tracks one part of this problem.
Software asset management (SAM) finds every application installed on servers, laptops and cloud accounts, and matches it against the licences the company holds. SaaS management finds every SaaS application that employees sign up for, shows who uses each one and what it costs, and removes a person's accounts when the person leaves. It starts from the employee's record in HR, an idea explained on the page on the HRIS. Mainframe software looks after the oldest part of the estate: the large central computers on which many banks and insurers still run their core records.
Two neighbouring products sit in the finance department. Procure-to-pay software is used to buy the licences and subscriptions in the first place. Telecom and technology expense management tracks the rest of what the company pays for, such as phone lines and data feeds. The laptops themselves are tracked from purchase to disposal by unified endpoint management (UEM).