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

A pioneer of Software Asset Management (SAM) in France, Elée is an independent consulting firm specializing in the management of software licenses and cloud expenditures. 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 for "Software Asset Managed Services."

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

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

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

Software Asset Management (SAM)

Software Asset Management (SAM) is a relatively new 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 at the time motivated the implementation of optimized management of companies' application portfolios. However, organizing a secondary market for software licenses was certainly an important lever in optimizing companies' software asset management strategies.

The primary objectives of Software Asset Management are cost optimization, portfolio and risk management. Its secondary objectives are to improve data management, control the information system, and implement an effective 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 different phases of its software portfolio optimization missions. It is indeed a complex asset combining a technical dimension (it is a program), legal (it is subject to copyright, usage rights management...), commercial (there are different marketing methods 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 installed software licenses locally, in server centers, and used licenses. For each of these inventories, Elée maps the associated hardware configurations (location, characteristics, capacity, acquisition date...). Following this technical inventory, Elée catalogs the rights attached to each software license present in the company and active maintenance. Finally, the expert firm Elée studies the projects to anticipate the phases of installation and uninstallation of licenses.

Frugality and Circular Economy

Only after this complete inventory of your organization's software assets and the analysis of the obtained data does Elée continue its Asset Management mission. It deploys monitoring and data management tools related to software (usage, features...) covering the entire organization and trains various company stakeholders. Implementing this organization and process allows you to enhance your software asset portfolio, optimize license use among users, decommission software licenses, and sell them on the secondary market via our Softcorner platform. The proceeds from these sales allow you to finance new technological projects (security, mobility, system availability, storage...) and, if necessary, purchase missing licenses in your inventory to eliminate publisher compliance risks.