License Dashboard
Taking the Usage of Licensing to Next Level

Last year’s Global Software Survey by BSA suggests that CIOs suspect around 15 percent of their employees install software on the company’s network without approval. On the contrary, however, that count is double: nearly thirty percent of employees admit installing software in a company’s network without approval. Here, it goes without saying that such unauthorized software installations often serve as the keys that open up vulnerabilities for organizations and in fact 49 percent of the surveyed CIOs ascribe security threats identified by their companies to be related to malware posed by unlicensed software.

Keeping track of software installations has become a critical operation for today’s IT but instances such as above not only restrict companies from ensuring full compliance with vendor contracts, but also inflate software costs. Unfortunately, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg. IT asset management is more than often a notoriously difficult task that security and senior executives tend to ignore, until a security incident sheds light on its exigency. To assist organizations efficiently manage their software licensing budgets, minimize costs, optimize utilization, and streamline entire asset lifecycle, UK-based License Dashboard steps into the picture. The firm combines software asset management (SAM) and its licensing expertise with professionally-driven solutions which deliver business critical license intelligence required for organizations to move forward.

Founded in 2008, License Dashboard offers a complete range of solutions which provides visibility into the applications deployed across an enterprise, as well as how they are being used within the particular organization. License Dashboard has over 70 connectors to various discovery tools. The company's flagship product, License Manager, helps optimize the current licenses and manages unbudgeted IT expenditure. Eliminating an organization's need for highly-skilled professionals, to manually decipher the organization's system, License Manager is designed to make the process of building an accurate and reliable license repository very simple.

Moreover, License Dashboard Discovery—fully-featured network inventory solution—tracks and audits all computers and servers across the network and delivers both hardware and software audit information to the user.

"We have developed the product with SAM professionals and consultants, to be used by SAM consultants," says Johnny Ellis, Managing Director, License Dashboard. Both the products, License Manager and License Dashboard Discovery, can work in conjunction which provides a user the unrivalled capability to achieve and maintain complete software license compliance.

License Dashboard’s robust SAM solutions facilitates consultants to perform analysis of the data for extracting better insights. In addition, the company’s License Dashboard Portal reporting platform allows users to access real time data anywhere, on their smart devices. The company's solutions are designed to move SAM into a BI and Business analytics platform, as well as offer easy integration with other SAM tools. License Dashboard's audit-centric approach helps professionals minimize risk and enables them to bring change in different co-licensing activities. License Dashboard’s platform facilitates the software asset lifecycle and the License Manager Web API assists with sharing and connecting valuable data sources to other incumbent strategic technology systems such as ServiceNow.

For instance, License Dashboard was able to assist a Michigan-based healthcare organization manage their 150,000 assets, with installation performed remotely and configuration with their multiple inventory systems from across the US—SCCM, ZENWorks, ILMT, Active Directory, VMware vCenter, LANdesk, Express Metrix & ADDM. On-site professional services were undertaken for the initial population of Microsoft entitlement and to assist with Business Unit creation for over 100 Business Units. The venture successfully and quickly matured the organization’s SAM capabilities allowing them to effectively manage its entire licensed software base.

To widen the horizon of its solutions line-up, License Dashboard is developing an agent-less discovery solution. Additionally, the firm is also developing its platforms to be cloud-ready (leveraging Azure and AWS) to include advanced features such as Azure billing. This allows License Dashboard to assist organization’s in their transition to the cloud and once there, it provides a vehicle to manage the application stack on cloud infrastructure and control cloud consumption.

With the company's license optimization already driving changes in software lifecycle management policies, License Dashboard is steadily moving towards driving new methodologies around cloud-based virtualization and user-based licensing.