thank you everybody for coming thanks for joining good morning good afternoon and good evening my name is victor paredes colonia i am part of our itam business unit and i work for our outbound product management team i want to thank everybody for joining our servicenow live event focused on setting up for success with software asset management and before we jump into our session just a few little announcements first and foremost keep in mind some of this information may be privileged and confidential and so just want to bear that in mind as you as you communicate with others as well as some of the information we'll be presenting are forward-looking statements and so therefore things are and may be subject to change and why are we all here well uh first and foremost we want to thank you for um being part of our servicenow software asset management community and our commitment to you is to help deliver on helping you all achieve deploy and get to value faster with servicenow sam and by doing so uh we're putting on this session to give you a better understanding of itam principles and setting realistic expectations you know it's one thing to talk about the product and features but it really is another to talk about how to bring that and hone that all together with developing the right itam practice and to do that i brought on three individuals that'll give you firsthand insight and input from the itam bu again my name is victor predes colonia and joining with me as host is patrick lowndes director of i.t asset management from the outbound product management team and the three folks that i've joined brought on to join us today is julian flores director of product management rohit lobo senior principal product management and rohan thiagy senior principal product manager so here's how today is going to work we've curated five main topics you know these are topics that we get a lot of questions from customers early on in their journey and these are five topics that we want to discuss in an open forum with our guests today the first is modern its management what is it how is how is it ips management different today than it was before it's not a new phenomenon but there's some new caveats that we should keep into place roles and responsibilities with stakeholder management different personas different individuals benefiting from software asset management so we'll touch on that trustworthy data everything starts with inputs so that you can get the best outputs so let's talk about what trustworthy data means and then working effectively with your implementation partners many of you today are working with partners or many of you are considering working with partners so we'll dive into what it means to evaluate a good working relationship with those implementation partners and finally we'll close with developing your personal sam roadmap you know our product has its own roadmap where we bring out a lot of different features but so should your its management program and by all accounts you know bring in your questions uh the chat forum is open and so we'll be reading those off as we finish each of our segments and in return we just hope that you know you bring your questions and stay laser focused on the topics of the day you know this is an opportunity to share a time with others hear from us but also your ability to contribute and bring in knowledge that you have through that chat feature and when we open up the mics that's going to be very beneficial patrick anything you'd like to say uh no i'm just excited to get to jump in i i want to let everyone know we are recording this session so um you don't need to share anything about your company or which company you're with but feel free to put questions in the in the q a and also comments in the chat are great we really look forward to getting interactive here so this is not a one-way communication so while we're going throughout feel free to jot those questions down and we'll be pausing throughout the presentation so we it's it'll be much more of a discussion than a presentation so yeah with that i think we're we're all set excellent all right well then let's jump into our first segment which is modern its management and for this i'll i'll bring in a julian so julian you know i tested management as i mentioned before it's not not something new but but what comes to mind when we say modern what does that mean yeah great great question victor and to define modern i think it's good to to talk about what traditional itam is and and what customers view it as and it's really just the understanding of you know what assets do i own where are they deployed and how am i tracking towards my contracts doing a comparison of the two when we start talking about modern itam a couple topics come into play the first is many many customers many organizations are moving to complex hybrid infrastructures so it's no longer just those traditional use cases of understanding what's in your data center what's on your desktops uh really goes beyond that you know customers are adopting multi-cloud approaches as part of their digital transformation and with that there's a lot of new challenges but also a lot of opportunities so modern itam is that end-to-end visibility across all environments uh for all of your assets nice and i guess you know one one other thing that comes to my mind is the ability to do that all from a single platform do you mind touching on that a little bit yeah absolutely with those complex hybrid infrastructures there's a lot more teams that have their hand in the effect of management of those assets so it's really important that you have a single data model a single architecture a single source of truth when it comes to managing these assets effectively so by doing that by bringing in ham sam and cloud into a single pane of glass you're making it much more effective for your team on the ground that are managing these assets we're also making really great experiences for those teams interacting with these assets so how do they request a new device a new software license how do they request to deploy a an instance to the cloud bringing that all into one one single pane of glass really helps with the end-to-end experience there yeah yeah that makes sense hey rohit um you know talk to me about people process and technology we hear that a lot julian just mentioned there's a lot of folks that are you know going to be looking into sam and getting getting value from it but what does that mean when we talk about people process and technology yeah i think that's a great question and um you know i in terms of an itam program i think there's it's a it's a it's a pretty complex um you know effort or initiative for an organization right and so as with any kind of large uh initiative of effort like this it has to be sort of more centered around people people in process and and of course then the tooling and the technology kind of follows that to support the process i would go as far as to say it's about 80 about people process you know your stakeholders making sure you're all aligned um even having executive sponsorship is absolutely crucial to the success of your program so speaking with customers i usually when you speak about itam it's about setting up setting up your itam program getting executive sponsorship aligning with your executives and your stakeholders uh you know what the design business outcomes are and establishing the process like what would this process this item process look like for your organization and then finally bringing in the tooling and the technology to kind of support that process that you've defined so yeah it's um there's lots of complexities it isn't just about the tooling it's more about the people process and the governance program around it yeah so it's not not necessarily something where you just kind of plug in the tool and it's going to solve all your you know solve all your issues right there's a lot of other um contributing factors to being successful with item absolutely so let's stay on that subject of stakeholders and maybe we'll move on to the next segment segment here rohit who are the necessary individuals that you should have in a successful sam team which stakeholders would you want to involve yeah this is this is a great slide uh lecture i think in terms of the different stakeholders that uh are typically involved in the right time program so you have on the left the green you know the uh the commonly involved i would start with executives you know you're obviously there's executives across multiple functions but really having your cio if or depending on your organization it might be a senior vp or a vp involved in this program is absolutely crucial because you'd need their sponsorship to align all these stakeholders around these design business outcomes that your organization is driving and also to create space in terms of their goals as well right because they will be contributing time resources effort to your you know your itam governance program so you need to have that alignment in terms of with your executives as well as all of your stakeholders which are you know the id asset management team you know your asset managers you could have you'll have your cmdb team that's managing your configuration database your discovery team um you have your procurement and your contracts you'll be interacting with them a lot because um you know you have contract renewals that happen very frequently sometimes every year in the case of sas contracts maybe in microsoft it's every three years and also just the initial setup of the itam program you need all your license entitlements since you'll be interacting very closely with the contracts and the procurement vendor management teams um there's of course other stakeholders involved as well but as i think as you broaden your itam program to other use cases beyond just core item um you start to kind of interact with the enterprise architecture team for example to set up governance and standards around what technology is allowed in the organization you could have security teams involved as you get into more the voluntary management and security use cases you could have vendor management of course i'd spoken about risk infrastructure themes as you look at data center and julian was talking about modern itam where you know customers are in a hybrid cloud environment and so you have a lot of infrastructure and operations and cloud ops uh teams as well yeah and maybe that's a good segue into rohan rohan is our key expert on cloud so hey rohan you know let's talk a little bit about stakeholder management from a cloud perspective um i think uh what i would want to um first of all all of these uh stakeholders that you have mentioned here on the slide it's pretty nice slide it covers all the personas and the stakeholders that are involved even in the cloud cost management and optimization use cases but i would like to stress on three major categories one is the executives we when we talk about executive sponsorship we most of the times focus on the cios and ctos who are mostly related to technology and we seek their approvals we see clear buy-ins but in case of cloud spend a lot of times i have seen is the finance teams the procurement finance teams the financial planning the cfos those type of people are also important when it comes to getting the buy-ins or executive sponsorship and it's not always the case that you have to rely on cios or ctos to fund your projects these type of initiatives especially in the cloud are can be driven by a cfo and if you're exp if you're showing them the right goals that your team can achieve these executives executives can also back you in so i wanted to stress on executives again just to make sure that you are not missing out the cfo persona from from this category and then the other two um i would also like to highlight is the engineers and the cloud operations team so in the end these resources that are spun up in the cloud are being created by the engineers who deploy their applications on the cloud so anything that you do in terms of optimization or even just creating cloud cost visibility you are affecting that persona you cannot take any actions without involving them so the the when you design your roadmap when you design the processes to cater people in your company you have to focus on that persona very heavily because those are the people who will say yes or no when you ask them to say start saving money um so these are the three major um personas i wanted to remind everybody about yeah that's great that's a great point you made earlier as well that executive sponsorship doesn't necessarily need to be traditional to the cio um perspective or that individual right it could be someone someone else yeah there's one one little another element if i could add something in victor is just yeah on the topic of of who carries the most uh influence in your organization we see lots of customers again just focused on those green boxes on the left and sometimes you're not able to be as effective with where all a lot of the software that was more business led spend and and tech stacks outside of what's traditionally quote unquote it or asset and what we find is that if it's kind of a you know business apps or employee experience whatever other groups even marketing tech stacks creative design tech stacks oftentimes there needs to be someone somewhat of a referee involved and like who gets to to do what with with that and we've seen that enterprise architecture teams really help provide that i'll say the air cover they've been given the authority in the company a lot of times to to have an opinion and sometimes that means you know engaging these other stakeholders and these other i'll say lines of business that own technology and so it's just it's important to make sure that you've got somebody that's that that kind of has that cross-functional authority and usually we see enterprise architecture being that group so just worth noting if you don't have that group at the table commonly they're not but if you can really helpful in accomplishing your itami you know goals yeah good points good points so julian let's just stress a little bit further why is executive sponsorship so crucial i mean how do you secure it how do you keep them engaged once they once you have buy-in and then how do you set and sometimes reset expectations if necessary yeah i think there's a there's two points here that that you know highlight why executive sponsorship is is so important um one i think you all touched on there's just such a broad range of groups um that have their hand in itam so you know at the end of the day the sam team is trying to help the organization as a whole buy software smarter more efficiently and more effectively that could be the way end users are requesting software software the way we're deploying software there's a lot of different stakeholders on how we can achieve those operational and savings goals so helping keep all those teams in line helping them getting the executive sponsor to communicate those goals more broadly and if people aren't collaborating uh leveraging that relationship to make sure that that they are so um keeping everyone in line and putting some power behind the message that's coming out of itam is is really the the first goal there the second is you know providing executive visibility into the successes and i think when we talk about modern itam the amount of value that itam teams can provide outside of it continues to grow um it could be you know providing early visibility into vulnerabilities it could be creating a better onboarding and off-boarding experience for employees it could be helping drive refreshes of business critical applications so accelerating business and creating good business experiences so providing those types of you know goals reports and visibility to those successes that are outside of traditional itam i think having executive sponsor help communicate those outside of the it organization to the rest of the business is going to be critical in terms of you know gaining more funding or asking that question of you know what is itam up to today yeah that makes a lot of sense thanks julian so let's open it up let's see if there's a questions from the audience so keep in mind you have the chat feature and you also have the q a that you can bring in questions so we'll start reading those as they come to mind and we'll keep the questions here focus kind of on these first two topics so you think about modern itam and if there's anything else that you're you're wondering about that might be relevant for your your organization you can bring that up there in the chat also if you've dealt with other stakeholders and maybe it's been difficult to gain their trust or or there have been many customers that we've had to kind of help and coach along those lines too so feel free to bring up those questions as well um we'll be watching that as it's coming through here i see somebody raise their raise their hand um brandon if you want to throw your question in the chat or if you have a mic on if you want to just jump off and just give you a quick question we can respond to you he might be typing let him finish typing there and feel free if anyone else wants to add something in this it's a good chance there'll be a couple more times to ask questions but let's just see if we can capture that and we'll wait for that one to come in while it while it's um while it's coming in perhaps victor we could maybe go to the next section on trustworthy data and uh unless oh right there thanks jill good question uh best ways to get reluctant stakeholders engaged um there's lots of different ways to uh to engage reluctant stakeholders i'm sure there's there's examples and different reasons why um victor what do you think are some examples that you can or maybe some examples of things to get people engaged that are maybe reluctant yeah i mean ultimately when i hear that question or read that question i think of like how do i sell sam internally within my organization right because from an i.t standpoint sometimes it makes just a lot of sense you're going to be tracking compliance but what does that really mean for the greater company so cost savings um you can also look at and discuss with different stakeholders you know what what are pain points that they have um with their organization right maybe there's a there's a solution within sand that can help that maybe there's a workflow you know somebody is i don't know from an hr hr perspective they have to install a bunch of software uh for different personas in their environment and rather than doing that manually you know you can set up different personas and work on and sam can distribute the software based on somebody's persona right so that's an example of finding a pain point and seeing if there's a workflow out there that's that servicenow sam can can deliver on in conjunction with other other applications yeah i just got off a phone call earlier today with a customer that had um it was actually a business an app owner out in the business so not part of itam and i just went through and asked good questions trying to understand well then what do you do well then what do you do okay you have you have another manual step okay and it turns out a handful of these manual steps we could handle uh inside of the product and one to just part of just learning and understanding what are those other challenges that people are facing and how can we solve that and and you'll also see you know um there's a good good point brought up here by eric about you know trustworthy data being which is a great segue but bringing trustworthy data is a great way to win people over maybe we'll go there and then we'll keep answering questions so continue to put them in the chat um but maybe we can move on to that one yeah you know and that's that's a great great comment to be made because trustworthy data is is really what it's all about you know what you put into the tool is what you're going to get out of it so in this next slide you'll see how sam works fundamentally just to give you a lay of the land but it really starts with everything on the left you know what is what is the information that you're bringing into the tool every everything from procurement entitlements uh different record keeping that you might have had you might have had legacy uh information um and different agreements but you might also have on on your inventory side you know the software that's out there what's being discovered where is it sitting that information needs to be clean as best as possible so that it can come in through uh the tools so that you can get to your compliance position and so that you can eventually get to you know your actions you know bringing making decisions based on what you're seeing so for that um you know let's go to rohit how do you define trustworthy data and with so much data that is out there um a lot of times we get paralyzed with where do we start um what has been your experience yeah that's a great question um in terms of trustworthy data i think my mind goes to data that you can stand behind that you can defend um you know and that you know the source of and you can verify right it's um it's your contracts it's your cmdb uh ensuring that your cmdb is clean and you know that all of the assets that are represented it may not be comprehensive but at least what's in there is clean um as well as your contracts your entitlements you know having having a relationship with the vendor management and the contracts teams to make sure that the contract lists the set of contracts that you have are current that you have all of them that you have all of your licenses represented again this is this is a pretty heavy lift in terms of making sure that your data is clean it's it's tends to be a multi-week exercise to make sure that you have good clean reliable data and this is very strategic from the success uh you know for the success of your program you want to start with good clean data because then you can trust the outputs right you can trust the compliance that you get and then the successes that come out of that you know in terms of savings in terms of like your business outcomes that you're driving you know will have that much more of an impact your executives when you report up right great inputs great outputs and you know a confident success that you can report on um so it that's that's trustworthy data and in terms of like just making sure um that you you know you're looking at the right data to start again i come back to you know what are the business outcomes that you're driving in the near term for your organization right it could be um it could be a smaller scope it could be just a division in your company where you want to discover software it could be just a publisher it could be microsoft and even in microsoft it could just be desktop product like office 365 right it doesn't have to be the whole suite of uh complex it doesn't have to be all the publishers having a smaller scope again driven by the business outcomes that you're driving right the business outcomes drives the scope and that drives the data that you're gathering it's easier for you to get your arms around having that good clean data just for that limited scope right so i would start i would look at it that way drive towards the success achieve the success and then expand the scope of additional data additional business outcomes that you're driving yeah yeah i mean having that that small refined scope allows you to kind of experiment with you know your information and clean that information and then kind of take those lessons learned to expand outward right instead of catching yourself so late absolutely now what about working in tandem between you know some of those uh initiatives that you have from a sam cloud insights perspective at the same time as cleaning your data and ensuring that you're getting the right inputs can you work on both simultaneously or is there a kind of an order of operations or how would you how would you mix the two yeah i don't think it's possible to work on both simultaneously again it depends on the resourcing your team has typically you're working with on the on the purchaser's side right you're working with vendor management with contracts right so that team's helping you with that portion of the data for your licenses and probably you're working with you know you could be working with the cmdb team with the team that's responsible for discovery to make sure your cmdb is clean so both of these could progress in parallel to ensure you have the right clean good data from both sources before you get into compliance so it is possible to set up a good foundation and and have multiple streams for it again i think it should be driven by the scope your desired business outcomes and the unlimited scope to start with before you move forward yeah and in talking about scope there might be some individuals on the partner track that can help you kind of define what that scope is right so maybe we'll move there patrick um you as a customer you have clean data or as clean enough data as you can you have executive sponsorship and now you're really itching to work with an implementation partner or you're debating whether you should work with an implementation partner so let's just open up the floor with that question rohan to have an implementation partner or not that is the question well the short answer is yes implementation partners will greatly bring value to your processes whether it is starting up the new function um or just bringing more efficiencies to your existing id asset management processes including cloud on-prem whatever that is yeah and and how do you evaluate which partner um you should bring into into your organization right i mean sometimes some partners are really good at the technical some are really good at the strategic how do you as a customer evaluate who you should work with so um i think it also depends on the customer to customer uh what their immediate requirement is however i can talk about the values that you should be looking into um when you are evaluating whether to go with a partner and which type of partner so we rohit alluded to the point where we have people process and technology and 80 of it is mostly people in process so this is where the expertise of a partner can play a really important role because uh let's talk about people strategy first so in case of people strategy who are those executives that you should be focused on what are the type of conversations you should be having with those executives to get the buy-ins what are the goals how do you translate that goals into actionable items so that people believe in your strategy that you can execute on it and then after that how do you set up your teams whether having age people is good or having two people is good what are the personas am i um over am i over spending in the type of people that have people that i'm involved in my team um like let's say do we need a product owner maybe not for a specific type of project but maybe it is really important to have a product owner when you are talking in terms of a full-fledged implementation or a larger scale project right um and and even the technical person was like finnops practitioner or id asset manager should that be the same function should those be two different functions so this is something that a partner who has worked in diverse environments in diverse industries can help you navigate the process and create a good people strategy right similarly to the data like do we need 13 months of data do we need 12 months of data just one month can make a big difference right or do we even need just one month of data in case of let's say cloud it doesn't make too much sense to go back in the history right so that is the type of thing partners can bring and then in when we talk about the process strategy again creating the playbooks automating as much as possible finding out the right targets and the kpis which is again very important sometimes process sometimes these um outcomes that you want to achieve or you're not able to achieve because you're not following the right kpis or you're not trying tracking the right kpis so these type of things are also pretty clear working with our experienced partners so people in process strategy once it is solid technology as i said before just follows this this strategy so that is why you need a partner yeah yeah i guess i think what i would add to that is yeah once you have sam implemented once you have some of these processes in place the playbooks the automation it really becomes your ability to take what the implementation partner has given you and operationalize that right and hopefully the partner will equip you to operationalize your sound program or your itam program um it's not just a one and done kind of thing yeah and maybe i could i could step in on this this one point because this is there's something that's kind of um understated here i think when when we think about working with partners many of you know we we strongly recommend that you only work with a sam certified partner to do a sampro implementation hopefully that's not the first time you're hearing this if it is yes certified but maybe to pile on a little bit more we've seen customers work with quote unquote certified partners where maybe one person on maybe the leader the manager of the team you're actually working with took the certification and the other people are basically learning on the job so really important detail when you're evaluating partners is you know looking at that you know at that question for you know what are the people that are working on this project do they have experience um actually looking at oracle license positions if they're more technical they might know how to turn on some jobs and some rules but they might not have any licensing knowledge so maybe i think you're going to get a little bit more into that this question how do you evaluate but you can't just take partners that face value it's it's on you to be able to go deeper so yeah maybe get that next question about how to evaluate yeah and maybe we'll do that by uh like leveraging a scenario um so rohit i'm gonna run a scenario um you as a customer you've you've chosen your implementation partner or you're considering which implementation partner but you're going to get ready for your first meeting with them right and begin working with them so what do you do to prepare for that yeah i think great great question and uh had a few uh conversations around that in the past as well so um by the time you have a partner engaged you know you're probably close to a sale or your sale has happened uh you bought the tool or and by then hopefully you have your executives your cio your cfo aligned um you have your sam governance program set up you have your desired business outcomes also set up so once these um once those uh once those elements are in place i think having the partner bringing in the partner to the um to the conversation as part of the sale to make sure that they're aligned you know with the with the goals that you have in this organization with the you know the design business outcomes that you're driving having them aligned having them bought into it and also having them you know just part of the whole decision making process i think would be a great way to ensure the success of the of the itam program again i think it's having that executive sponsorship before having the desired business being very clear about the design business outcomes that you're trying to achieve and again making sure your net is not cast too wide um having those goals and having the partner bought into those goals um as well before starting off the engagement i think would be um would be a great way to prepare and then lastly i think once you have successes we have i think driving it using milestones i think with the partner is great because you you have frequent milestones that can be achieved success that can be reported up up to the executives making sure that you know your item governance program is delivering uh to the set out objectives i think would be you know a great way to you know have success with your partners definitely one one thing that i've observed and that's that's always helpful too is not just accepting their roadmap or their their recommendations outright as well as them not just accepting what you as the customer you know say is your goal and what you want to achieve it's good to kind of kind of wrestle with and understand why is that individual why is that group suggesting i should do x versus y and really understanding how they got to that conclusion i think that really helps that that relationship yeah absolutely so why don't we open it up for questions then i mean we talked about trustworthy data and we talked about implementation partners perhaps now's a good time to just pause and see if anybody out there has any questions or shared experience related to this actually uh victor and patrick uh if we go back to i think yaer's question around information security i think if you pop back over to the how item work slide trustworthy data i think this would be a good question to address for the group here let's do that but uh yeah's question uh was around let me scroll back up uh one of the challenges is managing uh and managing software in terms of information security how can these aspects of sam be used for this use case um and i think a couple things to point out here is this uh kind of light purple box at the bottom that says better together the nice thing about managing itam on a platform is that all the normalization all the content curation all the data enhancements that we do are directly in the cmdb so any other team like your operations team your security team your wrist team they're working off that same set of data so in the case of understanding you know what databases support a business application you know your operations team might be doing service mapping so they can tell you okay these five databases are supporting this business critical application and there might maybe customer sensitive data in that and that cmdb so it starts putting context in terms of you know item normalizes the data your operations team might be creating these service maps or these these business services business applications and now within that context you can start drawing conclusions around what the data and the data base might be used for and you can do that in an automated fashion it's not having to you know tag it in the cmdb or manually keep track and this helps you do that at scale so i think here's one of the examples of in within modern itam where it's not just about what you could do for itam it's what can you do for the rest of the business i think that's a really really good question there you go here that's great i saw another question in the chat that i i think is really really universal um you know the question comes from christina i'm curious about implementation partners that only offer out of the box functionality versus customized let's touch on that uh rohit is that something you can touch on yeah yeah so the question is about implementation partners who can do out of the box but not customizations right yeah so i think i would um again defer to having those clear business outcomes defined as to what you're driving in the organization what does your right time program look like and there's always always an argument to be made for best practices right for leading practices because you want to stay in in line with what the industry is doing for item and in terms of um you know just what you implement in your organization right and so aligning your ipam program to that is something that the partner can to those leading practices is something that the partner can can also help with right it'll probably be a bit of a negotiation with the partner as well as well as um you know your internal teams um you know if there is something that is a custom practice it's good to have it as long as you have a very very good reason for why you there's a business outcome that you're driving towards it right so um if if there is such a good reason then i would i would say okay you could do that you know custom practice and have the partner buy into that as well and see what it would take a lot of times like you know custom setups might need additional work uh to not just to implement but to maintain so keep that in mind as well so as in when the the practice evolves there'll be an ongoing maintenance of there's a cost to it right so uh just be aware of that as well um yeah yeah that's a good good question i also want to add to it is that when you are doing the interviews with the partners and you have these specific custom processes that you think are not going to be addressed by out of the box or your partner comes back to you saying that okay these rfp questions these are custom things and we will only do out of the box then you should be asking the partners the question why do you think it is custom and do you have any work around how do other customers do it so can you achieve this use case or educate me to do it in a different way which is out of the box a lot of time what happens it's all about the perception that we have been used to doing this thing for 10 years and now we want exactly the same thing but a good partner strategy partner can educate you on the best way to achieve the same results but in a different way which would also be out of the box way yeah and they would have experience from their other implementations as well they might have run into a similar scenario where they could really help bring some of their uh thought leadership in that awesome awesome great well so let's uh let's move to the last segment here which is developing your sam roadmap so i mentioned it at the opening you know one of the things that we do as product managers is always putting out new features but you know in in stepping in line with that your business outcomes and your goals as an organization should also kind of follow your own roadmap that achieves the outcomes that you want um so let's let's have this slide open and while we're on this slide i'll ask to the group you know i've come across many customers that when they describe what their what's on their road map they say hey i just want to focus right now on building effective licensed positions to manage my top tier one vendors the oracles the ibms and the microsoft so i suppose on the surface that sounds pretty well marked but but what can we what can we do to bolster that a little bit further yeah so i think um you know this highlights the importance of working with an experienced partner but you know the the goal of uh you know for example onboarding microsoft it sounds great but the you know as a customer you definitely want to start digging into the details of what that actually means um so looking at your product scope you know do you want to look at all you know 100 plus products you're using at microsoft or do you want to focus in on the top five or the majority of your spend and maybe the majority of your risk is when you start looking at a smaller subset of products you know are those deployed in the data center are they deployed on desktops is it sas do you have all the information for those three environments do you need to work with other teams to integrate with sas to discover your virtual infrastructure to integrate with sccm and as you start digging deeper into the sow or the scope of what you want to do in a phase one of your implementation you start seeing the level of effort the the number of groups you might need to work with so it's always good to be very very specific and really get rid of any ambiguity in any of your srw deliverables um so is you know managing your tier one vendor is a great goal to have absolutely uh the plan to get there needs to be phased and it needs to be very specific great hey rohido or rohan anything to add to that no i think i think julian uh touched up on all the uh the key points there and then i think the the phased approach and the again kind of tied to your business outcomes that you're driving for the year that you're reporting up to your executives on to ensure continued funding as as the program progresses i think is would be would be critical and again um you know having that phased approach helps you to kind of narrow the scope of the data that you have to gather the amount of time that those other stakeholders have to put into the sam the itam program you know the contracts the discovery all of those pieces kind of moving uh you know moving forward um you know with a limited with a phased approach i think you have a much greater chance for success and i think you also learn from it as you as you implement for a certain subset right if it's just equal server in this example you would learn from it for your next phase right so that's a great way to to go and just want to emphasize that point that julian about awesome one of the reasons i have also seen having a good phased out approach whether it is your crawl walk run or phase one two three um is that what happens a lot of times is that you are working on a particular road map or a set of goals that you you've defined for short term and when you start communicating that in your hallway conversations or all hands or whatever the case is a number of questions come into um into you and your team and they asked start asking like okay you're doing this can you also do this can you do that it will be nice to have this and if you have all of that defined um you will avoid those distractions and you will be able to answer them those additional team members quickly that yeah this is on our road now we will do it um eventually as part of phase two or phase three um but we are focused on this thing right now so that avoids um just distraction and dragging your phases i mean bringing out of scope things in the scope is not good either right so create that visibility for those team members and keep them educated that you're working on that um goal as well yeah that's so good and even while you're trying to pull together all the ends maybe you you know that a big strategic initiative is getting a compliance position that might require a lot of time a lot of teams there might be some quick wins under your nose as well um right so trying to identify those that could be you can see on the right side of this slide here the you know focusing on publishers that have you know annual agreements up for renewal um not everyone's renewing you know this year in the next six months but if there are some you might be able to move the needle on those ones and also there are some you know with with whether it's a sas environment or even in a cloud environment you might be able to see some you know right-sized resources that might have a substantial cost savings within a matter of weeks uh you know that you don't need to have potentially all of the what might take months of uploading entitlements getting all the discovery data in there so there are some you know in the cloud sas and in the infrastructure as a service also some ways to get some quick wins so keep that in mind as well to show some initial value more quickly that's great yeah yeah i like that a lot actually balancing between having quick wins as you're working on bigger goals and to rohan's point ensuring that you have something in place so that you stay focused right because a lot of folks are going to see the value on one hand and then start asking for a lot of of their own value to support their teams but kind of keep having a clear roadmap ahead really helps so on that let's open it up to questions about roadmap i saw a couple comments in the chat maybe we'll revisit those but anything that you want to ask about roadmap specifically and how to develop your own roadmap [Music] yeah maybe i'll i'll re-read the question that came in um ben put out a really good question he said looking at your various customers what seems to be part uh the part that most customers struggle with as it relates to sam um maybe julian i'll have you given a first uh answer on this one sure um yeah definitely when we're talking about phase one implementations i think we see um if we get brought into a an escalation for example there's typically two things that we see uh one is uh the scope was just too big you know the the scope was trying to boil the ocean they had you know dozens of vendors hundreds of products um and it just seemed like the you know in every area there was a little bit of progress made but it was very difficult to get from you know the initial visibility to optimization because the focus was just spread too thin and typically what we do in that scenario is work with the customer say okay let's look at your top two products just for now and let's get the entitlements in let's make sure the discovery data is good let's reconcile let's optimize and now there's a kind of a basic understanding of how you get from start to finish with a single product or a couple products and that's more easily replicated you know down the line for any other products that you onboard so scope being too big is probably one of the more common things we see and then the other is just data quality um you know we're looking at dashboards or we're looking at um some of the compliance positions with the customer and you get into the details and realize that you know we're not discovering the virtual infrastructure or for some reason the assigned to on the the ci is not being populated so really going through and that's why we say this this focus scope looking at the data making sure that your data sources are complete and accurate you know if you try to make sense of uh any output from an inaccurate data source you're going to be spitting your wheels until that's corrected so yeah make sure your uh data sources are complete and accurate before you start doing all your optimization and reconstitution and you know this there's a question that uh jill put in there that maybe rohit you could speak to but she's she's talking about yeah i understand the phased approach for you looking at compliance positions you know she says what is a recommended best practice for building that software entitlement inventory everyone knows that running around the business looking for spreadsheets is a pain but i mean there's also ways to pull in data you know from you know procurement systems and whatnot but bro how would you how would you guide jill and other customers thinking about you know wrapping their arms around that that entitlement inventory yeah great great question jill and i know this is a significant lift for all of our customers you know it's getting that software entitlements loaded into the system not only is it uh multiple stakeholders like render management maybe your contracts team your legal team um it's also uh you know just in terms of like time getting those contracts like patrick was saying from a procurement system so in terms of like uh in terms of like a leading practice for this um i would i would try to see um one from the procurement system uh if you have contracts with depending on your again the business outcomes you're driving right like if you're just going after microsoft and if you're going after sql server for example then the scope of your entitlement gathering is kind of limited right so you can just look for contracts for microsoft from a vendor management system and pull them out the the other thing i can think of is um once you have those contracts with you i think you you need some kind of licensing um sort of expertise to get those understand the licenses that are in those documents a lot of times they're not very straightforward so getting those licenses understood and put into the software asset management tool uh would be a great way to ensure that your entitlements actually reflect you know the products that you're buying right yeah um so i think those two things would you know would be things that come come to mind um i would also say you know if you start with the sas vendor you know that's quicker time to value there's typically fewer contracts with them right and it's like patrick and patrick was saying earlier like it's you could get quick time to value just understanding your stale licenses uh you know with these sas vendors um you know to show kind of quick successes right and those contracts are typically easier to understand as well those entitlements are easy to understand because they use a subscription based so i would start there and then maybe go into something more complex like sql server and and so on so forth which is like service offer right here you're also partially answering that you're partially answering another question that i i'll i'll read out here um from azanias but i'll also um i'll restate it here for sam but then you know maybe rohan you can share your opinion too about the best you know what's a good product or publisher to be a good candidate to showcase sam capabilities you know and what we've seen is a lot of so sas is definitely one good opportunity um just because you don't need to have discovery running to be able to get at the you know the data and apis but you know for for folks that have a really nice clean sccm or jf environment you can get a lot of desktop software again a little more straightforward the licensing is not quite as complex to understand so that we've seen customers have some really great success um you know pulling back you know data from those environments usually we'd be asking you as a customer what you know what's your relationship like with that team do you know the data is good do you feel like you've got a good handle on entitlements right so that's how those are some of the ways we think about that and even if it's going to be a sas product do you know who the right owner is do you you know is it an environment that you think you'd be able to get agreement to connect but maybe rohan can share some ideas about you know on the cloud side of the house what are some ways to get some data in there um like some quick wins um from connecting you know aws azure gcp how would you advise customers on a quick quick lens for there too yeah um i think one of the most um compelling reasons of connecting to any sas applications was that it is easy to connect with the apis and get all the data in there right and it is the same with cloud or public clouds as well like aws or azure they have pretty robust apis that we integrate with uh but effectively all you need to have is credentials the right credentials and the data will start happening so there are quick wins here uh just because if you if let's say if your first phase of the project is creating the cost visibility and have a charge back showback type of process implemented then integrating with aws uh which is the most mature a set of apis and then over azure or gcp um you can start with any one of those but uh basically getting the trustworthy data um is the easiest in integrating with the cloud provider that's great that's great and you know there's also i i love it um customers that are on here are throwing out some ideas and there's one one uh customer james thank you for sharing this he said we've actually built this is kind of in response i think jill to your question around procurement entitlements but he says we've built a weekly feed from our procurement system in the format that servicenow entitlement import um the you know out of the boxing port and that um you know basically every every monday morning they review it and and basically kind of figure out the priorities of which products are going to pull in so think about operationalizing how do you get that data in front for new purchases and how you're gonna to bring them in so lots of lot more we could say i know in the short time period here but maybe we'll do see if we can do one more question here um let's see here i think that might have been wrapping it up yeah just another go ahead yeah yeah i think patrick jennifer's comment i don't think is a question but her comment uh the importance of life cycle management uh that helps keep your seam to be up to date uh a hundred percent um it you know it's not about point in time it's really about understanding how assets move through the life cycle so how are they requested onboarded uh do they need to be serviced do they need to be patched typically what we see before customers get on ham and sam those are all manual activities anything you know that falls into those required manual updates to the cmdb and things can fall out of accuracy very quickly so a lot of the automated uh workflows that support lifecycle management on the now platform really help with that so not just about the incoming data it's actually a lot about the activities that are taken on those assets and keeping it up to date so great great comment there jennifer yeah and so in in kind of in closing here as you kind of look at the whole um the the five topics that we we hit on in this session from what is modern itan how do we get people involved get their buy-in from different stakeholders is the data we're using and bringing in believable is it trustworthy hopefully we hit on some good points about how to you know size up those implementation partners even before you agree to work with them even how you evaluate them and then lastly just that that really smart phased you know laser specific road map um we're hoping that this session has just been um you know challenging on some of your points but also educational to get you off and moving on your journey or maybe you're already in you started your journey but you're kind of reflecting back what what else do i need to do to be successful um you know so with that i think um just with the last 30 seconds julian uh if i give you 30 seconds row hit and rohan what are the final words from you um before we wrap up um just thanks everyone for joining um you know press your partners question your partners it's a phased approach it's a item's always a journey um so just make sure to be asking the right questions uh not just to your partners but of the product team as well we're always happy to to chat and give feedback so looking forward to speaking with you guys again yeah rohit yeah yeah i just wanted to also say you know we'd love to hear your feedback you know our roadmap is very very um very very much influenced by your business needs and so you know as you have new ideas as you have your itam program progress in your organizations please do get in touch with us let us know we would love to kind of partner with you our purpose is to see you successful and so um please please do think of us as partners as you build your itam program that's right rohan um again um thank you so much everyone for giving us the time and listening to us one thing i would like you to take back from here is that a lot of times you do not reveal if you think carefully strategically the goals of the new cloud environments or the new infrastructure that is coming up in play whether it is clouds or in future new containers if you think about it in the end the goal is the same just to make get the get it managed pretty well and optimize the spend in the end right so things that you have learned from the id as management practices can also be implemented to your new environments um so before you um before you start thinking about new processes just reevaluate your existing processes maybe you do not have to reinvent you just have to pivot with that part thank you again yeah that's excellent well victor i think that brings us to the end here so thank you for hosting us and spending a great session today on this topic um i feel like we there's more there's a lot more we could be talking about so stay tuned to other live events as they come up and we'll be able to um to keep you all engaged and along your product journey um within software asset management and also other products as well hardware asset and so on so thanks again for for jumping on this live event we'll stay in touch talk to you all soon hi everyone thanks for your time and thank you to our guests thank you all right have a great day