Baseline Service
An audit or a ‘friendly review’ is unavoidable and every organisation will be confronted by these at some point. It is essential to be prepared for this. If you are not, then there is a chance that the announcement will come at a particularly inconvenient time, and you will have to rush to put together an audit team. Entering a review or audit unprepared not only demands a lot of resources, but may also result in unpleasant (financial) surprises. You can prevent such consequences by gaining insight into the software license compliance status for the software publishers that are most important to your organisation.
One-time or permanent insight into your software licenses?
Insight into the software license compliance status is very important for organisations. The implementation of Software Asset Management / IT Asset Management provides insight into software assets, whereby organisations can take measures to achieve software license compliance and avoid unnecessary costs. When your organisation has not or not yet implemented SAM / ITAM, but still needs one-time insight into an important software publisher, Softline can provide assistance with its Baseline Service.
SAP Baseline Service
ANALYSING AND OPTIMISING YOUR SAP SOFTWARE LICENSES
The SAP Baseline Service delivers optimisation of SAP licenses based on the actual transactions occurring in the connected SAP systems, which can be fully automated if desired. Our service automatically generates license reports, cleans wrongly assigned licenses, inactive users and duplicates, and allocates the optimal license types based on actual used transactions. The service allows extensive customising options for mapping all the details of a SAP license contract, including prices, ratio rules, custom licenses, transactions, business objects and other engines.
With this service Softline will provide you with transparency in and optimisation of your SAP compliance position. Softline is not a SAP software reseller and therefore has no conflict of interest in the outcome of the SAP Baseline Service.
Step-by-step approach to SAP license optimisation:
Step 1: Installation Installation of the SAP optimisation tooling.
Generation of user transaction database and licenses database.
Step 2: Optimisation potential report
We compare currently allocated licenses with calculation results from our transaction / license database (professional, limited prof., employee, ESS only).
Step 3: Inventory
Set up license inventory. Define individual license types.
Step 4: User profiling
Define role model users for each license type. Report on transactions and engines used. Define customising settings to reflect allocated license types and actual user behaviour. Consolidate users over multiple SAP systems.
Step 5: Generate optimisation report
Including all individual license types. Define and run additional reports on license usage and user behaviour.
Step 6: Write back optimised licenses
Based on optimisation results, define potential new user license alloca-tions. Automatically or manually write back optimised licenses. Optionally prepare continuous improvement cycle.
What should you expect
- A comprehensive SAP customising tree for a map of licenses, custom licenses, ratio rules (relation between limited professional: professional, etc.).
- Identification options of developers and free development resources.
- Identification of third party licenses and products by SAP (e.g. Business Objects, Adobe Form, Click Schedule etc.).
- Dashboard for permanent central map of all details which are cost relevant, like license costs, engine use of industrial solutions, etc.
Microsoft Baseline Service
ANALYSING AND OPTIMISING YOUR MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSES
The Microsoft Baseline Service offers organisations a complete and accurate overview of the Effective License Position (ELP) to prevent overspending on Microsoft licenses and to become compliant for Microsoft. With the Microsoft Baseline Service of Softline , an organisation is fully prepared when an software audit of Microsoft occurs, or if the yearly Microsoft true up needs to take place.
Additional advice with regards to optimise the license contracts is also part of this service. Softline is not a Microsoft software reseller and therefore has no conflict of interest in the outcome of the Microsoft Baseline Service..
Step-by-step approach to Microsoft license optimisation:
Step 1: Planning
- Define scope & Identify engagement goals
- Prepare environment for scanning and data collection
During the planning phase Softline will work together with the organisation to determine the scope, identify engagement goals, securing appointments and arranging access for the data collection.
Step 2: Data collection
- Software deployments
- Software usage
- License entitlements
The data collection phase consist of the discovery and inventory of software assets using an inventory tool, followed by mapping of inventory data, usage and license entitlements. This includes a questionnaire and interviews with stakeholders to ensure all relevant data and information is collected to provide a full and accurate analysis on software deployments, usage and licensing entitlements.
Step 3: Data analysis
- Review and validation of all collected data
- Identification Microsoft license agreements
- Considerations and recommendations
Analysing the results from the inventory data collection involves identifying and documenting all product deployments, usage and license entitlements. Softline Solutions will combine the inventory data with other relevant information that may not be discoverable via most tools, such as the identification of active and passive servers, identification of authorized users for specific products and the presence of internal versus external facing servers.
Step 4: Final report
Softline Solutions will provide a detailed report of the actual deployment, usage and entitlement position per Microsoft product together with considerations and recommendations.
