Partner Article

Organisations turn backs on legacy SAP licensing tools

Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software replaces poorly-performing first-generation tools

Snow Software, the leading developer of Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions for both end user organisations and service providers, today reported that more than 25 percent of organisations choosing its Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software solution in the last 12 months have done so after abandoning a previous SAP license management tool. Organisations that have turned their backs on previous investments include RWE and Heinemann SE & Co KG.

Michael Bloch from the Software Asset Management team at RWE IT GmbH (the IT services group serving one of Europe’s leading energy suppliers) explained the decision to move SAP license optimisation over to the Snow platform: “Trying to manage the SAP licenses outside of the SAP management interface proved to be not the best solution. We chose to move to Snow for three main reasons: because the solution resides inside the SAP ABAP interface; it’s the only solution of its type to be SAP-certified and because Snow was able to prove very quickly that it could actually meet our business requirements.”

Burkhard Berner, CIO for Gebr. Heinemann SE & Co. KG (a German-based duty free shop chain that generates $2.6 billion a year in revenues), added: “We migrated four years ago to using SAP software. For a spend of roughly $1.3 million per year, we have 2,650 employees using SAP retail, financial, and logistics apps to operate the company’s stores. We were acutely aware that we could overpay for SAP software if we didn’t carefully monitor our investment. With Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software tracking the usage of SAP apps by employees, we have been able to save tens of thousands of dollars a year.”

Just why Snow Optimizer for SAP Software is proving so popular becomes obvious when looking at recent projects. A Fortune 500 company with more than 200 SAP Systems, 500 clients and more than a quarter of million users had been unable to effectively track how employees were using the SAP software. This had led to excessive purchases of high-cost licenses. Using Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, the administrative overhead related to SAP license management has been reduced by more than 80 percent and the internal chargeback mechanism is vastly more accurate.

Claus Uwe Hodum, General Manager of SAP products at Snow Software added: “Usually you expect organisations to persevere with investments before admitting that they need to be replaced. But as more organisations reach critical milestones within their SAP contracts, or have to enter into negotiations for new agreements, the inadequacies of such legacy solutions are brought into sharp focus and the negotiations result in being more costly and painful than the organisation was led to believe.

“Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software is a critical component of Snow’s ‘fourth generation’ Software Asset Management offering, which aims to give customers a common platform for managing software use across all devices, from mobile to desktop, datacentre to the cloud. Already we’ve seen global brands using our solutions to reduce their SAP expenditure by millions of dollars. Combined with low acquisition costs and quick implementation times, that’s a compelling argument in the SAP licensing world.”

Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software is certified by both SAP and KPMG and provides an end-to-end solution for SAP discovery, metering, compliance, optimisation, and license retirement and recycling.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jane Harris .