Elée, a French Pioneer in Software Asset Management (SAM)

A pioneer in Software Asset Management (SAM) in France, Elée is an independent consulting firm specializing in software license management and cloud expenses. According to ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), an English methodological framework, Software Asset Management involves bringing together a set of skills, processes, and tools to manage, control, and secure a company's software license portfolio. The firm Elée has developed real expertise in this field, a know-how recognized in 2020 by Gartner in the first Magic Quadrant "Software Asset Managed Services."

The firm Elée aims to provide advice to IT departments (DSI) and purchasing departments to enable them to:

• Understand and manage the risks of non-compliance.
• Reduce recurring IT costs and capital expenditures.
• Negotiate better with extremely well-organized and ambitious suppliers like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, or Amazon.
• Build processes and deploy tools for monitoring and controlling usage and expenses.
• Reduce the IT environmental footprint and put digital technology at the service of ecological transition.

For more information, visit the company's website: www.elee.com

Software Asset Management (SAM)

Software Asset Management (SAM) is a recent activity within companies. It arrived in France in 2012, the year the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) authorized the sale of second-hand software licenses. This was a coincidence, as other factors motivated at the time the implementation of an optimized management of companies' application portfolios. But it is certain that organizing a secondary software license market was an important lever in the strategy of optimizing companies' software asset management.

The primary objectives of Software Asset Management are cost optimization, portfolio management, and risk control. Its secondary objectives are to improve data management, control the information system, and implement a strong Vendor Management strategy to take control of the relationship with publishers.

Software License, an Asset Unlike Any Other

The firm Elée has perfectly integrated the specificity of software licenses in the various phases of its software portfolio optimization missions. Indeed, it is a complex asset that combines both a technical dimension (it's a program), legal (it is subject to copyright, usage rights...), commercial (there are different marketing modes and supports), and accounting (the application is an asset, while maintenance is an expense). These specificities require the implementation of a specific method and process to be integrated into the approach of budgetary and technological optimization and valorization of Asset Management.

Thus, after defining specific objectives with its client, the firm Elée conducts a comprehensive software inventory within the organization focusing on technical aspects, with a detailed collection of data related to locally installed software licenses, server center, and used licenses. For each of these inventories, Elée maps the associated hardware configurations (location, characteristics, capacity, acquisition date...). Following this technical inventory, Elée lists the rights attached to each software license present in the company and the active maintenance. Finally, the expert firm Elée studies the projects to anticipate the phases of installation and de-installation of licenses.

Frugality and Circular Economy

It is only after this complete inventory of your organization's software assets and the analysis of the obtained data that Elée continues its Asset Management mission. It deploys monitoring and data management tools related to software (usage, functionalities...) covering the entire organization and trains different company actors. The implementation of this organization and process allows you to valorize your software asset portfolio, optimize the use of licenses among users, decommission software licenses, and sell them on the secondary second-hand market via our Softcorner platform. The proceeds from these sales allow you to finance new technology projects (security, mobility, system availability, storage...) and, if necessary, purchase the missing licenses in your inventory to eliminate the risks of publisher compliance.