Elée, a French pioneer in Software Asset Management (SAM)

Data center

Pioneer of Software Asset Management (SAM) in France, Elée is an independent consultancy specialising in software licence and cloud spend management. According to the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), Software Asset Management consists in federating a set of skills, processes and tools in order to manage, control and secure a company's software license portfolio. The firm Elée has developed real expertise in this field of activity, a know-how that was recognized in 2020 by Gartner in the 1er Magic Quadrant for Software Asset Managed Services.

The firm Elée is to provide advice to information systems departments (ISD) and purchasing departments to enable them to :

  • Understand and control the risks of non-compliance.
  • Reduce recurring IT costs and capital expenditures.
  • Better negotiate with extremely well organized and ambitious suppliers such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP or Amazon.
  • Build processes and deploy tools to manage and control usage and expenses.
  • Reducing the environmental footprint of IT and putting digital technology at the service of the ecological transition.

For more information, visit the company's website: www.elee.com

Software Asset Management (SAM)

Software Asset Management (SAM) is a recent activity within companies. It arrived in France in 2012, when the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) authorized the sale of second-hand software licenses. This was a coincidence, as there were other factors at the time that motivated the implementation of optimized management of companies' application assets. But it is certain that the organization of a secondary software license market was an important lever in the strategy of optimizing the management of corporate software assets.

The primary objectives of Software Asset Management are to optimize costs and control the portfolio and risks. Its secondary objectives are to improve data management, control the information system, and implement an effective Vendor Management strategy to take control of the relationship with publishers.

Software licences, an asset like no other

The firm Elée has perfectly integrated the specificity of the software license in the different phases of its software portfolio optimization missions. It is a complex asset that combines technical (it is a program), legal (it is subject to copyright management, usage rights, etc.), commercial (there are different marketing methods and media) and accounting (the application is an asset, whereas maintenance is an expense) dimensions. These specificities require the implementation of a very specific method and process to be integrated into the budgetary and technological optimization and valorization approach of Asset Management.

Thus, after having defined precise objectives with its client, the firm Elée conducts an exhaustive software inventory within the organization covering the technical aspects, with a detailed collection of data on software licenses installed locally, in server centers, and on the licenses used. For each of these inventories, Elée maps the associated hardware configurations (location, characteristics, capacity, acquisition date, etc.). Following this technical inventory, Elée lists the rights attached to each software license present in the company and the active maintenance. Finally, the firm of experts Elée studies projects in order to anticipate the installation and uninstallation phases of licenses.

Frugality and circular economy

It is only from this complete inventory of your organization's software assets and the analysis of the data obtained thatElée continues its Asset Management mission. It deploys tools for monitoring and managing software data (usage, functionalities, etc.) covering the entire organization and trains the various players in the company. The implementation of this organization and process allows you to enhance the value of your software asset portfolio, to optimize the use of licenses with users, to decommission software licenses and to sell on the secondary used market via our Softcorner platform. The proceeds from these sales allow you to finance new technology projects (security, mobility, system availability, storage, etc.) and to purchase any missing licenses in your inventory in order to eliminate publisher compliance risks.

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