At Metrixdata360, we have several services available at your disposal. Most of our services require a case-by-case rate which takes into account the size of your company, the time-frame of the project, the vendor you’re dealing with, and what sort of experts you’ll need for the job.
We generally charge a fixed fee per project, though a negotiated performance bonus that is determined by how much money we save you can be preferable for some projects. The reason for this is simple: We do not charge hourly rates because our services are usually remote and difficult to track on an hourly basis. We don’t want to be one of those companies that bills you a buck every time your name crosses our minds. By charging a lump sum with only a rough consideration for the estimated time-frame, we will be incentivized only by the quality of our efforts and not how much time it takes us to complete the project. We also only rarely charge contingency rates (this is done usually on the occasion that someone comes to us with two or three days to complete an otherwise month-long endeavor). We typically don’t charge a contingency rate because then we are not truly partnered, but instead, are each driven to keep things hidden in order to alter the end price. We don’t want that.
We want to work with you and so we use a performance-based metric so that you know our goals align with your goals.
The three main components of the SAM industry are contract negotiation, software asset management tools, and software auditing assistance. Let’s dive into each of these services, what their pricing metric is gauged by, and what you get for your money.
In software asset management, it’s important to negotiate good deals to make sure you are not overpaying, which can occur when you accidentally buy a license twice for instance, or buy more licenses than your company actually uses. The software companies do not know the inner workings of your system and will most often set you up with a generic licence based on what little information they have about your organization. If your licensing contract is not tailored exactly to meet your company’s needs, then that means potentially wasted money that isn’t being used for the benefit of your company and employees.
Having someone on your team who can gather, read, and interpret the data in your network means that you can know exactly what type of licence can benefit your company and where you can cut unnecessary spending. Usually, having someone who can negotiate the contract based on your software data can cut spending in license contracts by 30%. As far as pricing is concerned, you’ll struggle to find even a ballpark range, most consulting firms prefer if you contact them directly.
Software Asset Management tools provide you with a means to measure your data. This can save you a massive amount of company hours that would have otherwise been spent trying to interpret pages and pages of spreadsheets, leaving you open to the risk of human error and incorrect findings. For some software vendors like Microsoft, there is only a minute margin of error, since you only have to be out of compliance by 5% before you’re footing the bill for the whole auditing process. You need to make sure your numbers are accurate down to the decimal point. So your options are either finding that one person that can count thousands of lines of mind-numbing data flawlessly, or find a tool that can do it for you. That’s where the SAM tools come in. They are programs that you install which will allow you to track your data without having to worry about human error. They centralize the audit process into one area and help you to organize the licenses in your profile.
During the unpleasant event of a software audit, one matter that will come up when you first meet with the software publisher and the third-party auditor that the publisher has hired, is what sort of SAM tool will be used to measure your data. The auditors will have their own SAM tools that they will want to use in order to gather the data from your system. This is bad because it’s unlikely that your methods of counting will be the same as the ones that the auditor’s SAM tools use, increasing the risk of being blind-sided with unknown data findings. What you want during this process is the ability to have control over how the data is gathered and what licensing metric is used, and that is done by pushing for the use of your own SAM tools. This can only be done, of course, if you have SAM tools. If not you will be at the mercy of the auditor’s findings. You might have trouble finding the price of SAM tools unless they are free like the ones offered by Spiceworks that provide the basis for assistance, which allows you the ability to inventory your software, add licenses to your profile and audit software licenses to name a few of their features. The priced SAM tools offer a more in-depth service. Some of the programs with the highest satisfaction rate, according to Netwrix would be Sitedocs, ECAT, and StandardFusion.
Getting a software auditing experts on your team when your company is facing an audit is crucial for your company’s success. It will allow you to leave the software audit with a minimal amount of damage to your company’s budget and your relations with the vendor. A Software Auditing Expert is someone who knows the data, they can help you to divine the scope of the audit, the Non-Disclosure Agreement, and how to tackle relations with the third-party auditor that the software vendor has hired. When a software audit is conducted, the auditor’s come in, gather a bunch of data, and interpret it in the most conservative way possible. Any grey areas are tilted out of your favour in order to increase your compliance gap to horrendous levels. This can often leave you owing and paying far more than what you actually do (sometimes double or triple what your actual compliance gap is). With a software auditing expert on your side, they will have gathered data of their own and are able to compare it with the auditor’s findings. Just like with the other products and services, most companies are quite tight-lipped about their services and won’t give you a quote unless you contact them.