Software Asset Management at Raiffeisenbank - process and result

At the end of September this year, Berlin will host a competition of European SAM projects - SAMS Europe Award 2017 . We believe that our project at least deserves recognition, and therefore have applied for participation in two categories: Overall Project / Strategy and Tool / Software . What is remarkable about our SAM system? The fact is that a special combination of software products has developed in Raiffeisenbank, which has led to many changes to the product we have chosen for managing software assets. Under the cut - a detailed story about this epic.

Minute theory

Software Asset Management (SAM) is a process for accounting and managing company software assets. Any business is always interested in reducing costs. And with the growth of the company, its costs for software infrastructure also increase. What programs are purchased for the company? How many licenses do we have? How are they used? Are license restrictions consistent with their actual application? What conditions are spelled out in software product support contracts?

The larger the company, the more difficult it is to answer these and many other questions regularly raised by IT management, the finance department, and auditors. And this is not idle curiosity at all. If you have a full understanding of the composition and nature of the use of all software instances, you can save on excessive functionality, abandon “unnecessary” licenses, decide on the most appropriate licensing restrictions for your company, and make sure that all applications are used as specified in the agreements, and at the same time make sure that pirated software hasn’t been found anywhere. By the way, the last two points can cause considerable fines for the company. Each vendor has its own licensing and support features, with a variety of options. And when the number of licenses in a company is in the thousands or tens of thousands, the problem of manual accounting and optimization of software infrastructure turns into a weeks-long headache for entire departments - and this is not a one-time job. According to Gartner, in the first year after the introduction of SAM, 5-30% of the IT department’s budget is saved, and then about 5% every year. In large companies, a round sum is accumulating in absolute terms, not to mention the removal of legal risks in relation to compliance with licensing restrictions.

How was it with us

A modern bank is inconceivable without a diverse and developed software infrastructure. Moreover, the bank is large, with a large number of branches scattered throughout the country. Until recently, all accounting of the software used by us was kept manually. For each iteration of registration of all copies of installed applications and verification of compliance of their use with license conditions, several weeks of uninterrupted work of a couple of departments took several weeks. Self-written automation tools did not improve the situation too much. The last straw that overflowed the patience of business and IT management was the next audit of the bank. No, no violations were revealed, but collecting the necessary information in a short time required simply heroic efforts. So in our case, the decision to implement SAM was not made due to detection of violations during the audit,

We needed to automate the process so that the system as much as possible without the participation of people took into account the number of copies of the software and the options for their licenses. Moreover, the accounting had to be cross-cutting, throughout the entire life cycle of products, starting with purchase plans and ending with uninstallation. In addition to accounting, the system should allow managing assets, including cost planning, optimization of use and porting to other platforms (many licensing conditions depend on this). In addition, the management of support contracts was entrusted to the future product. This is one of the key items of software spending, so optimization here could be the biggest benefit. But in order to understand on which contracts you can save, you first had to get the full picture of the payments.

It was obvious that we would not pull the solution of the problem of this scale on our own and within a reasonable time. The volume and complexity of the work was such that we needed a ready-made, well-thought-out solution, and the integrator had to have all the necessary experience for implementation, and not experiment and gain knowledge at our expense.

After a long analysis of the SAM-products market and negotiations with vendors, we settled on HPE Asset Manager. Why exactly on it? Indeed, the capabilities of Asset Manager are comparable to competitors, and the cost of an enterprise solution cannot be called humane even for a large bank. But with a more careful comparison, it turned out that the cost of Asset Manager is at least comparable to the solutions of other vendors, if not cheaper - because we had to register tens of thousands of software licenses used by the company. It was also important that HPE offered active implementation assistance. An additional plus on the scales was Asset Manager’s broadest integration capabilities with existing bank data sources, as well as the fact that for many years we have been using HPE's CMDB - UCMDB as a reliable source of data on the current operating status.



Then we announced a tender and chose an integrator - the company "Ai-Teco."

A difficult history of implementation has begun. During the first year, the following works were planned:

• Preliminary survey of infrastructure.
• Building the SAM process.
• Adaptation of existing bank processes (IT and not only).
• Direct implementation of Asset Manager.
• Integration with all sources of data on software assets.
• Registration of all Microsoft and Oracle products.

Despite all the advantages of Asset Manager, using its capabilities out of the box did not obscure all the features of the solution to our task of building a fully automated SAM system that can take into account information about all the variety of software used in the company. Having deployed the test bench, we found out that due to the peculiarities of the combination of software and hardware in the bank - for example, Oracle products deployed on the IBM Power Systems platform - Asset Manager out of the box (in fact, like any other similar product) simply could not correctly take into account all the licenses used in our bank. It was necessary to make significant changes to Asset Manager - because we definitely didn’t want to get a “customized” implementation of the product to an unsupported state, we wanted to operate and maintain a “box”,

We must pay tribute to the contractor and the vendor - they did not try to approach the implementation of the project formally. We have never heard in response "this is not in the TK, so I'm sorry." Experts from all three sides quickly discussed each problem that came up, worked out a solution, and the HPE team made the necessary changes to their product - since the vendor shared our approach and also wanted to make the product better and more interesting in words.

As a result, several dozen changes were made to Asset Manager and UCMDB, which, thanks to our project, became available to all users of these software products.

What is the result

Our SAM process is not an internal IT process, it covers “extraneous” departments of the bank (for example, accounting), we combined data on operation, accounting, investment and operating expenses.

At the heart of the system, of course, is the Asset Manager, and we assigned the collection of data to the tools we already had.



The system is fully capable of:

• Find all applications installed on computers and servers of the bank. Even if someone takes an inappropriate initiative and quietly installs unauthorized software, we will find it before the auditors. IT employees are more careful about choosing options when installing applications.
• Identify the found. After indexing all the packages, applications and utilities, you need to understand what exactly we have installed and how much it meets the requirements of the vendors.
• Keep track of acquired software. It is necessary not only to know what we bought, but also to have evidence. If some computing unit or project needs additional computing power, then you can not invest in new hardware and licenses, but find and transfer unused resources. In preparation for the implementation of some projects, we have more clarity regarding the need to purchase new products and licenses. A nice bonus is that the IT response speed to business requests has increased.
• Monitor license compliance. The most important thing in all this venture with SAM. The rights to use the software are checked, any steps implying changes in the use of licenses are agreed.
• Financial Accounting. Only the future bankrupt can afford not to think about the value of assets. All costs are accounted for in detail and posted to business consumers. Budget planning has been simplified: how many licenses need to be bought in the next fiscal year, how much money needs to be allocated for technical support. Naturally, all data can be compared with information from previous years.

As mentioned at the beginning, our SAM implementation project was announced in two nominations. And we have great hopes for victory - most of the projects we reviewed in other organizations were a simple deployment of products out of the box, without any modifications. In our case, a fully automated solution was created that does not require human intervention. Thanks to him, IT employees got rid of the routine of accounting for licenses, the process of planning future expenses for software became transparent, the efficiency of managing the existing infrastructure increased, and the risk of using unlicensed products was reduced.