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Cherwell Asset Management 15.0 Adds SaaS Analytics for Salesforce and Box

Cherwell Asset Management (CAM)’s latest release expands its software asset management capabilities with SaaS Analytics. You can use it to analyze SaaS usage and licensing costs, but this first iteration only supports Salesforce and Box.

SaaS Analytics provides visibility into usage and licensing costs from hosted applications. Once a connection is configured to a SaaS application, CAM can collect license and usage data. It then analyzes and presents that data with built-in reporting on license entitlements, assigned licenses, license usage, subscription costs, and annualized savings potential (i.e. the cost of unused licenses). IT asset managers can use this information to identify areas for cost savings and optimize license spending.

Other new features in CAM 15.0 include the ability to add custom network device types and values, improvements to discovery and configuration performance, and verified support for running on AWS.

Source: IT Asset Management Data Quadrant at SoftwareReviews, Report Published May 2019.

Our Take

As organizations spend more on SaaS applications, the opportunity for waste increases as it becomes easy and common to overspend on licenses. Software asset management tools, when combined with good processes, can analyze license usage information to discover these areas of waste and help organizations optimize their software spend.

Cherwell’s expansion of its asset management tool to include SaaS Analytics will be a welcome addition for organizations that are already using Cherwell’s platform or are looking for a strong all-in-one IT software management solution that can analyze usage of both SaaS and on-premises applications.

However, while core usage and savings data are available, the number of reports that can be produced through SaaS Analytics is currently limited in comparison to more robust software asset management (SAM) tools. In addition, CAM only supports Salesforce and Box in this first version. Cherwell plans to add additional applications in the coming months, starting with Office 365, but if you’re looking for deep SaaS asset management analytics on multiple SaaS applications, you may want to consider a dedicated SAM tool with this capability.