STRONGER
TOGETHER
TAKING BACK CONTROLBy 2025, 50% of organizations
will unify SAM and FinOps into
a consolidated disciplinedelivering portfolio costmanagement and governance.”
Target Software and Cloud Costs byUniting Software Asset Managementand FinOps, Gartner, April 2023

Julia CollingburnJames Morris

ITAM Solution Leader,Technology Lifecycle Services,
Computacenter

Head of Cloud, Apps & Data Sales,
Computacenter

Computacenter recently had the pleasure of hosting a select number of Procurement and Software AssetManagement (SAM) industry leaders at our latest Roundtable, where we discussed the many challenges
faced by the rapid shift to the cloud at the same time as managing and optimising costs, and how C-level
sponsorship, functional collaboration and trustworthy data are crucial to taking back control and achieving
cloud and cost objectives.
Earlier this year Gartner reported that “By 2025, 50% oforganizations will unify SAM and FinOps into a consolidated
discipline delivering portfolio cost management andgovernance.”(ISO/IEC 19770-1:2017) to manage risk, maximise the valueof assets throughout the asset lifecycle, drive operational
efficiency and optimise spend through People, Processand Technology.

The unification of SAM and FinOps teams makes perfectsense, as their principles are aligned so working together
would benefit from each other’s expertise to expedite
maturity and reduce the time to value. In particular, utilising
SAM’s well-established ITAM Best Practice Framework

From our view of the market, although we are widely seeing
the emergence of a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CoE) or aFinOps Practice within organisations, we are not yet seeing
much evidence of SAM being a part of this.

What we are seeing are the beginnings of functional
collaboration, most frequently with SAM and Procurement
teams, as organisations are recognising the value of datadriven purchasing decisions to reduce and optimise spend.

optimisation and rationalisation activities. However, weare not yet seeing any evidence of wider collaboration
with functions such as Infrastructure, Security, andApplication Development.

In addition, some SAM functions are working closely withbusiness stakeholders and application owners to support

Collaboration is key, because without it important business decisions are potentially being made from a single or limited
perspective, a siloed view. To achieve optimised costs, you need to have the full breadth of data. There are many valuable inputs
to build up the picture and achieve complete visibility, such as:• What is the vision, objectives, timeframe, key success metrics?
• What is the hardware and software strategy? What is the roadmap?
• What is the agreed source(s) of trustworthy data?
• Who currently uses what hardware and software, where and how?
• What is the business value of the software or services?
• How does the software and infrastructure map to services, who owns them? Who is accountable?
• What is the current software licensing position, how would that be impacted based on different scenarios?
• What are the use rights? Do the current licenses cover usage in the cloud? Any restrictions?
• What are the security implications?
• Are there are any regulatory requirements?
• What are the commercial levers?
Knowledge is power - knowing your organisation, knowing where you are now and where you want to be, amd knowing yourdata is complete and trustworthy is the enabler to taking back control.

Collaboration is key, because
without it important businessdecisions are potentially being
made from a single or limited
perspective, a siloed view.

Unified SAM and FinOps

Feedback was unanimous that
although all organisations had
a Cloud or FinOps practice, SAM
was not a part of this and were
not given the opportunity toprovide any input into clouddecisions.

Our first discussion point was whether our market viewaligned with what was happening in their organisation, towhat extent the Gartner statement is, or will be, a reality intheir organisation and if it isn’t, what were the blockers orchallenges they faced.
Feedback was unanimous that although all organisations
had a Cloud or FinOps practice, SAM was not a part of thisand were not given the opportunity to provide any input into
cloud decisions.
It was widely felt that SAM wasn’t seen as relevant to thecloud conversation as its remit is purely license compliance,risk mitigation, and in addition for some, optimisation,and rationalisation of installed software. The perception
and capability of the SAM function very much needed to beelevated to that of a strategic function, responsible for thegovernance of the organisation’s asset lifecycle (hardwareor software) whether physical, virtual or cloud.
However, most did not have that C-level sponsorship toelevate SAM and to drive the required behaviours throughcommon objectives across the organisation. It was agreed
that this very much needs to be instigated from the top
down, not bottom up, to be effective. Some have goodworking relationships with Procurement and one or more
additional functions, but all lacked collaboration with otherkey areas such as Infrastructure, Cloud, and Security.
It was discussed whether this elevation or inclusion of SAM
at a strategic level was dependent on its reporting line
within an organisation and felt that internal SAM teams
need support from the wider industry to articulate the “why”
in order to get C-level engagement on this, by providing andproving clear C-level benefits in white papers, webinars andconferences.
The FinOps Foundation provided a view from the market
in its State of FinOps 2023 report, where survey feedback
showed the Chief Technology Officer as the most likely
reporting structure for the FinOps function.

Reporting structures become clearer
Practitioner only responses

Chief Technology Officer

Chief Information Officer•	CTO stable as most likely
reporting structure

Chief Financial Officer•	CIO continues to diminish• CFO growing slightly

Still working on a defined
reporting structure•	64% reduction of thosestating that they are stillworking to define thereporting structure

Chief Operation Officer•	20% reduction in multiple
selections of reporting
structure indicating fewer
dotted lines

Chief Product Officer

Chief Procurement Officer
Source: State of FinOps 2023,FinOps Foundation

Chief Digital Officer
05EMEA

10NAMER152025% Respondents

Source: State of FinOps 2023, FinOps Foundation

30354045

Cost Visibility

Significant Rise in Software Renewal costs

The conversation moved onto the problems faced when calculating the cost ofservices, as again these involve different departments, so awareness and visibility
are often a challenge. In addition, many don’t know why and where they have cloudinfrastructure, so no housekeeping is done to turn off what is not being used or is
no longer required. The crux of this being that mostly, accountability for cloud spend
does not sit at department level, so controlling and optimising costs is not top of
their agenda.

Individuals anecdotally shared where they had seen significant increases insoftware costs at renewal, one as high as a 300/400% rise. To mitigate the cost
impact of this, it was discussed how important it was to proactively prepare aheadof a renewal to understand the business value of each software application, whouses it and why, and the application strategy, so it can be determined if the costis justified or whether alternatives need to be sought. A modern Value-AddedReseller (VAR) can work with customers to provide guidance from a Commercial,Licensing and Technical perspective or if an alternative can’t be used, can provide
benchmark costs, and offer guidance on which levers could be used to achieve thebest possible price.

A lot of time and effort is going into mapping software and infrastructure to services
to try to get to a point of transparency on all costs. Having a single source oftrustworthy data which covers the entire scope of the estate and provides reliableinsights on who is using what, where and why is key to this being achievable. Onecustomer had been driven to take drastic action and switch off servers whichappeared not to have an owner or where there was no business justification for
their usage.
The ultimate aim across all was to reach unit economics, understand the Total
Cost of Ownership (TCO) of each service, each function and individual. However, toachieve this complete picture, software costs also need to be included. However,visibility and knowledge of software and SaaS licensing terms and costs usually sit
within the remit of the ITAM/SAM function. Thus, reinforcing the need for them to berepresented within the FinOps or Cloud CoE function.

SaaS Management
From a SaaS management maturity perspective, most did not have a SaaSManagement Platform (SMP) tool, and instead were relying on being informed of theuse of SaaS applications and being provided with login credentials for a multitudeof individual SaaS portals. This is found to be both time-consuming and limiting,as only getting insight into what is known, rather than into the complete SaaS
landscape. There was a good discussion regarding the pros and cons of the different
SMPs on the market and the methods used by each, as the logical next step inmaturing their functions.

In some cases, where the licensing changes have made the cost no longer
financially viable, they sought guidance through their VAR to strategically move awayfrom particular vendors, to reduce costs and regain control, whilst minimising theimpact on the business.

Software Audit Awareness
Whenever customers get together, the topic of software audits always comes up as
everyone is keen to understand which vendors are currently active from our viewof the market as well as from each other – one even mentioned how they kept aneye on which vendors were recruiting in this space! The key takeaway from thiswas to proactively manage your software estate – gain full visibility from both aninventory and entitlement perspective, whether physical, virtual or in the cloud, sothat any compliance risk is mitigated and the opportunity to right-size, optimise andrationalise is enabled through trustworthy data.

Multi-Cloud
From the latest Flexera ‘State of the Cloud Report’, 89 % of enterprises now operate inmultiple clouds. Customers had initially expected that ‘multi-cloud’ would enable themto easily switch workloads between hyper-scalers, but in reality, it hasn’t been so straightforward. Initial “Cloud First” strategies led to many companies rushing into cloud, but this has
inevitably led in many cases to increases in operational complexity, increases in cost and risk
exposure and ultimately organisations not fully realising the benefits of cloud they expected.
As such, customers are now trying to right size and re-assess workload placement, hence weare seeing trends such as an increase in repatriation. Ideally organisations should carefullyplan workload migration to the cloud and have all the insights and knowledge to make an
informed choice. Therefore, moving from ‘Cloud First’ to ‘Cloud-Appropriate’.
Customers have tended towards buying services from hyperscalers to support individualcloud deployments, because organisations have implemented clouds in silos, often driven
by individual business lines. These hyperscaler services deliver similar operational outcomesbut all in different ways. Think of security as an example, or logging, or monitoring or storage.
All these hyperscaler services differ which means dedicated resources, technology lock-in, alack of commonality and standards, and a lack of visibility when an operations team wants
to look holistically across these platforms. And this multiplies over time, so costs increase,risks increase, technology areas become more complex, and an organisation gets mired ingovernance and process issues.
And so, at Computacenter we recommend our customers should ‘Design for Multi-Cloud’
whether you are in multiple cloud platforms already or have a primary single cloud withmulti-cloud perhaps in your future. This approach helps our customers move towards asingle cloud operating model with the goal of addressing the challenges of using disparate
cloud native services by moving to a more centralised and standardised approach via the useof commonality and abstraction.

Simplifying and reducing complexity to provide
greater visibility and control of our customer’s
software estate to deliver operational efficiency
and cost control.
We help our customers ensure they have control of theirsoftware estate by providing independent licensing,commercial and technical advice to enable customers greater
visibility and to remove complexity across the lifecycle of their
Software investments, using agile and innovative solutions.
Our extensive industry leading software knowledge aided
by our processes and tools helps our customers unlock
opportunities in their software lifecycle. We understand that
our customers are unique, and we offer a range of smart
procurement and ITAM services to meet every need. Our
modular procurement and lifecycle management services
are designed to help organisations at all levels of maturity.
Our global presence allows us to service our customers
across their geographic needs, whilst our flexible, innovative
and transparent cost models can be tailored to address any
budgetary requirement including alignment to the use ofMarketplaces to offset consumption commits.

About Computacenter
Computacenter is a leading independent technology and services provider,trusted by large corporate and public sector organisations. We are aresponsible business that believes in winning together for our people andour planet. We help our customers to Source, Transform and Manage theirtechnology infrastructure to deliver digital transformation, enabling people
and their business. Computacenter is a public company quoted on theLondon FTSE 250 (CCC.L) and employs over 20,000 people worldwide.
www.computacenter.com

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