How integrated software asset management helps streamline inter-departmental operations
By now, most enterprises already have IT service management (ITSM) in place, but software asset management (SAM) often isn’t considered a top priority for CIOs. However, while ITSM is geared more towards the efficient delivery of business-critical services, the fast-increasing complexity of today’s enterprise software environments also make clear the need for SAM. It’s just as important to have a robust strategy for controlling software costs and maintaining your software licensing compliance. Ultimately, it’s about buying only the software you need and using all the software you have. This will decrease the burden on management, while boosting your organisation’s resilience and enabling innovation without adding operational risk.
While it’s always great to have out-of-the-box functionality, increasing complexities in today’s enterprise IT environment make it a practical impossibility in many situations. This is a familiar dilemma to any IT manager or administrator, as they seek to implement more efficient ways of deploying, managing, and retiring software-based assets throughout their lifecycles. That’s why your SAM solution must work seamlessly with your other core business routines, such as product cataloguing, software request processes, database management, procurement, and software licensing optimisation. With an automated and integrated solution, you can reduce the overall delivery time for new software and eliminate manual tasks prone to human error.
Human resources
It’s people, not technology, which drives any business. The HR serves as an umbrella for the entire software lifecycle management process – new hires need new software and licenses to start working. Onboarding a new hire typically starts with HR requesting a new machine with specific software preinstalled, which then needs to go through an approval process. The less time this takes, the sooner the new hire can get to work and, ultimately, reach their maximum level of productivity.
The approval process involves checking the software inventory database for any available software licenses. If there isn’t one available, one may either be repurposed from a retired machine or account or, if there aren’t any, there needs to be a way to send a request to procurement for purchasing the necessary license. It shouldn’t be hard to see why this process, done manually, quickly becomes virtually impossible at scale. That’s why your SAM solution must integrate with HR onboarding processes.
Inventory management
Paid software is typically licensed according to two models: per-core licensing in the case of desktop-side software, or per-user licensing for cloud-based software (as well as an increasing number of locally installed software products). SAM starts with building a complete inventory of your software environment and every license that comes with it. Deploying new installations or opening new user accounts, depending on the license model, consumes a license, except in the case of unlimited licenses.
To optimise software licensing across the enterprise, your SAM solution needs to work with your hardware environment and employee headcount. For example, if a computer is retired, any software licenses installed on that hardware can be placed back in your inventory for use on a new device. Similarly, if an employee leaves the organisation, any account-based apps they use should be made available to a new hire. In other words, inventory management is integral to the decommissioning process.
Software procurement
In today’s enterprises, the ability to innovate and adapt to change without unnecessary hurdles is critical for succeeding in a fast-paced and highly competitive market. That’s why companies need an efficient and established process for requesting new software deployments, not only for new hires, but also for the enterprise as a whole. At the same time, you can hardly afford the risky situation of having thousands of employees being able to download, purchase, or install any software they want without restrictions.
SAM can only be effective if it’s deeply integrated with the procurement and fulfillment process. For example, employees might want to choose from a list of approved applications to deploy on their machines, without having to make a request in person and then wait for a lengthy manual approval process. In another case, the head of a specific business department might want to implement entirely new software without going through unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles first. In the end, the software approval and procurement process should be as fast and as efficient as possible, albeit without adding risk to the organisation. After all, no one wants to go through a week-long approval process just to install Slack or Skype.
Integration + automation = revenue
As the enterprise becomes evermore defined by its software infrastructure, there are many more situations where integration and automation translate into increased revenue. Software asset management solutions are far more than just ways to maintain inventories of software; they also automate compliance, seamlessly support new business needs, strengthen risk tolerance, and reduce costs. Together, these factors boost revenue and help make businesses more adaptable to the constant pace of change.
AspectWorks’ SnowMirror for Salesforce has been approved for listing and is now available in the Salesforce AppExchange, which means Salesforce users can quickly and easily add the application to their instances.
With AspectWorks’ SnowMirror for Salesforce, users have an efficient and effective way to store Salesforce data from the cloud in their own local database servers. SnowMirror for Salesforce makes it possible to use cloud data for custom reports or disaster recovery, all run on your own infrastructure.
How SnowMirror for Salesforce works?
With SnowMirror for Salesforce, data is loaded from a Salesforce cloud instance and stored in a relational database such as Oracle, MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server installed in a local environment. All applications that need the Salesforce data for any purpose can access it in standard database ways (such as through an ODBC driver, JDBC, ETLs or plain SQL). Access to the local database is fast and the Salesforce API is no longer impacted.
SnowMirror lets you off-load reporting and business intelligence!
SnowMirror lets you off-load reporting and business intelligence, and enables you to easily create flexible reports on your own infrastructure. You can connect your own reporting platforms and tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Cognos, Microsoft Reporting Services or SAP Business Objects to Salesforce, or store your Salesforce data on databases like MySQL, MS SQL or Oracle.
In the event of a disaster, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that there’s a copy of your mission-critical data stored on a local server, with guaranteed access even if your internet or application service provider is not available. SnowMirror for Salesforce also reduces load on your Salesforce instance because only a few reports or integrated applications need live data.
AspectWorks is a premier enterprise Salesforce consulting and software development company.
AspectWorks is specialising in the custom implementation of software solutions to increase your competitive advantage. AspectWorks’ expertise has been built over 14 years and more than 380 successful projects with major clients across three continents.
Find out more at www.aspectworks.com.
Find SnowMirror for Saleforce at AppExchange HERE
SnowMirror team proudly announces the new SnowMirror for Salesforce which has been rewritten from scratch and brings many new features similar to those in the ServiceNow version. This release is fully compatible with Salesforce Winter ’18 Release. The main SnowMirror benefits are:
- Salesforce read replica in a traditional on-premise database which allows seamlessly building reports using existing reporting platforms and popular BI tools
- Backup tool for individual Salesforce tables including scheduled backups and configurable retention policies
- Mirror database as an integration hub for Salesforce data
Please download a trial version and evaluate SnowMirror in your own environment.
What’s New
New Replication Algorithm
The synchronization algorithm has been revised and thoroughly tested using large Salesforce organizations.
Salesforce Backup
This is a completely new module provided by the SnowMirror team. SnowMirror is now a fully-featured backup tool for individual Salesforce tables including full, differential and incremental backups with configurable retention policies.
Attachment Replication & Backup – SnowMirror enables replicating attachments onto a filesystem as well as performing attachment backups. The retention period settings is available as well. The attachments are stored in a directory structure where each record has its own folder named by the record’s display value and the folder contains the attachments as standard files.
Schema Changes Notifications – SnowMirror notifies every time there is a new field in a Salesforce object. It works for the modified or removed fields as well. The notifications work independently on the Auto Schema Update feature. So even if the schema is not being updated automatically then users get notified about changes on the Salesforce side.
Edit Mappings – This new feature allows editing database column data types for individual fields. So it is possible to override the default SnowMirror mapping. E.g. it is possible to extend a varchar column to CLOB and such a setting persists even if the temporary tables are being used for the full loads. See the feature in the user manual.
LDAP Integration – SnowMirror allows you to integrate it with corporate Active Directory or LDAP. When selecting this security realm then the users are not being stored in the configuration database anymore but they are being authenticated against LDAP. The existing roles are being mapped to groups in LDAP.
Salesforce is the leading cloud platform for automating sales and customer service processes. But Salesforce is not only about Service Cloud or Sales Cloud products. It is a real cloud platform for a wide variety of enterprise solutions. As a result, every Salesforce instance contains valuable, important or critical data.
If Salesforce is being implemented by a large organization with many other applications, existing IT environments and preferred company-wide solutions, then the Salesforce’s single system of record is suddenly becoming only another piece of software, another data source.
By its cloud nature, it is much more complicated to work with the Salesforce data outside of the cloud and making integrations directly with the production Salesforce instance might complicated, expensive or even impossible especially while dealing with bulk data. This is why many Salesforce customers think of building their own read replicas to be able to work with the data on-premise.
Specifically, here are 3 reasons to keep an independent copy of your Salesforce data:
1. Reporting and Business Intelligence
What if you have an existing data warehouse? Do you have a standard reporting environment based on Tableau or Cognos? In this case, Salesforce is just one of the data sources for the reporting team and accessing the cloud instance is simply not flexible enough. Having a copy of the Salesforce data in a more traditional relational on-premise database such as Oracle or SQL Server makes everything much easier.
One approach is to connect the reporting tool directly to the mirror database, the other approach is to use the replica as a staging area for further ETL processing such data mart loads or data blending.
2. Simplified Integrations
Salesforce data is important for many other applications within an IT environment of a company. Other tools need to work with the contacts, cases, leads and other objects. The experience is that vast majority of applications working with Salesforce data does not modify the data at all. These are just read-only Salesforce integrations.
In this case, the best practice is to read the data from a mirror database instead of using Salesforce API to get the same records again and again.
3. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are closely related practices that describe an organization’s preparation for unforeseen risks to continued operations. Many organizations are required to have such plans. Having the Salesforce data in a separate location is the vital part of these plans to cover scenarios such as “What if there is no Salesforce anymore?”.
Replicate Salesforce Data with SnowMirror
SnowMirror is a smart replication tool for Salesforce. The data is loaded from a Salesforce instance and stored in a relational database such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, installed in a local environment. SnowMirror is simple to install and configure. Follow the quick start guide to set up SnowMirror just in 10 minutes.
Türkova 2319/5b
149 00 Praha 4
Czech Republic
info@snow-mirror.com