What are SAM and SAM Pro within the ServiceNow ITAM Module?

SAM stands for Software Asset Management. Again, the main purpose of SAM is to track the usage of Software assets to make sure that the company is getting its money's worth. Since software cost a lot of money. SAM is there to ensure that the company does not overspend on software licenses and in fact, saves money according to their software usage. For example, SAM might track a piece of software on a user's computer and finds out that it has not been used in more than 90 days. This would mean that the software is under-utilized. SAM would automatically revoke the user's license and mark it in the database as an unassigned license. So, in case some other user needs the same software, the company could simply assign that software license to this new user instead of buying a new license, thus saving money. In small companies, this might not seem like much but with companies with thousands of users, this sort of cost can add up really quick.

How often does SAM check if a software is being used or not?

It depends upon the type of software. For software that are installed on a company's local computers (like Adobe Acrobat etc.), SAM might check once every week. This is enough because locally installed software does not have a recurring monthly subscription fee. Probing them once every week is enough to make sure that they are being used often enough. Otherwise, they are simply reassigned to users who need them more often instead of buying new licenses for them. For cloud-based software (like Salesforce etc.), SAM might check every 24 hours because cloud-based software normally has a monthly subscription fee and needs to be checked every day to make sure that the money that is going to be paid for it by the end of month would not be going to waste.

So, what is the difference between SAM and SAM Pro?

SAM uses simple conditional logic (if/then/else statements) to check software utilization. SAM Pro on the other hand is AI powered and uses Artificial Intelligence to check for software usage. This means, SAM would work with small companies because conditional logic would be easy to program for a small number of software licenses. For huge companies, having a huge number of software licenses, SAM can become really slow and programming/maintaining conditional logic can become really tedious and unmanageable. SAM Pro can work with huge companies easily because it is AI powered.

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