Categorizing Publishers and scope of ELPs

[Mantautas]

Dear Community members,

Would you please share your experience how you categorize Publishers and how far you go with establishing ELPs for them. For big enterprise companies its normal to have 300, 400 or more Commercial Publishers that FNMS would discover. The questions from my side would be:

1. How far you go on preparing ELPs for Publishers? is the goal - to have ELPs for ALL Commercial Publishers that FNMS discovers?

2. How do you categorize your Publishers? By Spend? For example Tier1 (Top10), Tier2 (Top50), etc ?

3. What is better for matured SAM practice: Having less ELPs in FNMS but better quality and processes established, or try complete all available Publishers but have less quality ?

Thanks for you opinion and experience,

Mantautas Daunys

Lead Consultant.

[agalbreath]

Hi Manny,   while there is no "one size fits all" for determing which publishers to onboard and sustain within a SAM Program, here are some guidelines to help determine scope.  

1. Current Spend – managing the larger spend publishers can allow for further optimization/savings as well as having a full understanding of that vendors spend compared to actual usage.   It's the 80/20 rule - 80% of software spend is with 20% of publishers. 
2. Spend planned for net new Licenses – understanding the current license position and opportunities to remove unused installs before purchasing new can be a cost avoidance
3. Upcoming Maintenance Renewal spend/timeline – understanding the current license position and opportunities to remove unused installs before a maintenance renewal may allow for a cost savings
4. Number of Commercial Application Installations – larger installs can often be considered low hanging fruit to effectively manage the environment and may overlap with #1 & #2 & #3
5. Known exposures – If a company knows it is over deploying licenses for any publisher or then this should be considered a high priority vendor.
6. Publishers that are actively auditing companies (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Adobe, Symantec, Attachmate, Micro Focus and AutoDesk) 
7. Applications you plan to include in your Service Catalog for employee self-serve so you can verify License availability before installation
8. If using AppBroker for reclamation campaigns the onboarding the associated publisher/applications first should be considered. 

[schilnr]

I would agree with your comments. I don't see anywhere in Flexera where there is a field that I can categorize the vendors? How are others doing this? I would like a field to populate with our own categories, which may include following Gartner vendor categories, strategic, etc.  

ServiceNow offers this capability. just trying to figure out how Flexera provides this. 

[ChrisG]

If you would like to store vendor categorization details within FlexNet Manager Suite itself, that could be done by adding appropriate custom properties to the "Vendor" object that model your particular approach to categorization.

[schilnr]

thanks. I don't see any information in help section on how to create these custom fields. we have the cloud version, so how do I go about creating the custom field?

[agalbreath]

I suggest you open a Support Case/Enhancement Reqeust asking for the custom field to be added to the Vendor object. 

[ChrisG]

The Adding Custom Properties chapter in the FlexNet Manager Suite System Reference PDF guide would be your reference here. However as @agalbreath has indicated, with FlexNet Manager Suite Cloud you should raise a support case to actually get a custom property configured for your tenant once you have worked out details of what you want.