While at a get-together of speakers at an IT Conference in Florida, I turned to the organizer (Martin Thompson) and said “I have your next article for you – What is the next Uber event for SAM?” he then asked “What is it?” to which I replied “I don’t know – you need to write the article!”
Seeing as he hasn’t bothered his arse(!) I thought I would have a go myself.
Back in June of this year, I wrote a blog called “Could you run your SAM Framework from your cell phone?” Where a particular use-case highlighted the filtration of mass amounts of data to an app that a CIO could use to steer a SAM programme from his phone – without having to leave the golf course.
But let’s take that a step further: What if the CIO didn’t wish to bring their cell phone onto the golf course? What if the CIO wanted a self-healing SAM system?
We may not be as far away from that as you might think. A couple of products spring to mind that help with such an aspiration. Slickey is a product which looks to turn your deployment suite into a license server; so no deployment is made without entitlement being available before deployment (remember that best-practice notion that ITIL somehow fails to address?!)
And for those folks concerned with Server builds staying as they were intended, then Puppet is a product which can return a server to its preferred build should an unauthorised state change occur.
Imagine if we could get a SAM suite to interpret those deltas based on company-supplied rules to either instruct a re-build/uninstallation, or to apportion a license if a rogue deployment took place?
The sooner SAM can focus on the deltas of data arising from an intended state to the existing state, the easier it will find its job of dealing with software vendor audits.
The next “Uber” event for SAM? Self-healing IT estates.
Hi Rory.
I agree with you that automation can and should simplify SAM life.
In my experience as SAM manager I designed and partially implemented an information flow starting from data collection to license position analysis. The idea was to avoid as much as possible human errors doing simple and repetitive actions, enforcing data quality, and produce on-time alerts to managers and suppliers about the license status.
It worked fine from the technical and SAM process point of view.
The issue come up with the steps of the process that required interaction with other company’s departments and their decision processes not being planned for automation.
So, as always, it is important to focus on strong stakeholders support and willingness to change processes more than to the specific software or technical solution to have a successful SAM implementation.