Customer story: Signify

Signify is the world leader in lighting for professionals and consumers and lighting for the Internet of Things. Signify has 36,000 employees and is present in over 70 countries. The company unlocks the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world.

The Signify SAM journey so far can be summarised as a real success story that resulted in an impressive risk reduction and cost avoidance in less than 1,5 years. Signify has software license compliance under control, avoiding significant (financial) risks.

Key enablers that helped realising these outcome

• Well-defined governance in place and management support within Signify;
• Good cooperation between the Signify SAM experts, the process stakeholders and service provider Noventiq Northern Europe (formerly know as Softline Group Northern Europe);
• Considering ISO/IEC 19770-1 as the standard best practice;
• Implementation of tools that perfectly support the defined processes;
• Initial focus on data completeness and quality.

The Software Asset Management governance, process and tooling needed to be set up for the new Signify company, including identifying and address potential licensing issues. The ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017 standard for ITAM was to be used as guideline.

At the start of the project, the Royal Philips / Signify infrastructure split was still in progress on several levels while Flexera‘s FlexNet Manager Suite for Enterprise (FNMS) was the first application to land in the new Signify domain (e.g.: devices owned by Signify vs. Royal Philips). Also, the split of software contracts and transfer of software licenses was in progress, but not yet fully finalised.

• There were challenges within the datacenters to get the Flexera agent installed and to get Oracle databases and vCenters connected.
• The Flexera FNMS recognition data needed to be reviewed and updated for many reconciliations to make sure that the compliance reports are trustworthy (delivered as a Noventiq Northern Europe managed service).

• Governance and Senior Management support are key
• Good stakeholder management:

• Create awareness for SAM and SAM processes within all levels of the company
• Agree on SAM processes and data delivery with your 3rd party service providers
• Setup small multi-disciplinary teams that can decide and move fast in case of issues

• Scope: Start with the top software publishers, but to avoid unexpected costs, make sure that you have a process in place that triggers you whenever risks arise in the tail software publishers‘ list
• Tooling: Always double check the outcome of the SAM tooling, e.g.: trustworthy compliance reporting requires validation of the recognition data embedded in the SAM tooling (file- and installer evidence)
• Because of the complexity and the liability; in-house SAM expertise is a necessity between a SAM Service Provider and the business. Introduce a multiple eye principle before finalising on a compliance state and next steps to be taken!

• License compliance risks identified and tackled leading to a significant decrease of the financial provision for license breaches since the introduction of the company.
• Top 20 software vendors under control (= zero or negligible risk exposure, desirable audit outcomes) and contracts optimised.
• ISO/IEC 19770-1 conformance went up from 17% to 81% (e.g.: Tier 1; trustworthy data scores >90%).
• Full data transparency with very high level of completeness through Flexera inventory; Software Asset Management acting as a reliable data source to other IT processes (e.g.: Architecture, CMDB, IT Security, projects).