Recently, the Institute of Databases and Information Systems (DBIS) and the global IT systems GmbH reached a major milestone in their collaboration on software asset management. In this context, Prof. Manfred Reichert (Director of the DBIS institute) has emphasized the great challenges for enterprises that need to be tackled to get a grip on the processes and tools for managing software assets.

Coincided with the completion of the master‘s theses of Benjamin Beidl and Alexander Schöbel, global IT systems and DBIS (represented by Prof. Reichert and Jens Kolb) delivered comprehensive results for a sustainable software asset management (SAM).

In his thesis, Benjamin Beidl developed comprehensive reference processes for software asset management. These processes, in turn, reflect long-time experiences from numerous customer projects as well as a systematic review of the ISO standard 19770-1 for software asset management. In particular, it has been proven that only a systematic process-centric SAM approach will contribute to the successful management of software assets within enterprises.

Alexander Schöbel, in turn, investigated the effects current trends like cloud computing (e.g. software as a service) and bring-your-own-device have on SAM. His thesis has clearly proven that both trends will further aggravate the management of software assets. Worst case, these trends will even lead to an over-licensing of enterprises (i.e., enterprises will pay too much for their software licenses), which only can be handled based on a professional and process-centric SAM.

The successful collaboration with global IT systems will be continued in future as well. Currently, the two partners are involved in a common tool study in which more than 30 SAM tools are systematically assessed and compared regarding their strengths and weaknesses.